A fact from Caitlin Doughty appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 31 October 2014 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
|
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
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There may be enough material on The Order of the Good Death to create a standalone article. There's a draft at Draft:The Order of the Good Death for those interested in contributing. — Brianhe ( talk) 18:46, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
It looks like a lot of content was merged in from Women in the funeral industry. This article ended up with more content about the order of the good death than The Order of the Good Death article, so it needs to be rebalanced. The paranthetical sourcing his going to be re-checked since the sources didn't get moved over. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:30, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
I couldn't figure out how to save the 'cost of funerals' material. It's not biographical content about Catlin Doughty. It's a thesis that argues the case against overpriced funerals. We already have a summary of Doughty's activism and the goals of her work. We don't need to actually have a platform that presents all of her arguments. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 03:55, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
In this diff, Dahveed1954 modified a part of the section "Early career in the death industry".
New text
After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated with a certificate of technology in mortuary science.[3] In California she could have obtained an embalmer's license to practice by passing an apprenticeship/internship and the CA state examination without attending mortuary college. To be a licensed funeral director in CA requires the completion of a mortuary science education and passing the CA state examination.[7]
Former text
After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated as a licensed mortician,[3] though in California she could have obtained a license by passing a test without attending mortuary college.[7]
They have given, as a source, this document, without adding it as a reference to the article, only as an edit summary.
I'm not reverting this edit, despite its deficiencies, because there was already a clear discrepancy between the article's text and sources that were being cited. But some reconstruction of this section is required, now that the errors have been pointed out.
I'm not able to resolve these issues right now, but may return sometime in the future to try, if nobody else has taken up the task. — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 04:29, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
Re this edit by Dahveed1954 ( talk · contribs), the document at Regulations In Funeral Service Licensing, Continuing Education and Pre-need is crowd sourced. It says on page 2: "Completed by Conference Members... The information on jurisdiction laws which is contained in this publication was compiled by The Conference for comparative purposes only. THE CONFERENCE DOES NOT ATTEST TO THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION." This doesn't quite meet the bar for identifying reliable sources, in particular because it seems to have been put tether in an undefined open-forum process. Over at WP:QUESTIONABLE it explains that this is essentially self-published. The two publications we cited for the statement that Doughty "graduated as a certified mortician, though in California she could have become licensed by passing a test without attending mortuary college", NPR and The Atlantic, meet Wikipedia's standards for reliability because of how they are edited and fact-checked. That doesn't mean they are THE TRUTH, or infallible. Far from it. It only means that they are the kinds of sources from which Wikipedia is written, for better or worse.
This article is a bio of Caitlin Doughty, and not a guide on becoming a mortician in California. The exact details of how you would go through some kind of on the job training in lieu of schooling are beyond the scope. We aren't writing how-tos for anyone. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 04:41, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
DGG tagged this article with Press release. Why? Please be specific. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
MOS:BIB, it is typical to have "books or other works created by the subject of the article (under a section heading 'Works', 'Publications', 'Discography', etc. as appropriate)". But this edit summary says "removed section on podcasts, etc. They are not normally included. The books are already discussed in the article." I don't follow this reasoning. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:44, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
It is customary to list major publications. Trying to list small ones is usually considered promotional, with the possible exception of really famous writers. The policy here is NOT CV. (this is especially true when the material consists only of excerpts from the principal publications) Similarly, the extent of detail of a book is normally proportionate to its importance, and the detail here is excessive--so excessive, that it amounts to a advocacy for her views. The policy here is NOTADVOCACY. The best experession of how much detail should be included in an article is WP:EINSTEIN. It's an essay, not policy, but it encapsulates many WP policies.
Additional indications of promotionalism are:
In summary, a good rule of thumb for discriminating promotionalism from encycopedic writing is whether the page would look appropriate as the person's website.
