Talk:Betty Roberts

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Betty Roberts/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

I am reviewing this article. Diderot's dreams (talk) 20:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

GA Review Status: On Hold

The article has much useful basic information about the subject. The article is factually accurate, verifiable, and stable. Spelling, grammar, etc. are correct. But Betty Roberts is too much about facts, titles, and dates and not enough substance, which I think exists for this person. Here are questions I am wondering about:

• History of the Supreme Court and her time on it. What signifcant things happened and where was she on these issues? Why did she resign from the Oregon Supreme court after only 4 years at age 63? This is a major breadth issue.

• Same thing for the Appellate Court, and other work.

• A picture of the subject would really be great for a biography. If it absolutely can't be found, then it can be overlooked for GA.

• About her work as a mediator: private, public, types of disputes, for which company, more info please on what she's doing now. Is it full time or is she semi-retired? If this isn't available, that's ok.

• Overall, I have a feeling she was a little controversial. Is this true? Bearing BLP policy in mind, can we add information on this?

The article also has a habit of repeated sentence structure and subject. Two examples:

During this time she also taught high school and successfully ran for a seat in Oregon's House of Representatives.[2] Also at this time she was married to Frank L. Roberts for four years.

...College from 1967 to 1976.[3][5] She and Bill Rice divorced in 1959.[6] In 1960, she became a member of the Lynch Elementary School District school board, remaining until 1966.[3] this sentence would be better worded as "During this time Roberts served on the ...".

There are some issues with the Introduction. Senior judge is not really much of a job, not worthy of mention in the Intro. Also is she still a politician? If not then reword. More of her personal life and other job stuff belongs in her introduction. For example she was married 3 times, and had 4 kids. And there is no mention of her length of time on the Supreme Court. All in all, this is a little POV towards her, as well as not summarizing quite enough.

Lastly, this is a clunker, Please reword:

Roberts was the first woman on that court, or any appellate court in Oregon, and then won election to a full six-year term in 1978, but resigned on February 8, 1982.[14][15] She resigned when she was appointed by Governor Victor G. Atiyeh to the Oregon Supreme Court to replace the retiring Thomas Tongue.

I'll put the article on hold for 7 days, and come back in a few days to see how things are coming along. If you have any questions, just ask them below. Diderot's dreams (talk) 22:43, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I will get to work on the fixes and see what can be found. But with your "breadth" issue, I disagree to a certain extent. To me, the GA criteria require that it is covered that she was on the courts and when, especially taken into account footnote 3. Then throw in the FA/GA differences, and going into those details is more of a comprehensive approach (I prefer the term depth personally as it better fits with the broad of GA), which is FA. So as to major happenings, I think that falls outside of that. As to an image, there are no free images, so until she dies we are stuck without a fair use one. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

You don't need to do all of the content additions I'm talking about, especially to exaustion. But some information on her Oregon Supreme Court days is needed for breadth, as well as at least a sentence about why she left, and some details of her controversiality beyond being the first woman, although that may be related (unless she wasn't controversial, then comment of that instead). I think these things can be gotten from archives of the Oregon newspapers or her autobiography, if you can find the book. Diderot's dreams (talk) 00:22, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

I think I have addressed most of your structural concerns, but let me know. I have also expanded the coverage with what I could find. Unfortunately the online archives do not go far enough back to cover when she left the court, and her book is checked out at my main library. I will see if I can make it to the state library again to check her book. As to controversy, I don't think she was particularly controversial. The Equal Rights movement was well underway by the time she was appointed to the Court of Appeals, and Sandra Day O'Connor had already been appointed to SCOTUS before Roberts made it to the OSC. In fact the headline for the story covering her appointment to the Court of Appeals was simply "Appeals Court Adds Four". But saying she was uncontroversial would be OR as that is not discussed in any of the sources. It's all about her firsts and her awards. Aboutmovies (talk) 09:22, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

You've satisfied the breadth concern for her Supreme Court work very nicely, I don't feel it's not necessary for GA to add more about appellate or other work with the amount added for the Supreme Court. Also the article reads better. My concerns are still:

• The text still reads too much "On this date x happened. Then on this date y happened.", etc. I mean date in a general sense, even if it's just a year that's given. Trying some different wording can help. Also the "clunker" sentence transition pointed out before still needs to be fixed. You might just make it one sentence.

• Why did she resign after 4 years on the Supreme Court?

