Talk:Gertrude Mary Cox

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This article was the subject of an educational assignment in 2014 Q3. Further details were available on the "Education Program:California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo/ES 350 (Fall 2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki.

Restructuring and Citation Improvement[edit]

After having visited this page seeking information about Gertrude Cox, I noticed that there could be some improvements made to the organization and validation of sources on the page. Cox was a pioneer in experimental design for the field of statistics, which is perhaps one of the most important aspects of any statistical experiment as any mistakes can have a disastrous impact on the results of the experiment. I propose that more information be made available about this very important woman in history and that her Wikipedia page be expanded and improved so that those seeking information about her have adequate resources. In the following sections I will provide suggestions for improvement in two areas; information and structure.

Information[edit]

The first issue that I believe should be addressed is the lack of validated information. The top of the article itself calls for "more precise citations", pointing out the lack of citation from the start. There is some relevant information about her early life and her education which have credible inline citations, but these appear to be snippets of information that follow each other consecutively and give no information about what may have happened in between. I believe these sections need to be expanded so that this page may inspire others who went through the same things as her to explore statistics as a possible career path.

Additionally, in order to address a lack of information, I would suggest going into greater detail about what Cox contributed to experimental design. There are no inline citations about important advancements Cox made in statistics and there isn't any information given about the more specific discoveries or developments she may have made. Experimental design is a huge part of Statistics and I’m sure she didn’t discover every single part of it, therefore it would be beneficial to define exactly what she contributed. For more information about Gertrude Cox and her contributions to the field of statistics, I would suggest finding information from AMSTAT, the American Statistical Association's website which contains information about notable statisticians.

If current citations are validated and more sources are used to validate existing information, I believe the article will be much more credible and therefore useable.

Structure[edit]

The second issue that I would address is the lack of structure. If someone were to visit this page seeking a specific piece of information about Gertrude Cox, they would have to comb through the single section which has no apparent organization aside from perhaps being chronological. Splitting the existing article into defined sections would be very useful and would certainly reflect a greater appreciation for the subject, Gertrude Cox, and her work. I propose the following form of organization in order to make this article more user friendly:

Gertrude Mary Cox:

introduction with several sentences describing in vague details who Gertrude Cox is.
Contents

Biography:

early life, academics, etc.
emphasis on citations

Statistical Contributions:

General Contributions
Specific to Experimental Design

Publications

Experimental Design by William Gemmell Cochran and Gertrude Mary Cox
Other publications by Gertrude Cox

Conclusions[edit]

If the changes mentioned above are made, I’m confident that this Wikipedia page will be much easier to use and more informative for those seeking information about Gertrude Cox.

Ra13chelli (talk) 01:26, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]