Talk:Linda Greenhouse

Multiple problems.

Again, there is no obvious reason that there is more than a paragraph or two that belongs in an integrated article about media coverage about Bush 43 administration policy coverage.

Note that 350px is an inappropriate size for an image not truly needing fine detail.

The lengthy quotes in footnotes are inappropriate. If the quote is appropriate, or preferably a paraphrase of it, it belongs in the main article, rather than forcing the reader to have to click every citation to see if it does, or does not, add more than bibliographic data.

Yes. Put quotes in the text. I'd often prefer an actual quote to a paraphrase, less chance of unannounced writer bias slipping in. However, CZ:Article_Mechanics#Quotations says "Quotations should not be used to “make an argument”; an argument is made by logic and reason, not by authority, and if a quote is used to support an argument by showing that important people agree with the point, then this is a misuse." Some of the quotes here look dubious to me by that citerion. Sandy Harris 08:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

There were few links to the article, so it would be unlikely to be found by a reader.

Recommend merging substance into general coverage and deleting this article. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:26, 31 October 2008 (UTC) Military Workgroup Editor.

Policy and usability discussion -- move to temporary page?

Most of my wiki experience is on the travel guide site Wikitravel. Policy there is to have articles only for destinations ("can you sleep there") not attractions (museums, etc.) or facilities (hotels, etc.). However, any name a user is likely to search for is created as a redirect. For example, a "Taj Mahal" article exists but it is a link to "Agra", the city where the Taj is located. This both makes it easier for users to find things within the wiki and makes our pages more likely to be found by search engines.

I would say deleting this article should be considered out of the question. There should absolutely be a Greenhouse article since people may well search on her name. The only question is whether that article has text or is a redirect into some broader article. I don't know the area well enough to have an opinion on that. Sandy Harris 03:38, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Would you accept a friendly amendment that agreeing that a topic -- with appropriate editing -- should not be deleted -- but how it is stored and retrieved in terms of articles is open to guidance? Sandy, I especially want your perspectives here, because you have made me think a great deal about accomodating top-down and bottom-up styles in a set of articles. It may be that you and George have more writing style in common, of building up from seemingly separate pieces, than I do so -- although, while this isn't the time for detail, I actually do use some bottom-up methods for organizing my own thoughts, but, by the time I actually begin to post articles, those sandbox/offline methods let me get to more of a top-down approach. I'm delighted to share them, and was just now thinking of somewhere to post them to avoid the forum access problem -- you aren't the only one with it, and we have the added problem that if there is a good search mechanism for the forums, I haven't found it.

For a search engine to find "Linda Greenhouse", there doesn't need to be an article with that title. If that string is in an article called extrajudicial detention and journalism, the data are not lost. For now, extrajudicial detention and journalism/Related Articles has been started.

I mention the forums because there are several active discussions that directly bear on ways to make groups of articles easier to navigate, extend, and edit. Without rehashing the details, let it simply be said that there may be some problems with the specific #REDIRECT construct that may eventually be better solved with some other techniques where the people working on the problem are beginning to be able to categorize the problems, although not necessarily the shape of the final or even a well-improvised interim solution.

Just as one conceptual point, I think there's a certain consensus among people working on the CZ — not sure what to call it -- schema? metastructure? Something more general that what we now call metadata — that we have a goal in which search engines can have a role, but the main navigation technique, we hope, will be somewhat more empowering by making the process less random.

Without trying to get into the merits of this specific article, I don't disagreee that that there should be coverage of Linda Greenhouse, Eugene Fidell, and other people; coverage that absolutely would be found by a search engine. There are other questions, which to some extent get into the internal conceptual and technical organization of CZ, which is not always the same as WP, may have nothing at all to do with the merits of a specific topic. There is an unnamed function -- not exactly Editor, not exactly Developer, but sharing both -- that strongly believe their are some usability issues here. In this case, there are separate issue of emphasis, style and notability.

