Pam Hupp has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: May 15, 2021. (Reviewed version). |
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 04:39, 26 April 2021 (UTC)
OK, since this is the GAN with the longest tenure among current noms, and I had a GA promoted a few weeks back, I will dive into this one.
I will be printing it out, doing a light copyedit, and then hopefully within the week getting back here with my thoughts. Daniel Case (talk) 04:39, 26 April 2021 (UTC)
OK ... that's done.
Ah ... true crime. A subject I've written a fair amount about, including another Missouri murder case that got national attention. And another long and convoluted story around a murder that also got national attention. So I know what it's like to research and write these stories in an encyclopedic fashion. (I usually prefer the unsolved cases, though).
So what I liked about this article was that it did explain the story of two homicides, one of which got the subject convicted of murder, the other she's suspected in and an unsolved death that might be a third homicide by our gal. Across overlapping time frames, yet. I don't feel like anything major has been left out.
And the research ... many sources were used, and to good effect. I should particularly praise the citations as consistently and properly formatted, something I see too little of when reviewing GANs. There are no marks from my red pen on my printout in the footnotes.
The author's command of grammar, punctuation and spelling was also better than average. The article also read from beginning to end like it was pretty much written by the same person, another thing I like to see but don't always.
That said ...
My copy edit took about 4K out of the article. As a general rule I have found that if an article becomes more than 1K shorter after I go through it, that means there was fat in the prose. Even before I got to taking out four references that supported birth-year info for the victims and Russ Faria, which we don't need in the article, there was still about 2.6K ending up on the floor.
I knew this was going to happen as I went through it with the red pen. The author, as I noted, paid heed to the grammatical rules of the English language ... to a fault. The writing was excessively formal and wordy at many points. I found many examples of the passive voice, unnecessary IMO relative pronouns, redundant phrasing ("multiple different stores") and other sins that seem to result from overzealous high school English teachers living in fear of standardized-test scores.
Most particularly, there appeared to be little recognition of the concept of second reference and how the writer's awareness of it makes it easy for the reader. So many times the writer kept using people's full names, contrary to MOS:SURNAME and MOS:SAMESURNAME, and for that matter so many other style manuals, say, as well repeating titles they had already been introduced under. The article also kept reminding us that the police did all these things in the Faria investigation—well, I think that we can generally assume that readers understand that the sanitation department is not the agency that executes search warrants, interviews criminal suspects and administers polygraphs.
This is contrasted in some cases by the writer's short bouts of amnesia, where the text referred to "the judge in the Faria case" even though her name is used in the preceding and following grafs. Why? It felt like, as I often say in GARs, that no one sat down, printed the text out and read it through before the nomination, which would have likely caught a lot of these things. There were, I'm guessing, a lot of sentences added just one at a time, with little if any effort to look at what kind of forest the trees were making (which could probably explain some of these elephantine grafs that I broke up as well).
But beyond that, I don't know what possessed the writer to use 24-hour time, not commonly used in the US outside the military, law enforcement and many computer networks' timestamping, rather against MOS:TIME and most US-subject articles. I caught two Commonwealth spellings; perhaps the writer is/was not American. That might also explain the unusual legal terminology ("Depositioned" ... now that's one I haven't seen before).
I also had to mend the fragmented information in a couple of places. Betsy Faria was introduced and her terminal illness alluded to before it was discussed at the beginning of the next section. Barely have we learned that she was found stabbed to death, an apparent suicide, then we learn what the "murder weapon" was (Got a little ahead of ourselves there).
Also, speaking of the use of "murder", which I took out except where it refers to the charges against Russ Faria and the death of Gumpenberger (God, like Dave Barry said about the similar-sounding Samuel Gompers, you just want to say that name over and over) ... this is, I grant, not formalized but it's something I do, and which I should again take the time to explain why: "Murder" in the United States (unlike the UK) refers specifically to an offense that a defendant can be convicted of or plead guilty (or no contest) to. It thus should not be used so casually by responsible media to refer to any killing or homicide, even one a suspect has admitted or confessed to, in the absence of a conviction by a trier of fact or a guilty/no contest plea.
So for that reason I have edited this article so it refers to only Gumpenberger's death as a murder ... because Hupp was convicted of it. Betsy Faria's death led to a murder trial because that was the charge her husband faced and was convicted of. But after his acquittal at retrial its current status is "homicide" or "killing" until and unless Hupp or some other person is convicted or pleads to it.
All that notwithstanding, the copy edit, I think, has put the article in range to get promoted. I will be back, probably later today, with my punch list of what needs to be done for that to happen. Daniel Case (talk) 05:32, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
Well, so much for me and my promises ...
Sorry about the delay, maybe it will make things work out better. But here's my list of improvements that, if made, could probably get us to GA here, if done within the usual timeframe (Or at least started).
Per MOS:INTRO we can go to four grafs here. Let's do it and use them. Tell the story in a more relaxed fashion that's going to make people read the article.
I have done this with many articles I've expanded, so I have a lot of experience ... if you'd be more comfortable with me doing it, just ask.
If we put into the ((efn)) template and add a notes section with ((notelist)), it will appear to the reader who mouses (or, these days, fingertips) over the note, and that's a better way to explain what was wrong with the document. Again, I can do this if you'd like.
This isn't actually something that's a make-or-break for the article, but it is something that occurred to me while I was reading it. So, if there's an answer, we should include it.
If I had written this article, and I lived in the St. Louis area, I'd go get some easily available (I would imagine) shots of the Faria house and the apartment complex where Hupp's mother lives. I bet the addresses have been mentioned in some of the sources (and if not it would be easy to get the police files naming them). We have this sort of thing in other true-crime articles (cf. Ramona Moore homicide, where I was able to get a picture of the corner where her remains were found, as it's in the county I live in). And, if Chris Hayes is willing to pose for a free image, yes, we could have one of him too.
OK, that's what I have. You have the usual week to at least get started working on this. I think you can do it. Daniel Case (talk) 03:05, 8 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi Wikipedia People: why did you note “sic” after two uses of the word “it’s” in the section on the death of Pam Hupp’s mother (reference was an anonymous note)? From my understanding of English punctuation, “it’s” (meaning “it is”) was used correctly in that context. The mix-up between “it’s” and “its” (the latter being the possessive form) always sticks in my craw. Thanks for reading this. Sincerely, Lisa Bobbie Schreiber Hughes 2601:152:C80:9930:8878:A1DE:C8E5:1B9A (talk) 03:50, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DgTI9_jGPg&list=WL&index=2&t=309s 82.69.56.17 (talk) 22:00, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
Does every single mention of a dollar amount have to include a purchasing power adjustment? It's distracting because the differences are so negligible (e.g., $2,000,000 vs $2,094,000), and are they that important for context, given the reasons for the subject's notability? These civil judgements are less than five years old. Matuko (talk) 21:39, 26 May 2023 (UTC)