Talk:Terri Schiavo case/Archive 47

message: Isn't this a scary sentence? What it says is "Once you have passed your peak ......" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MartinGugino (talk • contribs) 08:03, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Americans don't want to live "with no hope of improvement," 

message: At this diff, we again find Calton causing trouble. He revered my edit, removing every single link that I put in, supposedly because of angst with one particular link that is a blog.
I don't think he is right to oppose that, but at least he makes a half-way argument about not being notable. (I say this to contrast the arguments Proto made about blogs not being acceptable; Of course, he is wrong: Many blog links had been in the article after his edit.)
I will be fine with any consensus by the community on the links in question -if for not other reason than to make Calton stop arguing, a worthwhile motive, but not the best motive, I admit. (We should have as motives simply to make an Encyclopaedia article with sufficient details -and references to back them up.)
So, in short, Terri Schiavo's article seems OK, but help is needed at the Public_opinion_and_activism_in_the_Terri_Schiavo_case article -specifically, the links section.
PS: Any user can look at my recent contributions to see that I am a responsible editor, just in case anyone wants to know. Plus, I was the one who created the pretty Template:TOCcenter template you see at the top of the Wikipedia_talk:Village_pump page and seen in the page history here, which, for some reason, is needed: The Table of Contents doesn't automatically show on the Village Pump's talk page, like it used to -and like it does on this page. Anyone can help here??
In closing, if I am not around to vote, then my "vote" for each and every link enumerated is "add this link," but in the end, if some links are voted down, I would hope that at least some of them could stay -to strengthen the references section.--GordonWatts 09:39, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I went ahead and made an edit revision and reverted to a prior stable version, but although I did not include the North County Gazette link, I want to clarify: My "vote" for each link is to "add" -including the Gazette link. I just wanted to clarify that I'm voting "for" its inclusion, and the only reason I don't myself add it is because I'm a peace-living person who does not want to be responsible for World War Three on this wiki.--GordonWatts 09:57, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More help needed to resolve ongoing Schiavo disputes 

message: OK, now that the opening paragraph is crisp (not brilliant prose yet, but crisp), let's see what we can do to move in the direction of FA quality.  Sure, this one article is not going to get us to WP:100K, but it could be progress towards, say, 2K FA's at W. It seems like the sections called "Initial medical crisis" and maybe the whole "Five years of family conflict" is where things really start to bog down for the reader. In everything else, something happens and the story moves along, but these two sections have several qualities:
* They do not delegate any of their content
* They are lengthy and high in medical detail
* From the reader's piont of view, they are poorly movitivated. There is an ongoing suspicion that the husband directly contributed to the his wife's collapse. It is kind of like those bumper stickers that say "O.J. did it." (BTW: Neither will ever be criminally prosecuted, so let's not get into that) If we fail to explain right up front that this is why we are dwelling on tiny details of the "initial medical crisis", the reader misses the point and gets bored. Either we explain WHY we are dwelling on the details or we condense the thing. I am open to other ways to get to brilliant prose on this. Any other suggestions?
* There are right-to-life/right-to-die factions that created this thing as if by committee and the prose suffers for it.  This story is OVER. Most Americans do not even remember it. Let's care about Wikipedia for a while and get this thing to FA. We have to be sensitive about the subject and maintain her dignity (and little missteps still provoke reverts) but let's finish this thing. Terri deserves FA. Wikipedia deserves FA. OK? Heck, I am in a good mood this morning, even Jimmy Wales deserves this thing to be FA. After all, it all happened within miles of where he lives. But now it is old news and it deserves NPOV and quality and FA. Let's do it.  Read the failed FA feedback and let's do it. -- 70.231.140.181 17:03, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey, 70.aaa.bbb.ccc, you didn't see? There was an edit change in the lead paragraph three (3) minutes after you initially posted: WATTS_Word_97-2003 found numerous errors -and corrected them all! I'm Gordon Watts and I approve this message. Also, I note that at least I made edit summaries that justified my each and every edit change, even when I made multiple changes per edit. That is something that I note that Rosemary did not do, but she is a vegan like myself, so she's not all bad. One more thing, 70.xx..., I'd ask that you register so people don't accuse you of being me or vice verca, OK? Thx!!--GordonWatts 17:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

