Talk:No Easy Answers

Did you know nomination

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: promoted by PrimalMustelid talk 02:13, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

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• ... that students at Columbine High School joked in 1998 their school would be "next" for a mass shooting, according to a book by a friend of the killers? Source: Brown, Brooks; Merritt, Rob (2002). "Suburban Life". No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine. New York, New York: Lantern Books. pp. 97–98. ISBN 978-1-59056-031-0.
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Zhu Cilang

Moved to mainspace by Vaticidalprophet (talk). Self-nominated at 11:58, 16 October 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/No Easy Answers; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

• The article fails the WP:DYKNEW criterion, because it was created more than seven days ago on 14 September 2023 and not expanded fivefold in the last seven days before this DYK nomination (or otherwise eligible). – Editør (talk)

  I missed that the article was moved from the Draft namespace on 16 October 2023, which means that the article is eligible, I will continue my review of this nomination and post it here soon. – Editør (talk) 11:57, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

• The boldlinked article is new enough and long enough. I believe that the lead section of the boldlinked article is repetitive and goes into too much detail, I think that it could be reduced to two or three paragraphs, so this should probably be improved first, but otherwise the article has no apparent major issues. The hook is cited and supported by the source. And the QPQ has been done. I propose ALT1 with a different wording of the hook, to include an explicit reference to the massacre to better explain the context and significance of the hook and to include the title of the book that this nomination is about. – Editør (talk) 13:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
  • ALT1: ... that a year before the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, students at Columbine High School joked that their school would be next for a mass shooting according to the book No Easy Answers?
    • Thanks for the review. I'll trim the lead a little, though I don't see it going to 2-3 paragraphs -- there's four disparate things to cover here -- and at DYK level this isn't an eligibility issue anyway. (I agree it's a bit overlong, though, so I'm doing so nonetheless.) I was intentionally avoiding the book title as the bold link, because the fact Brown was specifically Harris and Klebold's friend is the big claim here and the thing worth bolding. (Having promoted a few hundred DYK hooks, I'm confident a hook that didn't bold that part would redirect most views to the Columbine massacre rather than to the bold article.) How do you feel about...
      • ALT2: ... that a year before the Columbine High School massacre, students at the school joked that they would be "next" for a mass shooting, according to a book by a friend of the killers?
    • I think this seems like a decent compromise. Vaticidalprophet 17:47, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Or even, while we're here...

• ALT3: ... that according to a book by a friend of the Columbine shooters, students at Columbine High School would joke that their school was "next" for a mass shooting?

Vaticidalprophet 17:48, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

The word 'next' doesn't require quotation marks in the hook, since you're paraphrasing and it doesn't require emphasis. I think you shouldn't assume that the reader is familiar with the Columbine High School massacre, so the connections between the different elements of the hook (like students, school, massacre, and book) should be made explicit. What about:

• ALT4: ... that according to the book No Easy Answers, students at Columbine High School joked about a mass shooting at their school a year before the massacre happened there?

But I also see your point about the book and clicking on the link. Can you come up with an entirely different hook that puts the book front and center? – Editør (talk) 19:31, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Vati asked me to chime in here, although he doesn't know what I'm going to say as I write this. The lead of Columbine High School massacre says that it's most commonly referred to as "Columbine", so I think we're good on that front – plus, a short hook with the boldlink close to the front is best. I think ALT3 is the best we've got so far – the book title doesn't really add that much to the hook, and if we add it, we have to add the context in separately. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 02:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I asked Leek for a neutral third option because I wasn't sure where this was going/how best to resolve it. Thanks for both your thoughts so far. (I also think from the performance of the most recent hook to mention Columbine that it's a subject we can reasonably assume some pre-knowledge of.) Vaticidalprophet 02:12, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The use of "Columbine" for the massacre in the article on the massacre is unsourced, but it was not recently added so I see no immediate problem here. I'm passing the hook of ALT3 without the unnecessary quotation marks, which is ALT5. – Editør (talk) 08:17, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• ALT5: ... that according to a book by a friend of the Columbine shooters, students at Columbine High School would joke that their school was next for a mass shooting?

