Sigh. In theory, that shouldn't happen until we've published, but of course in theory the review of this wouldn't be taking so long to get to; I can't really fault them for acting sooner rather than later. If anything significant about this changes during review, we should be sure word gets around, though. --Pi zero (talk) 23:23, 19 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
On this occasion, I've chosen to go into elaborate detail on most of the edits during review — keeping in mind I've not yet got to such an account requested for an earlier published article by the reporter. This has been a difficult review, taking about five hours; for perspective, that's about four or five times as long as a straightforward obit of this length by an experienced Wikinewsie should take. The comments did add a little time, prob'ly at least half an hour, but still only a small fraction of the whole. These remarks are mostly in the order they arose:
Use of "American" is non-neutral and routinely corrected on this project — a fact of which the reporter is aware, making their systematic use of it WN:POINTy, deliberate creating additional burden on reviewers and not supportable on the project in the long run.
Re the structure of the Anderson Cooper quote paragraph as submitted. It's not okay, anti-plagiary-wise, to copy the structure of a large source passage while changing a few low-level details here and there, as the overall similarity to the original adds up and the low-level changes start to look superficial. When applying that to a paragraph-sized quote like this, one might think of each direct-quote segment as functionally like a single word, since it has no internal flexibility of phrasing (rather the way one treats a formal title as a unit); but then the remaining frame text, including where the frame text is placed relative to the quote, becomes the whole concern of anti-plagiarism. Both sources that provide that quote divvy it up the same way, and also suspiciously both use the "Cooper said in a statement" structure; one may reasonably suppose that either both of them paid to use the same source (which appears to have been NYT, given what one of these sources said), or one or both of them are being sloppy about anti-plagiary practice. In any case, it's also better informative practice to tell the reader who is speaking before starting the quote, as starting in on the quote before identifying the speaker is pushing the reader to believe what is said rather than to assess it as a claim/opinion.
Similar adjustment to later paragraph quoting Robert Thompson.
It's not good practice to assert the cause of death in this sort of situation; only one of the three sources does so, the other two are properly careful to say she died and had advanced cancer rather than instructing the reader what to think about the relation between those two facts. If there is an ascribed cause of death, it should be attributed (which would not be possible here because the LA Times failed to attribute it). If I'd been writing the item myself I'd likely have said a bit more than just that she had advanced stomach cancer, hopefully making it all flow a bit more naturally; but since I'm the reviewer, minimal intervention was called for.
A similar principle applies to her father's death: it's easy enough to change of to with, and contributes to an ambiance of cautious precision that ought to permeate news reportage and, hopefully, affect the way the reader thinks (as well as how all of us think).
She was one when her father died, not two. When I looked, at least, this was stated correctly in two of the three sources (and not mentioned at all in the third). Not really sure how the error crept in; perhaps misstated in an earlier version of a source, noting e.g. the NPR version says an earlier version had misstated what year she was born.
Afaics from the sources, she was ten when the custody thing happened.
I see the source saying she earned "income"; best not get into the morass of distinguishing earning income from earning a living.
We do not know from these sources that her aunt controlled most of the family fortune; we know Cornelius had 100 million at one time, and at a later time Gertrude had 78 million, but we don't know what the size of the entire family fortune was at that later time.
A sort of detail to be wary of: "and finally a brand of designer jeans" -> "and a brand of designer jeans"; "First encouraged [...]" -> "Encouraged [...]". In a similar vein, I do not see anything in the sources to support a claim the NYT remark was in a book review.
She said her fortune exceeded Cornelius's, according to the source, and it'd be quite wrong for us to present it as objective fact, i.e., without attribution. I find it wildly unlikely if one allows for inflation.
The claims about inspiration appear, from what I can gather, to be incautious (I'm tempted to say sloppy) speculation by the LA Times. It appears that the association of Vanderbilt with the Capote character is part of a widely recognized controversy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Shirley Temple movie is also dubious. The fact that the LA Times made those claims is not itself worthy of mention, given the problematic nature of the claims, and if we wanted to report a more indirect connection, such as that she is sometimes cited as an inspiration for these things, we'd need to do much better on sourcing this facet.
