Template:Did you know nominations/Belva Davis

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The following discussion 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 BlueMoonset (talk) 06:15, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Belva Davis[edit]

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Created/expanded by Muboshgu (talk). Self nom at 16:11, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

  • Comment: The source for the first hook is her 2010 autobiography as indicated by the Chronicle. If that hook is used, it should be made clear that it is her claim, particularly as the hook is inflammatory. Is there any source other than her own account? Anne (talk) 20:10, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
  • Ms. Davis appears to be beyond reproach. I haven't seen a word of criticism about her, so I personally have no problem accepting her first-hand account. I will look to see if there are any non-primary sources. In the meantime, I found this Sacramento Bee article which more fully details Ms. Davis' account of what happened.[1] – Muboshgu (talk) 00:45, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm a little uncomfortable as the incident is entirely sourced to her autobiography. The second ref says that she was there as a spectator in the gallery and got turned on by the convention participants. I think I'd want another source. The second hook is better but is sourced to almost a throw away line in a local paper, the Contra Costa Times. Do we have better sources than this? Secretlondon (talk) 16:06, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, this isn't sourced to her autobiography, these are highly reliable secondary sources running with her story, including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Sacramento Bee, which are cited in the article, and a number of other secondary sources that are out there and aren't in the article. I can't believe they would run with that if it was unreliable. She was chased out with a Louis Freeman, her news director, and while I can't find him confirming the story, I don't see him refuting it either. In fact, nobody has refuted her telling of the story. As far as the Contra Costa Times, there's nothing wrong with local coverage that I'm aware of. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:24, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I see several issues here. Neither the proposed hooks nor the article do the topic justice, IMO. When I read the first hook, I felt a need to look at the article because the hook wording was hard to parse, but it also occurred to me that Cow Palace would get more hits than the target article -- because the name looks quaint to those who haven't heard of this venue. After reading the sources cited in the article, I'm impressed with how insubstantial the Wikipedia article is. The article presents the Cow Palace incident as if it was one of the major life events in Davis' biography, but my reading of the sources leads me to think that it is better understood as a memorable incident that provides a graphic illustration of the animosity that the Belva Davis encountered in her early career as a black woman in journalism. The article doesn't provide that context, though. It tells more about her family and her difficulties in early life than about the fact that she has had a successful career as a TV and radio journalist. It's appropriate for the bio to point out that she was the first member of her family to receive a high school diploma, etc., but she's not notable for those things.
Expand the article to include more information about her career. Be sure not to omit detail that may not be obvious to readers, such as what city the radio station KSAN was located in. Also, work on wording to avoid close paraphrasing -- I find too many similarities between the article wording and the wording in the sources. (Just one example: Source says "In 1966, KPIX hired Davis as a reporter, making her the first black female TV journalist on the West Coast" and article says "KPIX-TV hired her in 1966, making her the first female African American television journalist on the west coast" --that's too close.)
As for the hook fact about the Cow Palace, I think it would be valid to describe this (in the article and in the hook) as an incident she recalls from her early career. That gets away from the issue of whether her account is factually accurate. However, it's not clear to me from the sources whether she was at the convention as a reporter. I get the impression that she and her colleague were reporting the proceedings for a local black radio station, but they weren't there as credentialed journalists. With these considerations in mind, I think an acceptable hook could read something like the following:
I don't understand why you're telling me to expand the article. Comments about the breadth of the article sound fair for a GA review, but beyond the scope of DYK. DYK only requires a new article be 1500 characters within 5 days. This is a start-class article, and I don't think any expansion is necessary for it to be promoted by DYK.
If there is copyvio because I accidentally paraphrased text too closely, that needs to be taken care of. I'll look into that. The ALT2 hook clears up the issue of her being the source of the claim, and I agree that linking to the Cow Palace might detract from Davis' article. – Muboshgu (talk) 22:33, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