• My evaluation of "a little POV" was a little inaccurate, this needs to be corrected to pass GA. The article needs to address the concerns I mentioned in my initial comment on POV, and also check to be sure the other information is portrayed neutrally.

I feel it's only fair to hold the article for for 7 seven days from today, since things have been added to the review. Thanks! Diderot's dreams (talk) 23:43, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I'll see what I can find and try some re-wording. As to POV, I'm not sure I understand your concerns. If you mean that all the content seems to be positive, that is not necessarily a NPOV concern: "content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources". Here, the article represents Roberts based on all views published, period (significant or not), from RS. The fact that the coverage itself in the sources is generally positive (you can check them for yourself on those available online) means that we too have to in a way do so as well. We still let the facts speak for themselves (e.g. state she won such and such award and not say "Betty Roberts is the bestest person in the world because she won X award"), which helps prevent the bias, but the positive aspects reported in sources has to be included, otherwise that itself is a violation of NPOV. A violation here would be something along the lines of "Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court, obviously the best choice for the position based on her extensive background and the keen legal mind, and was the first woman appointed to that court. She showed her legal acumen as demonstrated by the many important awards she was bestowed with while on the bench and following her tenure." That is an NPOV problem, naming the awards is not. Now if negative aspects had been left out, then there is a problem, but here all negative items that have been published are in there (except anything in her book, if there is anything). For instance her losses in races for governor and Senate as well as her divorces. A perfect example of presenting it as neutrally as possible is the gay marriage bit. Things like presiding over the first gay marriage is going to be positive if you have one view of gay marriage and be a negative if you have a different view on the subject. Same with being the first woman on either court, the fact is listed, and it is left to the reader to add their own moral judgment on whether women should be treated equally. The fact that most people view this as a positive thing is not an NPOV issue.

Now, if this is in relation to the WP:LEAD, the lead should now be pretty good. People with 3 husbands and 4 kids are not notable for that, thus we generally do not add too much personal life details in the lead, as the focus is the more notable aspects of the subject. For instance, see Barack Obama, an FA article, where the kids are not mentioned in the lead or that he is a smoker. Aboutmovies (talk) 06:55, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

[outdent]One concern is the way a few things have been worded, avoiding stating how many marriages or number of years on the Supreme Court, both of which cloud some negative information. Second, my concern is there are negative or grey things that you haven't looked hard enough for or noticed. Look at 6th part of the oral history, and read about why she resigned from the Supreme Court. Not so positive, and an important part of her story. Also according to this source provided in the article,[1] she may very well not been the first to perform gay marriage in Oregon-- she may have been beaten to the punch and what was written is a mistatement. All these things need to be in the article, please.

The lead is fine now, thanks for making the changes. Since we mention marriages, we might as well mention the # of kids too, since it goes together. But it isn't required. Diderot's dreams (talk) 23:03, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

"what was written is a mistatement" Maybe some AGF is in order. The source says it is disputed and says some did the marriage outside the court. It doesn't say she didn't. What's more, if you do some research on it, you would find out that apparently unlike those reporters, other sources had the scoop on the special ceremony. That is the county in a special deal with a rights group hand picked the two couples that Roberts presided over before even announcing the decision to issue the marriage licenses. They then had them pre-fill out the forms and issued them their licenses before the doors of the county office opened and before anyone else could even get the license. So the fact that the reporters in the source in the article (one of two on the topic with the second one not questioning that Roberts was first which is why any question was not added to the article) you cite above saw people on the streets getting married without mentioning the special arrangement to ensure that the first set of couples were "noncontroversial" tends to suggest those reporters were unaware of the special arrangements. Thus their concern (buried at the end of the story) seems to be inaccurate.

With the other items, I'm sorry but I said I had been unable to locate why she had left the court and was trying to get a copy of her memoir. So its exclusion was only until I could find a source. So I'll add the info since there is now a source. But I'm rather uncertain how quitting the court at age 63 due in part to the travel everyday (I've been doing a slightly shorter stretch of the same commute for two years and am tired of it), in part due to the workload, and in part because the husband wanted to travel is some how negative? Couples make those types of decisions all the time, and I doubt (going by the fact that it was listed second, she kept the last name of her old husband, and she had her own career) Skelton forced her to quit if that is what you see is the negative. Is retiring at an age where you can start collecting Social Security (reduced at that age) really that much of a negative to you?

