Talk:U.S. heiress, designer, and author Gloria Vanderbilt dies at 95

Translation
Gloria Vanderbilt, 95, gestorben is a direct translation of this article for the German Wikinews. --Matthiasb (talk) 23:19, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Sigh. In theory, that shouldn't happen until we've published, but of course in theory the review of this wouldn't be taking so long to get to; I can't really fault them for acting sooner rather than later.  If anything significant about this changes during review, we should be sure word gets around, though. --Pi zero (talk) 23:23, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Review of revision 4485285 [Passed]
Wow, you sure put a lot of work into this, Pi zero. I'm not going to quibble with you on every single point, but I feel some defense is warranted. I appreciate the way you say "didn't find" instead of "that's not there."Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:54, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I am aware that you do not like the word "American" and think it is biased. Neither I nor our sources share that belief.  It is a perfectly normal word, used in all varieties of English.  The Wikinews page you cite makes no mention of it.
 * Regarding Vanderbilt's age upon her father's death, it's in the LA Times: "Her multimillionaire father died when she was 2."
 * "American" is just too broad and not the bet accurate information. Just like saying the Indian bullfrog is an animal is well and fine, but when talking in the field, it is Rana. 103.254.128.98 (talk) 19:57, 20 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Re "American": It doesn't matter whether the sources use the term that way; long consensus of senior Wikinews reviewers says this use of "American" is not okay with us.  It also doesn't matter for the current purpose whether you agree with us, either; imposing this usage in articles, while knowing it's contrary to Wikinews practice, makes review more difficult and unpleasant while corroding the infrastructure of the project; it amounts to project disruption.  Its impact is not at all limited to this particular issue; the more such errors clutter articles, the easier it is for a reviewer to be distracted and miss other things.  We often explain why we do things the way we do, but that's to help reporters make sense of it, not to petition them to consider opting-in to the project's standard practices.  Our standards aren't opt-in.
 * The LA Times says he died two years later. That's two years after he married her mother.  He died in 1925, and Gloria was born in 1924.  Her second birthday could not have happened yet when he died, which is what it means to say she was "two" in... well, certainly in the culture Gloria lived in and in the culture all three sources expect their audiences to belong to.  If the LA Times said she was two, it would be flat wrong about that; and we don't simply take as fact anything that a source says, we consider the likelihood of accuracy, and when things don't smell right we dig deeper.  We don't get excused for an error just because we repeated what some other news site said; we're expected to do better than our sources.  We certainly get blamed for reporting something wrong regardless of where we got it from.  It appears likely she was born in late February and he died in early September, which makes her just over eighteen months old when he died.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 20:55, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Please make these changes
1. Can the cause of death of a 95 year old woman be removed or at least simplified "she died of cancer". Stating which cancer does not shed any light on her life or accomplishments and is morbid and crude. A 95 year old dying an unnatural death, like falling from a window, might be worth stating, but inserting this information into the article describing her LIFE is unnecessary.

2. Same thing about her father, stating he died of liver cancer is totally gratuitous, crude and morbid. It adds nothing to our understanding of how she lived her life.

3. The quote from her son, Anderson Cooper should be removed. It is totally meaningless. In general family members will just say nice things about their recently deceased loved one. Again, this does not help us understand who she is in any way. If a colleague in the field commented on her life's work that would be one thing. A son saying "my mom was great" is really superfluous and basically useless.

Please make those changes to make the article better, right now it is very raggedy.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 152.130.7.195 (talk • contribs) 12:17, 1 July 2019‎ (UTC)


 * We do not make substantive changes to an article more than 24 hours after publication; a news article is a snapshot in time. Regarding specific issues raised:
 * A couple of the suggested changes would remove information from the article. This is a news article; its purpose is to inform.  It is neither respectful nor disrespectful: it's factual.  Deliberately omitting such details is not really suited to the en.wn venue.
 * As published, this article does not say she died of stomach cancer; it says she had stomach cancer at the time she died. During review, the former was changed to the latter exactly because the claim of causation could not be verified from the cited sources.  In the process, it was also noted that under the circumstances, if we reported on cause of death at all, we ought to attribute, so that we would not actually be reporting the cause as a fact, rather we would report that some particular party (such as a medical examiner) officially, or unofficially, said the cause was thus-and-so.  We can be very confident that someone said something without taking any position on whether they were right about it.
 * Although I agree quotes under such circumstances are of limited use, and we generally ought to avoid quote-farms,
 * family members do not necessarily say good things about the deceased &mdash;sometimes they may actually say bad things&mdash; and specifically what they do choose to say is not entirely information-free.
 * People other than members of the family are, in general, even more likely to say good things than are family. Anderson Cooper is a reasonable person to quote, keeping in mind that we make sure the reader understand who is saying those things, and that Anderson Cooper announced her death.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 14:00, 1 July 2019 (UTC)