Talk:University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Are there specific items in the article which prompted the addition of "Lead rewrite" and "Advert" tags?

Hello, Mikehawk10. Thank you for looking at this article. Can you give one or more examples of "advertising" wording, as described in the "Advert tag" template? In particular, your edit summary suggests that the lead section is what prompted you to add the "Advert" tag. Do you see specific statements in the lead section which are not supported by referenced statements in the main body of the article? Sorry; I forgot to sign my post. CWBoast (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello, CWBoast. The first sentence, "With the growing awareness of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) implemented a multi-faceted response to the COVID-19 outbreak to maximize the safety of students, faculty, staff and the greater community," gives me advertising vibes. it's sort of implying a motive that might be present in official UIUC publications, but its tone could be made to be more encyclopedic. The language in the second paragraph and the bulleted statements in the lead. The article is also generally devoid of any negative coverage of UIUC's event, which brings up some WP:NPOV concerns since we're using self-published statements from the university or its agents in wikivoice quite a bit throughout. We should probably try to use independent sources more to improve the article's verifiability and quality. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 20:20, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello, Mikehawk10. Thank you for the specific ideas. I agree with most of your comments and have changed the article accordingly. Even if ascribing motive (in the first sentence) is appropriate, that would probably only be true if it were based on an external source. Regarding your other comment about sources, I have removed many of the UIUC-sourced references; the things said in UIUC massmails, for example, are easy to find within the list of UIUC COVID-19 massmails, so it makes sense to remove many of these references. I found very little in the lead's second paragraph or bulleted statements which strike me as lacking an encyclopedic tone, but I made a few changes there. Finally, most of the negative coverage I have found regarding the UIUC COVID-19 response concerns the large number of positive tests, especially the numbers reported for late-August and early September 2020. This coverage is referenced through the early-September articles in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times as well as in the local student newspaper. Unlike this issue, which appears in the headlines of references, another area of criticism, the delays in saliva test results early in the Fall 2020 semester could probably be better referenced, and I am looking for ways to do that. Again I thank you for your attention to this article -- I think it is now improved in most or all of the specific areas you commented on. CWBoast (talk) 21:52, 26 March 2021 (UTC)