Talk:As shipping exemption expires, hurricane-torn Puerto Rico may face changes in relief from mainland United States

This feels a bit rushed to me too. Of the two, I think this article should be reviewed before the earthquake article.

Yesterday was a slow news day, now this. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:34, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It's alive ...ALIIIIIVE!
It's October, so I called my assistant Igor and raised this article toward the lightning. The ozone's still making my hair stand up, so I welcome fresh eyes, but I think she's presentable. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:17, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
 * from this point “talks FEMA, Trump Tweets as relief effort continues” headline makes no sense to an “average reader”. 223.186.116.8 (talk) 19:57, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The lede is nastily long and confusing. acagastya PING ME! 08:39, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4351645 [Not ready]

 * Took a stab at what you meant. Take a gander. . (There are highly aggressive geese in my area that often leave me wanting to stab ganders.) Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:55, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * On quick first impression, those two specific immediate problems are resolved. I see the focal event took place on Saturday, so it's not entirely impossible it might still be publishable on Tuesday (which, UTC, starts in about 50 minutes).  So we'll see what happens.  --Pi zero (talk) 23:10, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Cool. If no one gets to it by tomorrow afternoon, I'll just check the mediasphere for any updates. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:33, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Collaboration and timeline source
As usual, I'm not married to this title or any specific part of the text, and I welcome anyone who wants to improve it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:26, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Just going to stash this link to an Atlantic article about the timeline of Hurricane Maria here. Could be a good resource in any future articles.  I just used a similar source in the spotted owl Wikinews article. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:55, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4354530 [Not ready]

 * Done. I must say, though, a law may not be a person but it is certainly an agent. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:12, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I think the headline is confusing. I don't understand how the expiration of the Jones Act (shouldn't its formal title appear somewhere?) may limit shipping from the mainland US. The Jones Act restricts shipping to Puerto Rico to ships from the mainland. Now that it's expiring, only ships from the mainland can dock there... But that doesn't limit shipping *from* the mainland? Or I'm missing something? Ca2james (talk) 17:05, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Take a look now, . Weirdly enough, none of the sources I used included the Act's real name.  Everyone's just calling it "Jones Act" or "Jones Act of 1920." Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:50, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Side note: the Jones Act is intended to make US-flagged ships more profitable for trade between US ports. Foreign-flagged ships are required to clear into and out of a non-US port between US ports. The expiration will not limit shipping relief resources, but it could delay it OR make it more expensive. -  Amgine | t 17:59, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Swapped it out for "changes." It should do. If anyone wants to change it to a better title, I don't mind. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:56, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you! That makes much more sense. Ca2james (talk) 02:16, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4355220 [Passed]