• Readding tick based on the review above for DYK bot. Z1720 (talk) 17:53, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:No Easy Answers/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 20:33, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Will take a look at this. On a quick scan, seems to be in good shape: an interesting topic and one where careful decisions are called for on our part. This is not an area I know much about, so I apologise in advance if my content points betray that. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:33, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

• Points below. We're clearly not far off the GA standards: at least individually, most of the comments are advisory rather than deal-breakers. Images check out and I've put in three spot-checks for TSI/CLOP. Nice work on the article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Resolved matters

the sheriff of Jefferson County, Colorado at the time of the shootings: this and similar constructions need a comma after Colorado. I admit to not loving the geocomma in compound sentences. I've revised this in a way which is hopefully less convoluted overall as well as permitting the geocomma (John Stone, then the sheriff of Jefferson County, Colorado, of...). I think all other uses already have it. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) including false accusations against him ... impact it had on his life.: accusations is plural, so we need they had. Done. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) Does queer-coded work as a description of people in real life, as opposed to fiction? Who's doing the coding, in that case? I think it does, but this might be dialectical or idiolectical. The coding here is by other classmates, and of students who themselves were frequently heterosexual (one story that didn't make it to the article, but existed in some drafts of it: Brown, who is straight, talked to a school authority about how he was being bullied by people who assumed he was gay, and that authority invited in his parents and told them they needed to "accept his lifestyle choice"), which is why I find it worthwhile to word it in a way that clarifies it's not exclusively of gay students. It's possible again there's a better way. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) I see - that's not quite what "coding" means in this context, since "coding" a character means giving them attributes audiences associate with queerness. Agreed that simply saying "gay students" is the wrong approach, for the reasons you've described. Perhaps change the link text (keeping the link itself) to something like "LGBT students and those labelled as such by their classmates"? It's a bit wordy, so if there's a briefer way of doing it, go for that. UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:50, 1 November 2023 (UTC) Redone as "perceived as gay". Vaticidalprophet 02:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC) He was the son of a real estate agent who had purchased a house in the Jefferson County Public Schools district due to its good reputation: Suggest clarifying he to which of Brown and Klebold we're talking about, and reworking for grammar: at the moment, it's not grammatically clear whether the father or the son bought the house, even though there's no real chance of confusion. Reworded. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) There are parts of the background section cited to No Easy Answers: shouldn't they therefore be part of the synopsis of the book rather than of its background? I think these constitute background, but the lines here are persistently very unclear (I eventually restructured the publication paragraph to be part of Background). In a lot of book-articles part of why e.g. the book was written is more naturally cited to the book than to anywhere else, as well as some things that are closer to statements of fact than of narrative. But...yes, it's tricky. Vaticidalprophet 02:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC) Who is "Wire service", listed as an author for ref 15? It's an article originally published by the Associated Press, without a byline in the newspaper it was reprinted in; I don't have access to the original print (the reprint is on Newspapers.com). A friend had independently made a Newspapers.com clipping and a citation based around it, so I've swapped that one in, which should be clearer. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) I count the "Synopsis" section at a bit over 1,000 words, including the quote box: that's quite a lot (the MoS advises 400-700 words for a feature-length film). I count it about ~900, but that's not counting the quotebox. Nonfiction synopses are a little tricky; I have both an FA and a GA with synopses longer than this one by a significant margin, but the former is a compilation, which makes an inherently stronger case for a long synopsis. The stricter reading of the 700 limit is mostly enforced on fiction, and even there I recall a discussion finding consensus to change it to 900 that was just never implemented. Even given that, though, there was a fair bit of "let's desperately try to find the shortest way to synopsize this" going on that may not have succeeded, so I'll review it and see if there's anything worth trimming. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) I've trimmed a little, though on net, I'm not sure it's actually shorter. Will keep looking. (It occurs to me that both my book FAs are >700 words for the synopsis, though the other one is still shorter than this, so I'm aiming for close to its length if possible.) Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC) In their junior year, Harris and Brown fell apart: grew apart, perhaps, but fell apart sounds altogether more painful. It was a pretty painful incident, to be fair. I don't think "grew apart" gets across the source -- it was fairly abrupt and vicious. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) Sounds like a good time to apply MOS:IDIOM and be literal: "their friendship abruptly ended after..."? UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:38, 27 October 2023 (UTC) Done. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC) responsible for creating Eric and Dylan: might be clearer to add their surnames in square brackets? Have done this. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC) Brown was a student at Columbine High School at the time of the shooting and a friend of the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The book recounts Brown's experiences growing up as close friends with Klebold: I'm a little confused here: was he friends with both but chose not to write about his friendship with Harris? No Easy Answers tells Brown's personal story of growing up with Klebold, befriending and falling out with Harris, and surviving the massacre: I'd suggest we need only one of this and the sentence that precedes it: both seem to be trying to summarise the book's plot. Both of these are trying to gesture towards the fact Brown and Klebold were very close from a young age, while Brown and Harris met later and had a more chaotic relationship. It's possible there's a better way to express this. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC) accusations of racism in the shooting of the one black victim Isaiah Shoels: comma after victim. Restructured instead as "Shoels, the one black victim", which I think flows a little better. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC) and "campaign[ed] to discredit" Brown's statements: again, whose quote? MOS:SCAREQUOTES may apply here. You can tell I'm paranoid about not using too-close-to-the-source wording :) I've reworded this a little, though I'm not sold that the new wording (attempted to discredit the legitimacy of) is an improvement. I think if we're going for attribute-all-quotes-in-text it's better to try paraphrase this, though. Vaticidalprophet 02:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC) Harris portrayed as more "shadowy" and "enigmatic".: as above. Paraphrased to "more mysterious figure". I'm not entirely sure this gets it across, but the general idea is that the book never really tried to explain or understand Harris in a way it does Klebold, in significant part because Brown was less close to him. Vaticidalprophet 02:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC) No Easy Answers was co-written by Brown and Rob Merritt, then the editor of Marshalltown, Iowa's local newspaper. Merritt, who focused on education-related reporting, met Brown online after becoming "fascinated" with the Columbine shooting.: this would seem better in Background than in Publication. It was originally in Background, but moved down while working (I find there's some disagreement between different reviewers about what should go in Background and what in Publication, so it's possible these things are too subjective to make a hard call about). I found that if I had it in Background I wanted to reproduce that context in full in Publication, and I suspected this might be doubling up a little too far. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC) I assume John Green the reviewer isn't John Green the novelist? I assume, but I'm not sure! It doesn't read like him, but it wouldn't be completely out of character. There's a pre-existing hidden comment to this effect. Vaticidalprophet 01:04, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Nit-picks