Reconsidering the article, I have added hwat I consider the appropriate tag: "Advertising" . DGG ( talk ) 23:10, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
As far as all of the other so-called promotion, they are all related to why this article even exists at all. A bio includes trivial details like the subject's birthdate or where they went to school, but the meat of any bio should be the reasons why we even have an article about them. The thing they are notable for. If someone is notable as an athlete, we write about their athletic career: their style of play, perhaps strategies or techniques they pioneered for their sport, attitudes they expressed about the game, evaluations of their playing made by important experts on the sport. We might also mention the athlete's hobby or a part time job or many other things, but unless one of these is also part of why they are notable, we limit how much space we devote to that.
Doughty is notable for her advocacy, using several media for that advocacy. "OK, she's notable as an advocate. An advocate for what?" The bulk of the article is spent describing what she advocates for. Moreover, the contents of the article closely reflect what is found in all of the best quality sources about Doughty. They briefly mention she's from Hawaii or had a cat or whatever, but the majority of what good sources dwell on is what the subject advocates.
The notion that describing what an advocate or activists stands for is "promotional" flies in the face of countless Wikipedia bios, exemplified by the WP:Featured articles. Try applying the same standards you are claiming here to the very first bio at WP:FA: Eric A. Havelock. Like the Doughty bio, it begins with his childhood, early experiences, particularly focusing on experiences and education that informed his later ideas. It summarizes his political views, and gives details of the direction of his academic work. Then and entire long section is devoted to Havelock's ideas about Plato, Aristotle, etc. We have sentences like, "n arguing for a basic heuristic split between Plato and the contemporaries of Democritus, Havelock was directly contradicting a very long tradition in philosophy that had painstakingly assembled innumerable connections between Plato and the pre-Socratics..." How is that any different than the statements made here for what Doughty argues? You can proceed to the next FA on the page, Hilary Putnam, and repeat the entire exercise. It's describing what the person believed, what they stood for and advocated, and giving the reader full details of what they advocated. That would utterly fail your standards of "advocacy" and promotion. Jump around to aany FA bio, Yao Ming, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, you name it, and you'll find the same so-called "advocacy".
One thing I am unhappy with is that I can't directly quote any critics of the the death positive movement or of Doughty. I have a single unnamed mortician's words, and a little bit of interviewer Terry Gross playing devil's advocate. A few of the book reviews have some criticism, which have been given a disproportionate amount of space simply to try to balance the overwhelming positive content. I have quite a bit of Doughty relaying second hand her responses to her critics, but their words are not published in reliable sources. I went so far as to pay for library copies of the articles "Mortician Wants To Start Death Revolution" (Mortuary management, v101, no 10) and "Ask a mortician" (American funeral director, v135, no. 12) in the hopes of finding extended counter-argument against Doughty in these trade publications. Unfortunately, these articles are much the same as those int he NYT or NPR, simply summaries of what Doughty stands for, with nobody stating their objections.
So yes, it would be nice to have better sourced criticism of her arguments, but we can't create that out of thin air. Neutrality does not require that we play devil's advocate because her critics have not gone on record with their objections. If such publications existed then it would be against NPOV to totally omit them, but that's not the case. If you can find anything like that published, it would be most welcome.
Adding a controversy section to any article is generally considered harmful and against best practices, explained in great detail at WP:CSECTION. Controversy sections are dumping grounds for miscellaneous content, and a crutch for editors who don't bother to properly organize the contents of an article. Criticisms of Doughty's work belong side-by-side with the parts of the article that describe that work. If you want to make Wikipedia better, going around removing "controversy" sections from articles, and merging the contents into the rest of the article is much more productive.
The objection to the second photo is too silly to address. The photo is there because we don't have all that many free photos of her. If we had a better one, we'd use it. Yao Ming has no fewer than six photos of him playing basketball. Advertisements? Or the six different images of the subject in Joseph Priestley. I really question why I should take this nonsense seriously.
