Talk:Robin Cook

message: "At his death he was president of the Foreign Policy Centre, and the Party of European Socialists, and a vice-president on the America APPG and the Global Security and Non-Proliferation APPG."
Is this really true, and do we have a source? I know he was president of the PES at one time but I was fairly sure he left that post a year or more ago. — Trilobite (Talk) 22:23, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I converted "He is currently ..." which was in the article at the beginning of today, to "At his death he was ...". The APPGs appear to be correct - the America APPG usually has all ex-Foreign Secretaries in senior posts, and he was certainly still President of the FPC. I'll check the PES Presidency as I think this is an biannual changeover post. David | Talk 23:30, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Now corrected - see PES website for his Presidency dates. David | Talk 23:33, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

text: See Guardian guide to thinktanks. Cook set up the FPC in 1997 shortly after becoming Foreign Secretary, basically to provide him with a loyal think tank. I think 'President' is really an emeritus position which they gave him in order to keep him involved. David | Talk 15:08, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: PES

message: No major vandalism or edit war seems to have happened why lock it?
Jackliddle 22:25, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why has this page been locked? 

message: The article states that Madeleine Albright attended the funeral, but my recollection is that she was unable to because of illness. Can someone confirm this? Geoff97 21:35, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Albright 

message: The image of Cook in Commons, linked to from this page, has the tag:
"This image is a work of a U.S. military or Department of Defense employee, taken or made during the course of an employee's official duties."
Was Cook really an employee of the US military?? Suggests this could be a copyrighted image and should be moved to a fair use category. — SteveRwanda 15:00, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyrighted image? 

message: Could someone add a section on Cook's depiction on Spitting Image and elsewhere. He was sometimes shown as a gnome and most often his speech style was spoofed as being hard to understand along with a genuine verbal tick to extend certain vowel sounds. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.85.13.68 (talk) 15:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Depiction in popular culture 

message: 2000 pages multiplied by three seconds equals 6,000 seconds. Equals 100 minutes.
2 hours equals 120 minutes. So it's actually 3.6 seconds per page. Maybe change the phrase to 'under 4 seconds per page'
Not that I'm being pedantic or anything...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ray564k (talk • contribs) 21:14, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dodgy Maths 

message: So now we are to exclude all mainstream media reports until the mainstream media have also put them together for us and also labeled it for us? We are not to write, add, report or call them on their discrepancies? I find that more than just a bit troubling. Is there noone else among the admins that sees a problem here? Really? George Orwell's 1984 accounts of the revision of history over time springs to mind.. Deceitful times indeed. "Free" access to "information", screened by yet another self appointed arbitrary group of two to five people according to their personal political preferences and lack of critical abilities to even include stories from the mainstream media that are already part of general public knowledge. "Information" society. Go figure.  
:If you object to wikipedia's policy of WP:RS, then you should take up that point on that page. What information, and what articles, are you saying the article should include? BillMasen (talk) 18:32, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  On excluding the discrepancies of  Cook's death 

message: In other words, the very least the article should contain is a few words that cite the above mentioned public media articles, statements and sources and a sentence on the fact that all these differing reports actually constitute discrepancies.  Nunamiut (talk) 12:51, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The article as I left it two years ago did mention these discrepancies. They've since been removed. You could add them back, that is if no-one objects...? BillMasen (talk) 20:59, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Different media reports often say different, even contradictory, things as journalists search for scraps of information after an incident such as this one. For the article to mention the media reports is fine, for the article to imply that this is unusual, or points to some kind of conspiracy is original research. From WP:OR: Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Editors should not make the mistake of thinking that if A is published by a reliable source, and B is published by a reliable source, then A and B can be joined together in an article to reach conclusion C. This would be a synthesis of published material that advances a new position, and that constitutes original research. "A and B, therefore C" is acceptable only if a reliable source has published the same argument in relation to the topic of the article.—Jeremy (talk) 22:17, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: My version only said that the reports contradicted each other, not that there was some kind of agenda behind that. BillMasen (talk) 16:49, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discrepancies 

message: I think typically the infobox is supposed to represent the person's final style and title at death, so I have added the letters MP. I see that some other MPs who died in office are lacking these letters, but I'll see whether consensus supports including them for Robin Cook.
Regarding his degree, if he graduated from Edinburgh I think it would have been impossible for him to have got a BA (Hons) degree followed by an MA. I suspect that he got an MA (Hons) degree, which is the usual undergraduate degree in a Scottish university. Is there any evidence to the contrary?--Oxonian2006 (talk) 01:23, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  MP and MA 

message: There is an RfC on the question of using "Religion: None" vs. "Religion: None (atheist)" in the infobox on this and other similar pages. 
The RfC is at Template talk:Infobox person#RfC: Religion infobox entries for individuals that have no religion. 
Please help us determine consensus on this issue. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:29, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template talk:Infobox person#RfC: Religion infobox entries for individuals that have no religion|Request for Comments]] 

message: Robin Cook the politician suffers the peculiar handicap (in the internet era) of sharing his name with not one, but two popular novelists; which makes Cook the Politician's own political memoir (which is excellent and highly informative about contemporary British politics) unreasonably obscure using common search engine techniques. (It is titled "The Point of Departure"; it was this precise title that I could not remember, and so I had turned to Wikipedia for help).
Reference to Cook's wikipedia page is one obvious way for the searcher to resolve the difficulty, but even here, reference to the work is somewhat buried in an obscure paragraph.
I have done what is easy to improve the situation (see my recent one word edit substituting one instance of the word 'book' for 'memoir' to aid down-page searching in the browser), but it occurs to me that a canonical link to a page discussing the book itself would be handy, but I do not have time to address this now.
LaFolleCycliste 09:10, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Locating Cook's political memoir 'The Point of Departure' with greater ease 

message: Was Robin Cook known to have been injured in the fall caused by his heart attack? I could easily imagine such a fall could hasten his death. I have wondered if he could be listed in Records of members of parliament of the United Kingdom in the list of those who died accidentally. I note he is listed in the category of Mountaineering Deaths.Cloptonson (talk) 20:47, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Death accidental?

message: This article needs a better source to verify Cook being a republican. Neither source explicitly states he was a republican. -- TrottieTrue (talk) 02:58, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Republican?