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Template:Did you know nominations/Wikipedia coverage of firearms

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by Zanhe (talk) 00:30, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

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Wikipedia coverage of firearms edit

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Created by Catrìona (talk). Self-nominated at 07:39, 12 December 2018 (UTC).

  • Hi Catrìona. The article is new enough, long enough, and well-cited. QPQ is done :) I have some concerns about neutrality. The hook ought to reflect the fact that Wikipedia coverage of firearms has been both criticized and defended. Would you consider changing "criticized" to "controversial"? Within the article, I feel the pro-gun POV is not as well-explained as it is in the sources, and the overall tone comes across as an argument for one side. These issues are fixable - look for the best, most intelligent, and most cogent of the other side's arguments and make sure these arguments get across. I'd also leave climate change out of it. Good luck - it's an interesting topic and I'd like to see this on the Main Page. Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 07:44, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
@Clayoquot: Thanks for the review. Can you be more specific about what positive information you think should be included in the article? My impression of the sources were that the tone was very negative. I double-checked Google News for articles that had a more positive spin but couldn't find any. Catrìona (talk) 08:38, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
I agree the tone of the sources is very negative. But from the sources that the article currently has, here are some key arguments for the pro-gun side that could be added (you don't need to include all of them):
  • “Mass shootings already have their own articles, all relevant info is, or should be, in that page and not needlessly duplicated on other articles. If we start adding info about just one shooting incident to one tenuously-connected article, we’ll be opening a literal Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking).”
plus Added
  • “The fact that they give the police the benefit of the doubt until all the facts are in does not make the NRA racist”
plus Added; it seems like they were arguing that the Castile incident criticism was UNDUE
  • "the wider Wikipedia community failing to reach a consensus at the end of a vote on changing it."
Not included as it's not clear in the article what this is referring to
  • "the most detailed criticism came from a Media Matters post, which was dismissed as a non-neutral source"
plus Added mention of Media Matters
Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:09, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I'm seeing another significant issue as well, which is that the article seems to put the responsibility for the removal of mass shootings from the AR-15 article squarely on the shoulders of Niteshift36. Most of the sources say that a number of people removed this content, and don't even mention Niteshift36. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:27, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
minus Removed any mention of Niteshift.

A neutrality tag was added to the article yesterday, so we'll have to put this nomination on hold until the dispute is resolved. I'll be happy to finish reviewing at that time. Take care, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:17, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Someone has nominated the article for deletion, so until that resolves the article should continue to be on hold. Catrìona (talk) 15:56, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
  • For what it's worth the accusations made by The Verge, the source of most of the material included in the recently created wikipedia article, were poorly researched and basically took an otherwise unremarkable evolution of a few pages and turned it into a conspiracy. Rather than actually ask involved editors what they thought happened the Verge author jumped to conclusions. I posted this in reply to an editor around the time the articles were released.
So I have a bit of time and thought I would share my take on the four articles you posted (thanks BTW for the recent edits to the summaries). I basically see the News Week, and Haaretez as repeating the claims of The Verge. The Week was of course its own thing. Anyway, The Verge's author did ask me for a quote but just 24 hours before. His question was vague (other than making the tone of the article clear). I decided not to reply and I don't think a well thought out reply would have mattered. I think there were two things the author got really wrong.
First, the sequence of events related to the AR-15 pages. As I recall and based on my limited exposure to the article prior to this year, there were kind of two debates going on. The first was the scope of the article. The Colt AR-15 article, as I gather, started as the general AR-15 page. My early involvement was around the time there was a big debate about what the scope of the AR-15 page should be. Some editors felt that, since AR-15 was a trademarked name it should only be about the "Colt AR-15". So the people who were trying to keep general AR-15 material (primarily crime material) out were doing so based on keeping the article on topic (thus not a PAG violation). As I gathered, the outcome of this debate was to change what was the AR-15 article to the Colt AR-15 article and then start a second article that was the generic page. Of course that didn't go smoothly. First, until recently, the AR-15 search term went to the Colt article vs a disambiguation page. So when someone searched for "AR-15" they found the Colt AR-15 page then assumed the removal of general AR-15 material was only due to trying to keep the material off Wikipedia vs just keeping the article focused.
That would have been easier to deal with if the generic page had been created properly (note: I'm really vague on this part of the history). I recall debates about what to call the page. At some point it appears that Modern Sporting Rifles was picked or morphed into the generic page. I have an issue with that since, as I understand it, not AR-15s can be MSRs. I also see why people who wanted to put some thing about a crime wouldn't think to search for that page and AR-15 didn't redirect there. So that I what I see as the setup that caused most of the issues The Verge reported. The biggest issue was that when the AR-15 page went non-generic, the creation of the generic page and setting up of disambiguations wasn't done correctly/at all. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate effort to keep this material out of any article or more likely just people weren't worried about creating the generic page so it was never really done. As it relates to the Verge, well, that author made it sound like this was a planned or controlled thing vs just the sort of outcome that inevitable given the circumstances.
Another issue with The Verge is conflating the removal of a given passage as refusal to allow any such material in the article. A number of the passages I've removed over the last 1.5 years were edits made by the many socks of [redacted]. Even the material we ended up adding to the AR-15 style rifle page started off as a [redacted] sock addition. When the reporter would see a single passage from the NRA article get removed he didn't distinguish between not wanting the general material included vs not wanting the specific text. ... [T]he Verge assumed a motivation without considering that material is sometimes removed for reasons other than suppression.
I don't have much to say about The Week other than first, the author didn't consider that simple suppression isn't the only reason to remove material. Second, given how quickly a single removal made it to a news story, I have trouble believing that was just a reporter who happened across the story. Springee (talk) 16:29, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
@Springee: Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps some of this material/Wikipedia editors' response could be included? I was able to locate your original post in various talk page archives, but I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to link if these are not indexed by Google and names should be redacted. Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that I don't think WP:Firearms is a cabal; in fact, I haven't been involved in these discussions at all until I stumbled onto them and (probably too hastily) decided to create an article on the controversy. Catrìona (talk) 17:28, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Catrìona, thanks for the reply. Absent first hand context I can see why the articles make it look really bad. I wrote the above in response to others who took the contents of the articles at face value. For what it's worth, I hope that after reading it you can see why some of the "pro-gun" editors were frustrated by the articles and how something that from the trenches was nothing more than the typical push and pull of evolving articles was cited as a conspiracy while. Had this set of change occurred 6-12 months earlier I doubt we would be having this discussion now. Regardless, since the above is my OR we can't add it to an article even if we all agree it's 100% correct. It could be included in an internal to Wikipedia article but short of an external source picking up the discussion and reporting we wouldn't have a RS to cite. My read of RS is we can challenge the reliability of source articles based on our own research/arguments (and assuming consensus) but policy would prevent us from including such arguments in the Wiki-articles no matter how sound the OR. If nothing else, I'm glad we had a chance to discuss the topic. Springee (talk) 18:57, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
@Springee: Thanks again for your response. You've convinced me that it's not possible to write a NPOV article with the existing sourcing, so I've requested speedy deletion of the page. Therefore, this DYK nomination should be withdrawn. Catrìona (talk) 19:03, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
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