If no one can explain how this bio is fundamentally different than the overwhelming majority of bios at WP:FA, I'm going to remove the {{ advert}} tag. I'm not claiming any of the writing in this article is pure perfection. If anyone wants to improve the wording and tone, or improve the structure and organization, by all means, do so. But there's no good reason to delete very much of anything here. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 21:52, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
For the birth date, this page on reddit is used as a source. I can't find it there. And even if I could find it: is this source good enough...? Laurier ( xe or they) ( talk) 16:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
A fact from Caitlin Doughty appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 31 October 2014 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
|
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
There may be enough material on The Order of the Good Death to create a standalone article. There's a draft at Draft:The Order of the Good Death for those interested in contributing. — Brianhe ( talk) 18:46, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
It looks like a lot of content was merged in from Women in the funeral industry. This article ended up with more content about the order of the good death than The Order of the Good Death article, so it needs to be rebalanced. The paranthetical sourcing his going to be re-checked since the sources didn't get moved over. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:30, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
I couldn't figure out how to save the 'cost of funerals' material. It's not biographical content about Catlin Doughty. It's a thesis that argues the case against overpriced funerals. We already have a summary of Doughty's activism and the goals of her work. We don't need to actually have a platform that presents all of her arguments. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 03:55, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
In this diff, Dahveed1954 modified a part of the section "Early career in the death industry".
New text
After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated with a certificate of technology in mortuary science.[3] In California she could have obtained an embalmer's license to practice by passing an apprenticeship/internship and the CA state examination without attending mortuary college. To be a licensed funeral director in CA requires the completion of a mortuary science education and passing the CA state examination.[7]
Former text
After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated as a licensed mortician,[3] though in California she could have obtained a license by passing a test without attending mortuary college.[7]
They have given, as a source, this document, without adding it as a reference to the article, only as an edit summary.
I'm not reverting this edit, despite its deficiencies, because there was already a clear discrepancy between the article's text and sources that were being cited. But some reconstruction of this section is required, now that the errors have been pointed out.
I'm not able to resolve these issues right now, but may return sometime in the future to try, if nobody else has taken up the task. — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 04:29, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
Re this edit by Dahveed1954 ( talk · contribs), the document at Regulations In Funeral Service Licensing, Continuing Education and Pre-need is crowd sourced. It says on page 2: "Completed by Conference Members... The information on jurisdiction laws which is contained in this publication was compiled by The Conference for comparative purposes only. THE CONFERENCE DOES NOT ATTEST TO THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION." This doesn't quite meet the bar for identifying reliable sources, in particular because it seems to have been put tether in an undefined open-forum process. Over at WP:QUESTIONABLE it explains that this is essentially self-published. The two publications we cited for the statement that Doughty "graduated as a certified mortician, though in California she could have become licensed by passing a test without attending mortuary college", NPR and The Atlantic, meet Wikipedia's standards for reliability because of how they are edited and fact-checked. That doesn't mean they are THE TRUTH, or infallible. Far from it. It only means that they are the kinds of sources from which Wikipedia is written, for better or worse.
This article is a bio of Caitlin Doughty, and not a guide on becoming a mortician in California. The exact details of how you would go through some kind of on the job training in lieu of schooling are beyond the scope. We aren't writing how-tos for anyone. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 04:41, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
DGG tagged this article with Press release. Why? Please be specific. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
MOS:BIB, it is typical to have "books or other works created by the subject of the article (under a section heading 'Works', 'Publications', 'Discography', etc. as appropriate)". But this edit summary says "removed section on podcasts, etc. They are not normally included. The books are already discussed in the article." I don't follow this reasoning. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 17:44, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
It is customary to list major publications. Trying to list small ones is usually considered promotional, with the possible exception of really famous writers. The policy here is NOT CV. (this is especially true when the material consists only of excerpts from the principal publications) Similarly, the extent of detail of a book is normally proportionate to its importance, and the detail here is excessive--so excessive, that it amounts to a advocacy for her views. The policy here is NOTADVOCACY. The best experession of how much detail should be included in an article is WP:EINSTEIN. It's an essay, not policy, but it encapsulates many WP policies.
Additional indications of promotionalism are:
In summary, a good rule of thumb for discriminating promotionalism from encycopedic writing is whether the page would look appropriate as the person's website.
