Talk:Biological Weapons Convention

Major article revision (17 February 2021)

Dear fellow Wikipedia editors,

I am about to implement a major revision to the Biological Weapons Convention article, which I hope will substantially improve and expand the article. I would kindly ask you to comment here with any suggestions for further improvements or potential disagreements with my revisions.

In brief, I have (i) substantially expanded the article content (from 32,000 bytes to 83,000 bytes), and (ii) added almost 100 new reliable sources to provide evidence for all the claims (for most of which I have added the web archive link to prevent link rot).

In the following, I briefly outline the major changes I have undertaken:

1. Rewrote the article introduction, improving the structure and clarity.
2. Added a section on the "History" of the BWC.
3. Substantially expanded the section on "Treaty obligations", adding details on all of the major treaty provisions.
4. Expanded the "Membership" section, including by adding a graph of the BWC States Parties since 1972.
5. Substantially expanded the "Verification and compliance" section with (i) a sub-section on the BWC confidence-building measures (CBM)(+ a graph of CBM submissions since 1987), (ii) a sub-section on the failed negotiation of a BWC verification protocol in the 1990s, (iii) a sub-section on historical cases of BWC non-compliance, including of the Soviet Union, Iraq, and other non-compliance allegations against BWC States Parties.
6. Expanded the "Implementation Support Unit" section
7. Revised and expanded the "Review Conferences" section and restructured it to fit into a table which gives an overview of (i) the conferences' key outcomes, (ii) the number of BWC States Parties at the time of the conferences, (iii) the conferences' Chairpersons, and (iv) the conferences' final documents with their official UN document symbol (+ a download link to the official UN documents).
8. Substantially expanded the "Intersessional program" section by adding a table with an overview of the duration and content of the intersessional program meetings since 2003.
9. Added a section on the "Challenges" faced by the BWC, including (i) the potential misuse of advances in sciences and technology, (ii) the technical difficulties associated with the verification of biological weapons, and (iii) financial difficulties due to non-payments and late payments.
10. Expanded and structured the "See also" section
11. Expanded and structured the "External links" section

Please note that I have archived the old "Talk" page since all of the issues raised on this old page are outdated with the publication of the revised BWC article.

Thank you very much for your support!

--Ego.Eudaimonia (talk) 14:34, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

References