 * Anything specific jump to mind? Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:22, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I hope you're regularly tracking the on all these; I cultivate a review style in which the edits are broken into small increments so that each individual edit will have a readable diff and afford a clear edit summary.  --Pi zero (talk) 03:15, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Ordinarily my take is "don't be defensive; just move on," but you've told me that your perception of matters like this has affected your decision-making in at least one case, so...
 * PRE-POST CAVEAT: I am not offering this to argue with you about any of the changes you made to the article. You used your reviewer judgment. The way I see it, the article is fine the way it is.  Nothing needs to go back in or come back out.  Anything posted on any part of project Wiki is going to be changed by other people, period.  I am posting this so we can determine whether I'm interpreting your edit summaries correctly, which I must do if they are to be useful.  Hopefully it will also satisfy you that I wasn't careless.
 * "didn't find" Looks like you mean "didn't find source material stating that the exemption allowed foreign ships to join U.S. ships in the relief effort." It was right here: "A waiver enabling foreign ships to deliver supplies to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico has expired and will not be renewed" and "eased the way for foreign ships to deliver crucial supplies, such as food and gasoline, more expeditiously and at a lower cost." "Didn't find" is actually a good summary here because it acknowledges the possibility that the content may indeed have been there. That was the case here.
 * The other two edits marked "didn't find" look like revert and reverted, so I'm guessing they were a false alarm.
 * "Rm bias" Calling people "Americans" is not bias. It's the only option provided by the English language where a demonym is required.  Spanish has both "americano," which can also mean anything pertaining to the Americas, and "estadounidense," but English has just the one. "Citizen" is not exactly the same thing; it refers to legal status (and "American" to culture/identity).  Nothing in the source material suggested that the researchers checked citizenship status before administering their poll; the respondents are called "Americans." The distinction between "American citizen" and "American" is more relevant than usual here because that's what the paragraph is actually discussing.  I know that some Latin Americans take offense at "American," so I've used "United States" whenever it was six-to-one-half-a-dozen-to-the-other, and I chose "American" here because this isn't one of those times.  The fact that Puerto Rico is not literally a state but its people are Americans is another reason to prefer "American" to anything with "States" in it in this article.  It could get confusing.
 * "Rm analysis" The "Complicating the relief effort" matter is from this in USA Today: "fewer than half of Americans (47%) believe that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth. ... That may help explain why the nation rallied behind the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida, but have not responded in the same way to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico" and surrounding.
 * So, did I get it right? Is that what your edit summaries meant or were any of them pointing at something else? Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:48, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I try to avoid ever asserting that something wasn't in the sources, always noting "didn't find" (or some similar words, but "didn't find" is my usual phrase).
 * That particular "" was, iirc, not about the allowing foreign ships (which repeats the earlier explanation of the Jones Act) but about the claim that most of the ships were already allowed. I spent a great deal of time and effort trying to find that in the sources (which is usually true of those innocent-seeming "didn't find" edit summaries; hence my characterization of them as expensive).  There's also a subtle difference in what is implied by "will be allowed to continue making deliveries until October 18" versus "may take until October 18 to complete deliveries", and the difference is another thing I didn't find.
 * Another "didn't find" was because I didn't find that the rainfall was record rainfall, but it was clearly extraordinary so I went with that. I'm appalled to discover I somehow accidentally undid my own change there, when I was making a much larger didn't find edit in which I cut an entire paragraph.
 * The analysis removed is analysis. I knew where you got it from.  Just because that opinion was expressed by a source doesn't make it okay to report it as fact.  Don't report analysis in your own voice.  Objective facts likely to lead to that analysis are typically okay to report (with a caveat about misleading selection of facts).  If the analysis can be attributed to someone in the story, doing that is okay; but usually the journalists who write the source articles are not themselves part of the news story, so usually it's not appropriate to report the journalists' opinions (even with attribution).
 * Using the term "Americans", in Wikinew's own voice, introduces bias. It can't help doing so; the biasing effect is inherent.  It's not difficult to quietly avoid the usage in our own voice, and quietly avoiding it creates a largely unnoticed push toward neutral perspective.  The fact that it is largely unnoticed is the flip side of the fact that most people in the US don't notice the biasing push created by using the term.  Note it's not just a biasing influence on the reader/listener; it's a biasing influence on the writer/speaker, too.
 * Interesting, to observe in which cases the edit summaries were and weren't lucid. (Some rationales are just really hard to get across, so that an edit summary never really had a chance of doing so anyway.)  --Pi zero (talk) 04:57, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Then we've established what we needed to establish here: Edit summaries alone don't do the whole job.
 * As for "Americans," the situation seems to be that you think it's bias and I don't. It's not that I don't notice the situation or have overlooked something.  I have examined it closely and find the word appropriate. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:41, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I've had some bad experiences with exchanges that become lists of points of disagreement, but it's possible this could be one of the times such a thing accomplishes a useful purpose. (Hope springs eternal.)
 * Was it not understood beforehand that edit summaries don't always suffice in themselves? I've spent years attempting over and over, with many different people, to explain Wikinews writing, in general and as specifically relates to particular articles; however much I try to apply what I've learnt from past failures, people keep finding new ways to not get it.  So it's certainly nothing new to me that edit summaries don't always suffice.  Nothing always suffices; often I'll put much time and effort into writing lengthy discussions in review comments only to find that somehow the contributor entirely misses the point I was trying to make.  But, clear diffs and specific, if necessarily brief, edit summaries are an immensely valuable place to start, and have greatly improved my success rate at communicating at-least-some-information to contributors.  (Also, btw, I find it can be very difficult to remember, through a lengthy review, all the potential review comments one thought of during the review &mdash; one of the things I hope an eventual review assistant can help with &mdash; and the edit history is also my most detailed record of what went on during the review.  Naturally, I can make more of it, by examining it in detail later, than someone else can, somewhat as an original reporter's notes-at-the-time may mean more to the reporter than they do to someone else (but we still want those notes, and a reviewer routinely reconstructs how the reporter derived their reportage from the notes).)
 * There are at least a couple of difficulties with your statement "As for 'American,' the situation seems to be that you think it's bias and I don't." It's a fairly nicely crafted remark on your part &mdash;cautious wording should be instinctive for journalists&mdash; in that it's somewhat buffered by the word "seems" (though you might further qualify it as "seems to me").  Given this buffer, the difficulties are in apparent implications rather than direct assertions.
 * The statement presents this as a personal disagreement just between the two of us. If it were some petty preference of mine, I wouldn't pursue it aggressively and would clearly identify it as a personal preference.  Part of the responsibility of review is not treating it as free license to indulge one's personal idiosyncrasies.
 * The statement suggests that I think the usage is bias. I certainly might have slipped at some point, but I've tried to avoid saying it's (necessarily) biased.  The usage generates bias, regardless of whether bias was intended.  That's the difference between "biased" and "biasing".
 * A side note on the usage itself. In my experience (admittedly I've a pretty good vantage from which to see a lot), those who feel strongly and are not from the US disapprove of the usage, conversely those who feel strongly that the usage is acceptable are from the US.  I'll go cautiously a bit further and say there's some correlation between those who feel strongly that it's acceptable and those who live in so-called "red states".  --Pi zero (talk) 14:40, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I hope it's ok if I jump in here. I'm Canadian and to me the term "American(s)" conveys an image that the term "US citizen" does not. To me, I hear or read "Americans" and think of loud, pushy people who are insensitive to international customs. (I'm well aware that not all people in the US fit this image!) I expect that many people in the US have a rather more positive image when they hear or read the term. Whatever image comes to mind, I think that the fact that the term does convey an image or subtext to readers (I think my English teachers called this "connotations of words") contributes to it being a biased term. Using it doesn't just describe people's citizenship but adds implicit information (which may be positive or negative depending on the reader) and this implicit information makes it not neutral. Ca2james (talk) 05:05, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The main upshot I see is that "U.S. citizen" is a legal status and "American" is a cultural status. A person who is one is almost always also the other, but a Dreamer (someone who was brought to the U.S. illegally as a child), for example, is often an American even though not a U.S. citizen. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:59, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree there's a meaningful distinction there, although the fundamental problem with the "American" usage remains. --Pi zero (talk) 04:33, 2 December 2017 (UTC)