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.
On this occasion, I've chosen to go into elaborate detail on most of the edits during review — keeping in mind I've not yet got to such an account requested for an earlier published article by the reporter. This has been a difficult review, taking about five hours; for perspective, that's about four or five times as long as a straightforward obit of this length by an experienced Wikinewsie should take. The comments did add a little time, prob'ly at least half an hour, but still only a small fraction of the whole. These remarks are mostly in the order they arose:
Use of "American" is non-neutral and routinely corrected on this project — a fact of which the reporter is aware, making their systematic use of it WN:POINTy, deliberate creating additional burden on reviewers and not supportable on the project in the long run.
Re the structure of the Anderson Cooper quote paragraph as submitted. It's not okay, anti-plagiary-wise, to copy the structure of a large source passage while changing a few low-level details here and there, as the overall similarity to the original adds up and the low-level changes start to look superficial. When applying that to a paragraph-sized quote like this, one might think of each direct-quote segment as functionally like a single word, since it has no internal flexibility of phrasing (rather the way one treats a formal title as a unit); but then the remaining frame text, including where the frame text is placed relative to the quote, becomes the whole concern of anti-plagiarism. Both sources that provide that quote divvy it up the same way, and also suspiciously both use the "Cooper said in a statement" structure; one may reasonably suppose that either both of them paid to use the same source (which appears to have been NYT, given what one of these sources said), or one or both of them are being sloppy about anti-plagiary practice. In any case, it's also better informative practice to tell the reader who is speaking before starting the quote, as starting in on the quote before identifying the speaker is pushing the reader to believe what is said rather than to assess it as a claim/opinion.
Similar adjustment to later paragraph quoting Robert Thompson.
It's not good practice to assert the cause of death in this sort of situation; only one of the three sources does so, the other two are properly careful to say she died and had advanced cancer rather than instructing the reader what to think about the relation between those two facts. If there is an ascribed cause of death, it should be attributed (which would not be possible here because the LA Times failed to attribute it). If I'd been writing the item myself I'd likely have said a bit more than just that she had advanced stomach cancer, hopefully making it all flow a bit more naturally; but since I'm the reviewer, minimal intervention was called for.
A similar principle applies to her father's death: it's easy enough to change of to with, and contributes to an ambiance of cautious precision that ought to permeate news reportage and, hopefully, affect the way the reader thinks (as well as how all of us think).
She was one when her father died, not two. When I looked, at least, this was stated correctly in two of the three sources (and not mentioned at all in the third). Not really sure how the error crept in; perhaps misstated in an earlier version of a source, noting e.g. the NPR version says an earlier version had misstated what year she was born.
Afaics from the sources, she was ten when the custody thing happened.
I see the source saying she earned "income"; best not get into the morass of distinguishing earning income from earning a living.
We do not know from these sources that her aunt controlled most of the family fortune; we know Cornelius had 100 million at one time, and at a later time Gertrude had 78 million, but we don't know what the size of the entire family fortune was at that later time.
A sort of detail to be wary of: "and finally a brand of designer jeans" -> "and a brand of designer jeans"; "First encouraged [...]" -> "Encouraged [...]". In a similar vein, I do not see anything in the sources to support a claim the NYT remark was in a book review.
She said her fortune exceeded Cornelius's, according to the source, and it'd be quite wrong for us to present it as objective fact, i.e., without attribution. I find it wildly unlikely if one allows for inflation.
The claims about inspiration appear, from what I can gather, to be incautious (I'm tempted to say sloppy) speculation by the LA Times. It appears that the association of Vanderbilt with the Capote character is part of a widely recognized controversy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Shirley Temple movie is also dubious. The fact that the LA Times made those claims is not itself worthy of mention, given the problematic nature of the claims, and if we wanted to report a more indirect connection, such as that she is sometimes cited as an inspiration for these things, we'd need to do much better on sourcing this facet.
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.