A few bits of the article read as slightly verbose, which isn't a problem for GA but might be worth a look over.

• No Easy Answers was co-written by Brown and Rob Merritt, then the editor of Marshalltown, Iowa's local newspaper: the first part of this was already stated at the beginning of the lead, and the second could be worked into there. Suggest "a local newspaper in Marshalltown, Iowa", for this and the similar case later on: on first read I thought we were talking about an Iowa newspaper called Marshalltown.
• Columbine impacted policy around ... anti-bullying policy: seems like something's awry here.
  • Yeah, that part went through a few revisions, and I don't much like any of them. I'll keep playing around with it. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• He juxtaposes their reactions to bullying; though Brown rebelled openly against his parents and classmates, Klebold reportedly bottled up his emotions: I think we mean contrasts (highlights as different) rather than juxtaposes (places next to each other) here.
• What's the logic behind citing individual chapters of the source book? If a book only has one set of authors, we usually just reference the whole thing and use page numbers.
  • I generally prefer to cite books by chapter as well as page number even for non-collections, because epubs lack page numbers and readers working off of them are better-placed to verify or read further by chapter than by page. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
    • OK, but surely that's one for the loc= parameter, rather than making extra citations? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:05, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Brown juxtaposes this with the common focus on short-term warning signs: as above with juxtaposes: juxtaposition often indicates contrast, but the two aren't the same thing.
• Brown overviews his life following the shootings and efforts to understand it: it, grammatically, refers to "his life", but I think we mean them (the shootings).
  • It's sort of both. Will dwell on it, and probably reread this chapter. Vaticidalprophet 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
• The version of Columbine High School depicted in No Easy Answers is "nothing short of horrific",: who's being quoted here?
• aided and abetted: a bit of a MOS:CLICHE and, I suspect, not entirely what is meant.
  • Redone as "overlooked or participated in". Vaticidalprophet 02:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Evan Todd, a football player at Columbine: is his sport relevant here? I worry that we're pushing an easy narrative, given how stereotypical his comments are, but it's perfectly possible to be athletic and decent (and, vice-versa, unathletic and bigoted).
  • Sources tend to focus on him being a football player (probably more than I'd have focused), so I think it's due to mention. Vaticidalprophet 01:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
    • Hm; there's certainly a WP:DUEWEIGHT argument there, but we also don't have to reproduce bias or simply lazy thinking because our sources do it. To use an extreme analogy, if we were writing on material where contemporary sources viewed it through (say) a racist or sexist lens, we wouldn't follow suit. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:05, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Note 19: italicise "Give a Boy a Gun"
• A number of critics: Several critics?
• at the time he was reportedly "struggling": attribution and scare quotes are concerns here.
• References are inconsistent as to whether to use title case or sentence case, though this is not really a problem for GA.
• A lot of the references are general rather than to specific pages: consider the RP template to give greater precision. Again, not an issue for GA.
• Images check: Columbine photograph is licensed and the book cover has an appropriate FUR.
  • UndercoverClassicist, I think most of this should be handled now. (I'll get to the title-casing two minutes before the FAC :) ) I have admittedly-minority positions on sfn (I've seen experienced editors edit-war over moving sfn'ed cites to further reading, having mistakenly thought they "weren't references", and am thus cautious about whether they're actually understood by readers). Changes that aren't ref-focused have almost all been implemented. I think the Todd mention remains due -- discussions of the social environment at Columbine do talk a lot about the role of school sports. It looks more visible to me, given how often he's defined by that characteristic and how much its broader context comes up, to omit mention than to include it. Vaticidalprophet 19:10, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Spot checks