text: So let's talk about the family feud. They fought over guardianship and there were lots of appeals. The current version of the story dwells on the details of the patient and the court cases, rather than the diagnoses and decisions by the licensed professionals. Why is that? Do we doubt that the licensed professionals were competant? Put yourselves in the mind of the judge: is he going to second-guess the professionals and dwell on all the details? No: he is going to rely on the fact that the Florida professional boards will discipline the doctors, nurses and lawyers if they do anything against their rules of ethics.  The pathway to condensation is to stop dwelling on the details and start focusing just on the professional opinions of the on-the-scene professionals. That is what happens in real life and in the courts. In a sense, we ask the doctors and lawyers, just like we ask to courts, to hold the balance and ask which way the scales fall. Just like the opinions of juries, we ultimately have to accept the opinions of the professionals who were on-the-scene.  They had fair access to the complete set of detailed evidence and put their reputations and their licenses on the line. If they were wrong and, in effect, "O.J. did do it", then we will never know because, even with hindsight our access to the evidence is vastly inferior because of our own lack of training and experience and also: confidentiality rules that continue to obscure our view to the full set of evidence. I think that both the medical and legal details belong on some kind of delegated data sheet or timeline. The readers are sick of slogging through a lot of true factual details (too often still uncited) that do not give conclusive progress to the storyline. -- 70.231.147.149 20:22, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Can we just remove the Wolfson report or make a one-sentence reference to it? It changes nothing about the story at all. I mean, I do NOT want to read that "there was no evidence  this..." and "there was not evidence that...". I want to read that there WAS evidence about something but not every iota of that evidence.  Just that that WAS evidence about SOMETHING that actually really happened. Please! -- 64.9.239.102 06:08, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The Wolfson report details and the Nurse Iyer details are back, but the citations are better, so we are making progress on other FA objections. OK. Where else is there excess and inconclusive detail (or stuff that was suspected but, AFAIK, never is known to have happened) to be trimmed in this story? -- 199.33.32.40 22:11, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Now, let's use the failed FA feedback 

message: It seems that Judge Greer campaigned in 2004 for re-election in Florida and some of the police officers (the Sheriff and two deputies) did a commercial for him and only now is some kind of ethics investigation is resulting.  Is this part of Terri's story?  Does it fit into some medical/legal ethics thing? -- 71.141.252.50 20:23, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ethics investigation 