The article is sufficient in overall length, but I don't find it sufficient in its coverage of the topic to meet the threshold for DYK. Most of the article is about her early life, her family, the challenges she faced early in her career, her community involvement, and her retirement, but it barely mentions her successful career, which is the aspect of her life for which she is notable. This is comparable an article on a successful professional baseball player that goes to great length about his family's moves during preschool years, his Little League experience, the sports other than baseball that he played as a teenager, his early difficulties in the minors, the auto dealership he ran in retirement, and his wife and kids, while devoting only two bare-bones sentences to his entire MLB career. It looks to me as if the sources have more information about her work and influence -- was there a reason you didn't want to say more in the article? --Orlady (talk) 06:16, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
The article was as it was for a few reasons: (1) I haven't written articles on journalists before, so I'm not that clear on what merits including. I added a list of the stories she covered, but my initial thought was that many journalists covered these stories, so why mention her? Other than that, I don't know what else to add. (2) Time is a precious resource for me. I promoted a lot of content in 2012 but I'm very busy at work now so I don't have any GA, FA, or FL nominations, and only this and two other DYK noms. I have a little time right now, so I just expanded on her career a little because I want to see this promoted already. (3) I don't understand your criticism of this bio being too heavily weighted for her early life, considering that her upbringing is a big part of the bio, certainly more than the "preschool years, his Little League experience" of an MLB player. (4) There is a DYK regulation that says a reviewer can reject a >1500 character article if they deem it too short, but that's not what you're saying. Before the edit I just made, the article was at 3136 characters, so double the minimum threshold. I don't agree with your interpretation of the DYK rules to say something about "sufficient coverage" of the subject. That sounds more like an AfD argument based on GNG or a GAR comment to me. Anyway, I hope that I've added enough new content with that edit to satisfy you regarding DYK requirements. I have no intention of taking this to GAN unless I can expand on it considerably. – Muboshgu (talk) 20:09, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
I have to sympathize with the challenges you encountered in writing a bio for a person whose career (like most careers) can't be summed up through statistics and objective facts. I (and probably many of us) have struggled with that type of challenge. One strategy that I discovered after several less-than-ideal efforts at bios is to include short quotations or paraphrases of published statements about the article subject. In this article, for example, instead of saying that Bill Cosby wrote the foreword to her autobiography (an objective fact that left me asking "so what?"), the article could quote what Cosby said about her. The sources include several other statements (both statements by the authors and quotations from others) that testify to the significance of her career.
Prose length isn't the only measure of the adequacy of an article's length. I guess the reason why I found this article, which is a biography of a living person, to be inadequate was that it contains many minor and sometimes unflattering details (11 people in the 2-bedroom apartment when she was 8 years old, other details of her impoverished childhood, has been spat upon, was chased out of the Republican Convention, two marriages, etc.), but it failed to give me a clear idea of what Davis accomplished that causes her to be notable.
I guess that the alteration of "KPIX-TV hired her in 1966, making her the first female African American television journalist on the west coast" to become "KPIX-TV hired her in 1966. She became the first female African American television journalist on the west coast." was supposed to eliminate copyvio, but unfortunately it also stripped out a critical element of the meaning. There are other instances of too-close paraphrasing still, such as "she was spit on while covering a civil rights march in Georgia" (source) vs. "she was also spit upon while covering a Civil Rights march in Georgia" (article). A thorough scrub is needed here. --Orlady (talk) 15:45, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm back from my vacation now, so I'll give it a close look for any close paraphrasing. As far as the other comments, they would certainly help strengthen the article, but again seem to be above and beyond the requirements for DYK. – Muboshgu (talk) 02:35, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Duplication detector reports ([2], [3], [4], [5]) should show this article to be clean. The Cosby quote certainly improves the article a bit, as does the added paragraph "Davis was highly regarded for her coverage of politics and issues of race and gender.[3] Rita Williams, a reporter for KTVU, said "Davis was highly regarded for her coverage of politics and issues of race and gender,[3] as well as her calm demeanor. Rita Williams, a reporter for KTVU, said "Belva knew instinctively how to keep everyone in check. Amid all these prima donnas, she had so much class, so much presence, so much intuition. Belva has always been the grande dame."[1]" I hope this is sufficient now. – Muboshgu (talk) 22:06, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Also, part of the reason I focused on her upbringing, to the point where it began to overshadow her career, is summed up by the quote I just added. Her upbringing built character. It was clear in my head but not on the wiki. – Muboshgu (talk) 22:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
  • I like what I see! Good to go. ALT2, please. --Orlady (talk) 22:53, 4 January 2013 (UTC) Image license is OK, but for DYK it could be cropped. --Orlady (talk) 22:57, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
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