Could I please have the quotation from the source to support the following:

• Brown and Harris became friends in their first year of high school, but their relationship was more chaotic; a temporary falling-out led to Harris making death threats towards Brown and his family. They repaired their friendship a short time before the shootings. (note 15)
  • The newspapers.com clipping has since been added. Relevant sections: [...] said Brown, who befriended Harris when they were freshmen at Columbine. When Harris and Brown feuded over rides to school, Harris posted a death threat against Brown and others on the internet [...] Because both boys wanted to be friends with Klebold, they made up shortly before the assault. Looking back over this one, I've removed "and his family", which was from the book itself and mixed up with that one -- sorry! Vaticidalprophet 01:15, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Happy here. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:43, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

• Violence prevention researcher Paul M. Kingery argued in Youth Today that Brown's narrative failed to address the role of politics in mass violence, believing that underfunding of social services, inaccurate monitoring of school violence, and a lack of recognition of students' rights to due process played underrecognized roles (note 35)
  • Behind this smoke screen, school administrators underreport the number of firearms confiscated by as much as 100 percent and have done little to make schools safer [...] Other effective approaches include mediation, recognizing due process rights, more accurate monitoring of and reporting on school violence, and more adults at school [...] Brown and Merritt concentrate on Brown's singular story, as they must. But an account of troubled individuals is only part of the story of the school safety problem. Politics is another part [...] At the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Mental Health in the Schools, in Maryland and California, have been comparatively more effective, but they are underfunded. Vaticidalprophet 01:15, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  Almost there: I'm not sure I'm actually seeing the point that underfunded social services caused this particular shooting - he says that mental health support can be effective in improving "school safety", but that it's generally underfunded: there's a few more logical steps between that and "more money for mental health care could have prevented the Columbine shooting". More generally, this seems to be talking about the present day, rather than just before Columbine, unless there's some context that changes that? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:42, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  I've tweaked this one a little bit to remove that clause. I think the review supports that, but it jumps between quite a few ideas rapidly and arguably I could've ended up with a way longer list, so trying to keep it compressed is the better option. I've clarified the prelude as "full explanation for why school shootings occurred" as a whole -- reviewers tend to jump around a bit as to whether they're talking about Columbine, the political response to Columbine, or a generalized "concept of school shootings", and to a real degree all three of those occupy the same place in the cultural consciousness, so trying to read any writing about Columbine instills this problem. (The review is from 2003, so the contemporary-period being looked at is that of Columbine still being the deadliest school shooting and of policies that were immediate responses to it still percolating through.) Vaticidalprophet 06:01, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• No Easy Answers was one of the first books to analyze Columbine, later the subject of thousands of works (note 36)
  • Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris's and Klebold's, published one of the early books claiming to present the true story of Columbine: No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine [...] The public's need for answers to the many unresolved social and spiritual questions raised by the tragedy proved to be profitable for many U.S. publishers. Amazon.com currently lists nearly two thousand titles related to the "Columbine school shooting." Vaticidalprophet 01:15, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  Happy here: could quibble whether "one of the early" and "one of the first" are quite the same, but I'm going with "close enough" in this case. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:43, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.