message: The Wolfson report has its own section.  Is ths appropriate?  I ask because it is my impression that Wikipedia should speak in its own voice. It should report, in its own authentic voice
*fact
*both sides and the judgement handed down of final court cases
*if room allows, the spectrum of possiblities, including brief allowanes for plausible speculation if the reader will benefit from such speculation
Also, while blue-ribbon investigative commissions occasionally get a section, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster#Rogers Commission investigation and even the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the report itself is treated as a document to be used in references. If people want to criticize our sources, then they should be able to go to the "Notes" section and get the whole picture.  Personally, I feel that we should just "digest" the Wolfson report, extract the new facts and refer to the report only in the refs.
To be honest, I think that the same should be done for many of the other documents generated by the court cases. The cases themselves are not notable: only the truths revealed in those procedings that are relevant to the article's subject matter.  Our subject sits in her lonely hospital bed, waiting.  All of the fighting is about her, but only what it tells us about HER really matters. The facts (or claims) should be sorted out chronologically as to when they happened, not when they were claimed or later discovered.
The Barbaro story suffered from this same problem early on, with every sportwriter dramatically piping in about the creature's prospects, until somebody just went in last summer and "objectified" the aritlce, focusing on the horse's foot and how it broke and the medical procedures actually performed. Some editors claimed that the new version bled the story of its spirit, but that new, objective version stood the test of time, and that story is ongoing, with new events even in the past few days. That article was transformed to speak in its own authentic voice, much to its unification and increase in its readability.  This article should be also.  There is no loss of dignity to Terri in this comparison because this argument is about the brilliant prose.  Brilliant prose should be intricate, poetic, and very conscious about the perspective imposed upon the reader. When we learn something new from the court battles, we should be always re-sort the facts by chronological order and then take the reader back to Terri's lonely bedside, and THEN continue the discussion and the footnoting.
One user characterize the Barbaro linear narrative as "lifeless" and longed for the lively day-to-day commentaries during that creature's July 2006 crises. That style was very easy, but Wikipedia is not a newspaper, nor it is a daily version of Sports Illustrated.  Wikipedia should present a timeless account of the enternal Truth within that Truth's chronological context, as it pertains specifically to the subject.  Even in the past year, there is ongoing sequella with Nurse Iyer, who was ultimately exonerated and her nursing license restored (but this does not change the relevance of her affidavit), and the county Sheriff and some of his buddies, who are the subject of some kind of politically-realted ethics investigation. While that is interesting, it does not belong in this article because those are sideshows of the non-notables. We already have a "Related articles & documents" template for those notables who ended up involved in the story and their details are on their pages.  Now, it is time to focus on our subject in her hospital bed. It strikes me that the "legacy" section could be expanded because the reality is that the precedents set by the legal and politcal events are what still matter today and perhaps for decades to come. How should we deal with the long list of legal procedings of the 1998-2003 period? In my humble opinion, they are just a bunch of line items of decisions handed down (and a rather monotonous list at that). The rest of the revealed facts should be incorporated back into the storyline. I am not in a rush: I just want people to think about this and respond.
:Why do the nations so furiously rage together? 1. Why do the heathen rage, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? Psalm 2:1
-- 71.141.246.35 16:32, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wolfson report 

message: Can we just move the Schiavo memo to the Palm Sunday Compromise? I am still probing for what else can be trimmed out w/o somebody taking offense. The other two targets, in my mind, are still the Wolfson report and the 2003 petition. Any dialog at all would be appreciated. --199.33.32.40 01:07, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Schiavo memo 

message: What does this mean? How can the senate pass a bill with only 3 votes? I generally don't like parentheses. Could this be rewritten without the parentheses? MartinGugino 05:50, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  
With only three members present 


message: :"In 1998, her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo petitioned the courts to remove her feeding tube; her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, opposed this and they took legal action. The parents' argument was that Schiavo's brain damage was not as extensive as the PVS diagnosis suggested."
I feel better about something like this:
:"In 1998, Michael Sciavo, Terri's husband and guardian, petitioned the courts to remove her feeding tube. Her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, opposed this, claiming that Terri recognized them, and that Michael had conflicts of interest.
This allows 
*Michael to be called "husband", factually true, while it flags the problem with that designation, which the guardian ad litem also noted. It does not even say "In 1998, as soon as it became legal to do so, Michael" which is also true. 
*It removes the possible misunderstanding that Robert and Mary first involved the courts (took legal action) when for the most part they were excluded from knowledge of the legal proceedings Michael took, and responded, probably too late, only after problematic factual determinations had been made.
*It also reflects their view that Terri was 'still in there', something that others (Weller, Pavone) also felt and reported.
MartinGugino 06:41, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The focus should be on "what happened". In the lead section, adding more and more circumstances around any action tends to suggest the primary motivation for the action without necessarily presenting all of the circumstances fairly. If the reader wants to know what somebody was (or might have been) thinking before they took an action or made a decision, then they can read the body of the article. Who, what, when and where are fine in the lead section. "Why" is always the problem and should be dealth with in the body.-- 71.141.242.194 19:25, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

text: "In 1998, Michael Sciavo, Terri's husband and guardian, petitioned the courts to remove her feeding tube. Her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, opposed this. , claiming that Terri recognized them, and that Michael had conflicts of interest.
MartinGugino 21:03, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The first paragraph says