Talk:Catherine Coffey

Family life and death section

As I said in the AfD discussion, well done @Kerrieburn on your hard work in improving the article!

I think you now need to take a hard look at "Family life and death" and ask which parts of it are really necessary to keep. The final four paragraphs in particular are still written in YOUR voice; the reader hears *you* interpreting what are essentially primary sources, instead of using a neutral, factual encyclopedia voice. Furthermore, do readers really need all that detail about the children and their birth and death dates? There is a tendency with women's biographies in particular to want to pad them with all the detail about their children, especially if there is little else that is known about them, but it often ends up taking away from their main achievements, and makes it look more like genealogy web site research rather than an encyclopedia. You can be confident now that the rest of the article is strong, and you don't need so much other "stuff". Just keep the key facts and lose the rest; even the final quote from the obituary could be a much shorter "partial quote" instead of all that. You really can say more with less and make it even better. Cielquiparle (talk) 12:36, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions and advocating to keep the article. I will be doing more research and writing a lengthier biographical article about the subject (where I can incorporate additional sources and expand on the content included) but I am glad that the Wikipedia article is now much stronger. Kerrieburn (talk) 21:19, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for cutting that section down; I added back a sentence about the children (based on what it says in the obituary, while avoiding the whole "how many children did they actually have and was the obituary technically accurate about the total number" question (quite common in 19th-century bios), so see what you think. Maybe you already did this, but if you want to name Thomas as the surviving child, you could still look for his obituary since you know when he died. (The best way to use Findagrave, etc., is to mine them for clues for further research rather than citing them directly as a source; I would still strongly recommend going back and fixing this in other bios if you can.) BTW – The way to cite databases like Trove is to put them in the "via" field in visual editor citations. Cielquiparle (talk) 05:39, 18 June 2022 (UTC)