Talk:Malaysian authorities arrest fourth suspect in killing of Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of North Korean leader

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Dictator?[edit]

It feels more natural to call Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un "Dictator." Does that violate our neutrality rules? Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:48, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It'd be interesting to look through our archives to see what we've done in the past. Like looking things up in a dictionary, it isn't necessarily decisive, but may offer useful perspective. --Pi zero (talk) 05:40, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Counting the elephants[edit]

The elephants in the room on this one are 1) that cloth was probably poisoned and 2) it is reasonable to conclude that North Korean authorities may have arranged the assassination. North Korea has a long history of kidnapping people from other countries and raising their children as sleeper agents and spies. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:19, 16 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

And we've now got sources for both. Hooray. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:24, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

References[edit]

Since the Foundation changed search engines a while back, search is almost entirely useless for finding other articles related to anything mentioned in one of our recent headlines, because the search is now based on formatted text instead of raw wiki markup, and the formatted text contains the DPLs in infoboxen, thus hundreds or thousands of unrelated articles may contain a recent headline. So it's worth noting that right now, with this article not published, I see only one previously published article in our archives at all related to Kim Jong-nam:

--Pi zero (talk) 13:50, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cool. The execution of the Kims' uncle might work as well. I have concerns that that might push the idea that Kim Jong Un arranged the murder, though. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:25, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Wikinews does have an article about a Kim Jong Un-era execution, but it's of Vice Premier Choe Yong Gon, not Jang Song Thaek. I'm not sure this hits our relevance mark. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:13, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Name format[edit]

I did some investigating re "Kim Jong Un" versus "Kim Jong-un". The article uses the style it uses, and there's source support for the choice; but, inquiring minds and all that.

  • Most obviously, the sources tend to be split between US sources that write "Kim Jong Un" and non-US sources "Kim Jong-un". That could be "US style versus British style", but I was very dubious it would be that simple.
  • In terms of internal consistency, of all our articles in his cat, the only place I found using "Kim Jong Un", other than headlines of a very few sources, was in a direct quote, in an article that otherwise uses "Kim Jong-un". That could be to who wrote the articles or to what sources they used or relied most heavily on, also it could be partly due to people making deliberate decisions to match what other articles in our archives did.
  • The AP style guide (I recently picked one up second-hand, from 2015) says of Korean names, go with how the country's government transliterates names unless the individual has shown a personal preference, and North Korea uses a separate capitalized name while South Korean uses a hyphen and lower-case. (Why am I not surprised those governments would take any opportunity to do things differently?) If AP is, by any chance, the only one of major guides to explicitly say to handle North Korean names differently — and, keeping in mind a lot of news about North Korea comes through South Korean sources likely to impose their own style — the difference in sources could be a measure of who uses the AP style guide.

--Pi zero (talk) 14:50, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes! And expats from North Korea often change their names! Shin Inguen became Shin Dong-hyuk.
I think it would be great to use AP style. This is a news article written in American English and that's one of the if not the most reputable American English journalism style guides. I might be able to get access on a dead tree version of the 2016 guide today, but it probably won't be different from 2015 (2017 comes out in July).
Let's see how the sources have it...
A quick search shows "Jang Song Thaek" and "Jang Song-thaek" also spelled "taek," though the New York Times seems to use both hyphens and separates, so I'll put in "Jang Song Thaek" for consistency, at least for now. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:35, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Kim Chang-su is South Korean and formatted with a hyphen in NPR, so I'll leave the hyphen, at least for now. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:57, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to try hard.........[edit]

.....to tighten up some language here, although I don't really have a proper chunk of time to do so right now.--Bddpaux (talk) 15:09, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said in the edit summary, I don't want to use the word "request" with respect to the North Korean embassy asking for no autopsy because the Guardian has a line or two about how it wasn't a formal request. I don't think we need to explicitly state that particular detail but "asked" reduces the likelihood that the reader will think it was a formal request. If you happen to have your heart set on using the word, though, go ahead and put it back. It's not a straight right/wrong issue. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:49, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I hope, unless of course someone beats me to it (go for it :-P ), to try to review this after lunch (it's about 11:30am here atm). --Pi zero (talk) 16:34, 17 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nature of the beast[edit]

This is the second time I've refocused this article and I am officially not offended if anyone feels like cutting some of the older stuff. I think it's relatively cohesive, but things look different from an elbow-length view. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:50, 18 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"elbow-length view" — must remember that turn of phrase. Ideally we'd publish a series of articles on something like this, each of which would only introduce a limited amount of material requiring extensive source-checking while the rest would be background pulled more-or-less-verbatim from Related news. We could thus end up at roughly the same place with not much more review effort but without requiring all the review effort to come in one lump. --Pi zero (talk) 05:35, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Review of revision 4288929 [Passed][edit]

Doan Thi Huong[edit]

According to this article in the NYTimes, which includes Doan's father's name (also "Doan"), "Doan" is the surname and "Huong" the given name. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:37, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]