Latest comment: 10 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
A newspaper editor I used to know remarked that headlines are the hardest part of the job.
The original headline ("Case of Ebola virus in DC area"), besides not being a sentence, was apparently technically wrong since the case has not, as best I can tell, been confirmed as Ebola.
My first rename ("Possible Ebola case under evaluation in D.C. area") was technically correct but still seemed alarmist.
One way to be less alarmist in an article like this would be to change the focus. One of the source articles does this by making the focus the case that was determined not to be Ebola, and mentioning later the one that's still under evaluation. Alternatively one could make the focus both cases, and say that one has been determined not to be Ebola while the other is still under evaluation. These would be major changes to the article, though, and are therefore not open to me as a reviewer.
I'm now trying to devise a headline using the phrase "Ebola-like symptoms" without getting too similar to the Washington Post headline. --Pi zero (talk) 13:27, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
What I came up with, "Patient under evaluation with Ebola-like symptoms in D.C. area", is mildly long/complicated, but I'm thinking it's tolerable. --Pi zero (talk) 13:37, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
And, yet another tweak: The focus here is a case in DC itself, not just in the DC area — and international readers might not know what "D.C." is, so best to spell out "Washington D.C.". --Pi zero (talk) 14:37, 4 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
There were two kinds of fairly serious problems here.
A number of passages were much too close to source passages. The reporter needs to work on this; I would have been justified in not-ready'ing the article on that basis. Repairs seemed at least marginally within reviewer's purview, and have the advantage of showing which passages were the problems.
There were factual errors.
One error that arose repeatedly was failure to distinguish between Ebola and Ebola-like symptoms. The original headline was an example of this: It said there was a case of Ebola in the DC area, which is not what is known: there is a case of Ebola-like symptoms being monitored in the DC area. The early symptoms of Ebola are apparently a lot like those of flu: fever, sore throat. To be precise, the point is really that the case is being treated as if it might be Ebola; anybody who's coming down with flu exhibits Ebola-like symptoms. If somebody shows symptoms like that and has just come back from some place like Nigeria, the hospital should take measures in case it might actually be Ebola, until they can determine confidently that it isn't Ebola. The same problem occurred several times in the body of the article. I treated this as a matter of clarification, within reviewer's purview; please take a close look at what I changed.
Other factual errors: There weren't many cases of Ebola in Nigeria (I changed "many" to "some"). There were, I believe, 8 deaths and about a dozen more people who might have had it, and there apparently hasn't been any more Ebola there since the end of August. Nigeria had a solid medical infrastructure already, and the few Ebola cases that showed up there didn't spread out of control as they have elsewhere in west Africa; this is one of the reasons to think Ebola won't spread out of control in the US: Nigeria is an example of what happens when Ebola crops up in a country with a solid medical infrastructure.
It's important, with a sensitive story like this, not to be alarmist. We have no reason to be sensationalist (we're not trying to sell copies), and we certainly don't want to accidentally start a panic through incautious reporting. It really is possible to cause mass panic in stories like this. While we wouldn't hold back from honest reporting of facts in such a story, we should always be careful not to accidentally create misunderstandings, and in a story like this the consequences of such an accident can be pretty awful.
The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.
There were two kinds of fairly serious problems here.
A number of passages were much too close to source passages. The reporter needs to work on this; I would have been justified in not-ready'ing the article on that basis. Repairs seemed at least marginally within reviewer's purview, and have the advantage of showing which passages were the problems.
There were factual errors.
One error that arose repeatedly was failure to distinguish between Ebola and Ebola-like symptoms. The original headline was an example of this: It said there was a case of Ebola in the DC area, which is not what is known: there is a case of Ebola-like symptoms being monitored in the DC area. The early symptoms of Ebola are apparently a lot like those of flu: fever, sore throat. To be precise, the point is really that the case is being treated as if it might be Ebola; anybody who's coming down with flu exhibits Ebola-like symptoms. If somebody shows symptoms like that and has just come back from some place like Nigeria, the hospital should take measures in case it might actually be Ebola, until they can determine confidently that it isn't Ebola. The same problem occurred several times in the body of the article. I treated this as a matter of clarification, within reviewer's purview; please take a close look at what I changed.
Other factual errors: There weren't many cases of Ebola in Nigeria (I changed "many" to "some"). There were, I believe, 8 deaths and about a dozen more people who might have had it, and there apparently hasn't been any more Ebola there since the end of August. Nigeria had a solid medical infrastructure already, and the few Ebola cases that showed up there didn't spread out of control as they have elsewhere in west Africa; this is one of the reasons to think Ebola won't spread out of control in the US: Nigeria is an example of what happens when Ebola crops up in a country with a solid medical infrastructure.
It's important, with a sensitive story like this, not to be alarmist. We have no reason to be sensationalist (we're not trying to sell copies), and we certainly don't want to accidentally start a panic through incautious reporting. It really is possible to cause mass panic in stories like this. While we wouldn't hold back from honest reporting of facts in such a story, we should always be careful not to accidentally create misunderstandings, and in a story like this the consequences of such an accident can be pretty awful.
The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.