Reconsidering the article, I have added hwat I consider the appropriate tag: "Advertising" . DGG ( talk ) 23:10, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
As far as all of the other so-called promotion, they are all related to why this article even exists at all. A bio includes trivial details like the subject's birthdate or where they went to school, but the meat of any bio should be the reasons why we even have an article about them. The thing they are notable for. If someone is notable as an athlete, we write about their athletic career: their style of play, perhaps strategies or techniques they pioneered for their sport, attitudes they expressed about the game, evaluations of their playing made by important experts on the sport. We might also mention the athlete's hobby or a part time job or many other things, but unless one of these is also part of why they are notable, we limit how much space we devote to that.
Doughty is notable for her advocacy, using several media for that advocacy. "OK, she's notable as an advocate. An advocate for what?" The bulk of the article is spent describing what she advocates for. Moreover, the contents of the article closely reflect what is found in all of the best quality sources about Doughty. They briefly mention she's from Hawaii or had a cat or whatever, but the majority of what good sources dwell on is what the subject advocates.
The notion that describing what an advocate or activists stands for is "promotional" flies in the face of countless Wikipedia bios, exemplified by the WP:Featured articles. Try applying the same standards you are claiming here to the very first bio at WP:FA: Eric A. Havelock. Like the Doughty bio, it begins with his childhood, early experiences, particularly focusing on experiences and education that informed his later ideas. It summarizes his political views, and gives details of the direction of his academic work. Then and entire long section is devoted to Havelock's ideas about Plato, Aristotle, etc. We have sentences like, "n arguing for a basic heuristic split between Plato and the contemporaries of Democritus, Havelock was directly contradicting a very long tradition in philosophy that had painstakingly assembled innumerable connections between Plato and the pre-Socratics..." How is that any different than the statements made here for what Doughty argues? You can proceed to the next FA on the page, Hilary Putnam, and repeat the entire exercise. It's describing what the person believed, what they stood for and advocated, and giving the reader full details of what they advocated. That would utterly fail your standards of "advocacy" and promotion. Jump around to aany FA bio, Yao Ming, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, you name it, and you'll find the same so-called "advocacy".
One thing I am unhappy with is that I can't directly quote any critics of the the death positive movement or of Doughty. I have a single unnamed mortician's words, and a little bit of interviewer Terry Gross playing devil's advocate. A few of the book reviews have some criticism, which have been given a disproportionate amount of space simply to try to balance the overwhelming positive content. I have quite a bit of Doughty relaying second hand her responses to her critics, but their words are not published in reliable sources. I went so far as to pay for library copies of the articles "Mortician Wants To Start Death Revolution" (Mortuary management, v101, no 10) and "Ask a mortician" (American funeral director, v135, no. 12) in the hopes of finding extended counter-argument against Doughty in these trade publications. Unfortunately, these articles are much the same as those int he NYT or NPR, simply summaries of what Doughty stands for, with nobody stating their objections.
So yes, it would be nice to have better sourced criticism of her arguments, but we can't create that out of thin air. Neutrality does not require that we play devil's advocate because her critics have not gone on record with their objections. If such publications existed then it would be against NPOV to totally omit them, but that's not the case. If you can find anything like that published, it would be most welcome.
Adding a controversy section to any article is generally considered harmful and against best practices, explained in great detail at WP:CSECTION. Controversy sections are dumping grounds for miscellaneous content, and a crutch for editors who don't bother to properly organize the contents of an article. Criticisms of Doughty's work belong side-by-side with the parts of the article that describe that work. If you want to make Wikipedia better, going around removing "controversy" sections from articles, and merging the contents into the rest of the article is much more productive.
The objection to the second photo is too silly to address. The photo is there because we don't have all that many free photos of her. If we had a better one, we'd use it. Yao Ming has no fewer than six photos of him playing basketball. Advertisements? Or the six different images of the subject in Joseph Priestley. I really question why I should take this nonsense seriously.
If no one can explain how this bio is fundamentally different than the overwhelming majority of bios at WP:FA, I'm going to remove the {{ advert}} tag. I'm not claiming any of the writing in this article is pure perfection. If anyone wants to improve the wording and tone, or improve the structure and organization, by all means, do so. But there's no good reason to delete very much of anything here. -- Dennis Bratland ( talk) 21:52, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
For the birth date, this page on reddit is used as a source. I can't find it there. And even if I could find it: is this source good enough...? Laurier ( xe or they) ( talk) 16:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)