Wow, you sure put a lot of work into this, Pi zero. I'm not going to quibble with you on every single point, but I feel some defense is warranted.
I am aware that you do not like the word "American" and think it is biased. Neither I nor our sources share that belief. It is a perfectly normal word, used in all varieties of English. The Wikinews page you cite makes no mention of it.
Regarding Vanderbilt's age upon her father's death, it's in the LA Times: "Her multimillionaire father died when she was 2."
"American" is just too broad and not the bet accurate information. Just like saying the Indian bullfrog is an animal is well and fine, but when talking in the field, it is Rana. 103.254.128.98 (talk) 19:57, 20 June 2019 (UTC)Reply
Re "American": It doesn't matter whether the sources use the term that way; long consensus of senior Wikinews reviewers says this use of "American" is not okay with us. It also doesn't matter for the current purpose whether you agree with us, either; imposing this usage in articles, while knowing it's contrary to Wikinews practice, makes review more difficult and unpleasant while corroding the infrastructure of the project; it amounts to project disruption. Its impact is not at all limited to this particular issue; the more such errors clutter articles, the easier it is for a reviewer to be distracted and miss other things. We often explain why we do things the way we do, but that's to help reporters make sense of it, not to petition them to consider opting-in to the project's standard practices. Our standards aren't opt-in.
The LA Times says he died two years later. That's two years after he married her mother. He died in 1925, and Gloria was born in 1924. Her second birthday could not have happened yet when he died, which is what it means to say she was "two" in... well, certainly in the culture Gloria lived in and in the culture all three sources expect their audiences to belong to. If the LA Times said she was two, it would be flat wrong about that; and we don't simply take as fact anything that a source says, we consider the likelihood of accuracy, and when things don't smell right we dig deeper. We don't get excused for an error just because we repeated what some other news site said; we're expected to do better than our sources. We certainly get blamed for reporting something wrong regardless of where we got it from. It appears likely she was born in late February and he died in early September, which makes her just over eighteen months old when he died.
Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
1. Can the cause of death of a 95 year old woman be removed or at least simplified "she died of cancer". Stating which cancer does not shed any light on her life or accomplishments and is morbid and crude. A 95 year old dying an unnatural death, like falling from a window, might be worth stating, but inserting this information into the article describing her LIFE is unnecessary.
2. Same thing about her father, stating he died of liver cancer is totally gratuitous, crude and morbid. It adds nothing to our understanding of how she lived her life.
3. The quote from her son, Anderson Cooper should be removed. It is totally meaningless. In general family members will just say nice things about their recently deceased loved one. Again, this does not help us understand who she is in any way. If a colleague in the field commented on her life's work that would be one thing. A son saying "my mom was great" is really superfluous and basically useless.
Please make those changes to make the article better, right now it is very raggedy.
We do not make substantive changes to an article more than 24 hours after publication; a news article is a snapshot in time. Regarding specific issues raised:
A couple of the suggested changes would remove information from the article. This is a news article; its purpose is to inform. It is neither respectful nor disrespectful: it's factual. Deliberately omitting such details is not really suited to the en.wn venue.
As published, this article does not say she died of stomach cancer; it says she had stomach cancer at the time she died. During review, the former was changed to the latter exactly because the claim of causation could not be verified from the cited sources. In the process, it was also noted that under the circumstances, if we reported on cause of death at all, we ought to attribute, so that we would not actually be reporting the cause as a fact, rather we would report that some particular party (such as a medical examiner) officially, or unofficially, said the cause was thus-and-so. We can be very confident that someone said something without taking any position on whether they were right about it.
Although I agree quotes under such circumstances are of limited use, and we generally ought to avoid quote-farms,
family members do not necessarily say good things about the deceased —sometimes they may actually say bad things— and specifically what they do choose to say is not entirely information-free.
People other than members of the family are, in general, even more likely to say good things than are family. Anderson Cooper is a reasonable person to quote, keeping in mind that we make sure the reader understand who is saying those things, and that Anderson Cooper announced her death.