I really want to get this discussion into an article page where it is not tied to specific mainspace articles, but probably something like CZ: space; that will get around your Forums access problem and some of the inherent problems of the Forum software (i.e., no good search capability). Earlier this morning, I was considering a VERY TEMPORARY userspace page to concentrate on the meta-issues including, for example, a consensus on when it is best to have separate, merged, or at least explicitly linked articles. There really is a lot of active thought being given to this problem, and no ideal solution has yet emerged; there are bound to be prototypes. Driving this is a desire, in large part, to make CZ more navigable and more verifiable, without going too far in the "expert-controlled" rather than "expert-guided" direction. Howard C. Berkowitz 11:33, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Is CZ_Talk:Article_Mechanics the right place? Or where?

I was objecting to your "Recommend merging ... and deleting this article." She looks like an appropriate topic for an encyclopedia, and I want people who search on her name (either with a search engine or on the wiki) to find that topic. The methods I know are writing lots of little articles to cover all reasonable topics, writing overviews to tie it all together, wikilinking a lot, and adding redirects so searching on "Pekin" gets you "Beijing" et cetera. I'm certainly not wedded to those methods; anything else that works (including the CZ "related articles" stuff) is of interest.

I tend to the view that more-or-less all indexing methods have their place. A book needs table of contents, index and cross-references. If you can make the text searchable too, or provide a one-page index of only the key points, or colour-code the chapters, or come up with something else, so much the better. Users and their goals are all different; give them all the choices you can.

I've even written code to generate a permuted index from HTML headers [1]. Definitely not an ideal index, but some users loved it. I wonder if something similar might work here, based either on HTML headers or on definition lines.? Sandy Harris 12:28, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Just for background, CZ runs on the same base MediaWiki software that does The Other Place, and has limited technical staff that do some modifications. Chris Day is the one regular content contributor that actually has some implementation capability, principally in templates. There really isn't a page that discusses some of these issues; a good deal is in Forum discussions, but you'll find pieces scattered on talk pages all over CZ. Given some extremely active discussions and more and more of a need for some enhancements, I suspect there may well be a page in the very near future. Given that, I don't want to get into too much discussion on a specific article talk page. Temporarily, I've set up http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Howard_C._Berkowitz/CZusability, which I hope to move to some other space.

Redirects certainly are useful, but they also have problems. They will feature in any eventual plan, but they may be more of a temporary patch or workaround (consider me screaming about case sensitivity in article names, and the inability to search on specific strings in the CZ search engine).

Now, without getting into a lot of detail, it is, with consultation/checks & balances, quite within the authority of an Editor to recommend deletion or merging of an article. One of the checks is that a Constable must actually do the deletion, and any wise editor proposing such a drastic action will have consulted with other experts (topic and functional), and what we hope to be increasingly more public governance bodies. In many cases, while I don't have the explicit approval of the Constabulary or Editor-in-Chief or other key individuals, I have consulted and advised of my plans to take an action; I'm not unique in doing so.

Why is this on the talk page

This article should be moved back onto the main page. Linda is not defined by, nor is her future life limited to, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Clearly any Pulitzer-winning journalist with a 40 year career deserves their own page. This article clearly needs expansion, but putting it on the talk page almost guarantees that no one will spruce it up. Howard, while it is very nice to blend aspects of individual articles into larger articles, the individual pieces should still stand alone. Just my 2 cents! David E. Volk 21:24, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

As the article was written, it doesn't stand alone. This was repeatedly mentioned to the author, who appeared to have no other interest.

My two cents' reply is that the original author had been creating a series of articles, unlinked to one another and to any more general articles, which only would be found by search engines. See http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Howard_C._Berkowitz/Strong_Articles for what I consider needed to have a useful set of articles. Further, these articles have been written only with respect to Guantanamo, which I believe creates an impression of non-neutrality and indignity about very narrowly defined Bush administration actions, even to the exclusion of broader actions in Iraq itself. If we are to differentiate ourselves from the Other Place, there simply cannot be strings of articles, in a "walled garden", dealing with only one aspect of a large problem. If there is no willingness to discuss Greenwood in other than the context of Guantanamo Bay, I don't think there's a significant article here. If someone wants to generalize the article, and talk about her career, and link it to journalism, that would be great.

I would rather see no article at all, in the interest of the integrity of CZ, than to have an article dealing purely with the Guantanamo aspect. Under those circumstances, I would be inclined to recommend deletion, unless someone is willing to have a broader Linda Greenwood article. Indeed, I would rather see several articles deleted when they give the strong indication that Guantanamo is the only relevant thing in the political universe. For the record, I happen to think the Guantanamo operation is a stain on the U.S., but there are many more substantial issues, and I don't want CZ to seem, to a random reader, to be the venue by which one individual expresses indignation. I, personally, am not going to follow up after every Guantanamo-focused article and generalize it to what it should have been in the first place. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:15, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't realy care very much what the current author does or does not want to do, as long as the current text is factual. Many very good articles start out as stubs like this that was eventually added to by other authors. So, if it is a factual stub, then there is no legit reason to remove it. David E. Volk 22:35, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Howard, I agree with David on this -- you're simply wrong, for the reasons that he gives. Moreover *any* Pulitzer Prize winner is, by definition, notable enough to have an article about him/her. If it makes you feel better, however, I will track down what her Pulitzer was for and will put that info in the article. Hayford Peirce 22:49, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Hayford, if you will fill out the article, I am delighted. For me, however, the point of having a large number of stubs, all dealing only with aspects of the same issue is a deal-breaker for me. If others fill them in, great. If that doesn't happen in a reasonable amount of time, however, I deeply believe something is very wrong and we are encouraging non-neutral flogging of views. Sorry, I just am not very flexible on that belief. I am utterly burned out on articles that have little to add besides a sense of moral indignation.

I don't really think it's a good idea to have stubs appear, factual on one point only, in the context of a large number of other stubs that focus only on that one point. Had there been a stub, or even a few, I wouldn't have the same concern about the appearance of bias. When, however, no one has extended the article beyond that stub in a year or so, I have little confidence anyone cares enough to do so.

Again, let me emphasize: it's the totality that bothers me. Individual stubs are fine. Bombardments create, to me, an impression of tolerating bias, of which I won't be part. If we had enough general activity that I felt comfortable that random other authors would eventually fill out the stubs, I wouldn't be concerned, but we don't. A key way that we differentiate ourselves, I believe, is that we could go by an "oil drop" sort of model, where various stubs get filled in, connected, and built into a solid framework. If that doesn't happen in months, I'm not going to assume that it's going to happen.

A stub that deals with only one aspect of a complex situation is factual only in a narrow sense, and, if it doesn't flesh out in a reasonable time, it gives too much of a sense of not being factual. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:54, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Howard, it is *clearly* longer than a stub. It may upset your sense of Overall Order as to What CZ Is Supposed To Be, but it is a clear case of a stand-alone article. I have put in the Pulitzer info -- others can put in other info. I understand your objections to the article, along with all the other articles that George Swan wrote (why not put a name to it), but Larry has been made aware of this over the months and he has not given EinC orders to do what you did to this article. So I think we can take it as a given that this article should be allowed to remain here as it is. Hayford Peirce 23:01, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Covering the Supreme Court's rulings on Guantanamo captives

Greenhouse's husband, Eugene R. Fidell, is also a lawyer -- a specialist in military law. He has been a critic of the Bush Presidency's policy on captives taken in the war on terror.

On January 20, 2008 Clark Hoyt, of the New York Times described Fidell holding back in participating in preparing a brief submitted to the Supreme Court on behalf of National Institute of Military Justice and the Bar Association of the District of Columbia because of the concern it would be considered a conflict of interest, due to his wife covering the case.

On January 22, 2008 Slate magazine, published an article written by Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick, criticizing the New York Times for failing to show more support for their employee.

According to Bazelon and Lithwick the main critic of Greenhouse covering stories where her husband Fidell has a role is M. Edward Whelan III of the National Review. They wrote:

Unable to point to any actual bias, Whelan resorts to the petulant claim that the effect of Fidell's involvement in the detainee cases "would be impossible to separate … from the broader political bias that pervades so much of Greenhouse's reporting."

Resignation

Greenhouse and the New York Times negotiated a buyout and voluntary resignation in late February 2008. The New York Times had announced a plan to trim 100 staff members, and had asked staff to consider volunteering for a buyout.