As to the amount of time on the court or how many marriages, you must equate the large number of one and the small number on the other as negatives. With a divorce rate of 50% and with people like Elizabeth Taylor with 8 marriages I hardly see how three means much of anything. Plus they are all listed so its not like the info is not there, including all three in the infobox (I would like to assume readers can count). Same with the number of years on the court, the info is there, the number of years were not totaled up (as with the number of years for most of her jobs), but the readers are free to. With years on the court, out of the roughly 100 justices that have served on the court, she would probably rank around 65th longest serving, so not as long as most, but well ahead of many others. Unlike SCOTUS, these judges tend to serve a lot shorter period (no lifetime appointment and mandatory retirement age).

In the end, I'll add the info on why she left and additional sources for the gay marriage, but perhaps we might get a second opinion on some of these issues? Aboutmovies (talk) 07:06, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Please let me be clear that I am not saying you or anyone else intentionally misrepresented the facts about Robert's gay marriage ceremonies. I'm just saying it was stated wrongly. At least according to the sources that were listed then, Roberts being the first to perform a gay marriage ceremony should have been stated with some doubt. (I'll check out the new sources). It is very easy to be less than impartial-- we all do it at times without realizing it. NPOV is harder to maintain with biographies, especially if they are mainly written by one person. Part of my task, of course, is to check for it.

I don't think it would be good for me to elaborate any further on the POV issue as I don't want to have an editorial content debate-- I'm just here to review. I won't be adding the things I'm talking about to the article if you don't.

So please make any changes you feel are appropriate in regards to any of the outstanding issues I've listed, POV or otherwise. If you feel you haven't elaborated enough about things you didn't agree with you can leave more comments here. In a few days I'll go over the article again, review what you've said, and make a final evaluation. There is an appeal process that I will detail if you wish to appeal my evaluation. Thanks! Diderot's dreams (talk) 02:51, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I have eleven GA bios alone (27 overall, plus 1 FA and a good chance for a second any day now) so writing from the neutral point of view is not that difficult when you've been around the Wiki for awhile (more than 40,000 edits for me, more than 1400 this month alone). I have also done about 15 GA reviews over the years, so I know what the process is and have been involved with GA for about 2 years. I also know about the review process, been there, done that before. So when I ask for a second opinion (another GA process) due to your recent involvement with GA and your overall low edit count (only indicating newness to the process and to Wikipedia in general), I would hope you would involve a second editor. I'm not saying that many of your points are not valid, and I have addressed those points. But I feel you have a bit of a misguided understanding of NPOV, which I once did as a newer editor. I used to think that NPOV meant to balance between good and bad points about a subject. But it is not a balance, it is to include what RS include, and if 14 sources say one thing and only one says the opposite, we generally go with what the 14 sources say and not even mention the 15th source. So if you have nothing but bad, only bad things go in; vice versa for positive. In the end, what is in the RS goes into the article as filtered for bias and corrected as needed for errors. Now it does (as I mentioned above) mean we word the positives and negatives neutrally so the reader can apply their own value judgments to determine if something is negative or positive to them (that is really the heart of NPOV), but we certainly do not go out of our way to emphasize the positives or negatives. And this is a Wikipedia entry, so yes, they tend to be more fact/date driven (this is one of Criticisms of Wikipedia) which is a direct result of the multitude of guidelines limiting how and what we can write. Adding our own commentary simply is not allowed. Now there is some room for expanding to make it less so, but overall the rules of Wikipedia require articles to be more fact/date driven. Its the nature of the beast. Otherwise, I have addressed everything in the article I think needs to be addressed, so nothing more will be done, so feel free to make your final decision. Aboutmovies (talk) 06:35, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Final GA Review Status

Based primarily on POV issues, I’m going to have to fail this article. Though the article is much improved in this regard, and the issues with breadth and prose are mostly resolved, there is still too much understating gray or negative points, emphasizing positive ones, and omission of information less than ideal. Here are specifics-- many of them on their own are minor, but it all just adds up:

• explaining that the Oregon Supreme Court is the highest court in Oregon. This is self-explanatory.

• refusing to enumerate Robert’s short 4 year tenure on the Oregon Supreme Court. I don’t buy the argument that 35% of justices lasted that time or less, her successor and the two previous justices each served for decades. There have been 99 justices in 150 years. That’s for all the positions, set at 7 since 1931.

Perhaps also accepting her at her word some of the reasons she resigned from the Supreme Court. The long commute or time to retire reasons don’t seem like excuses. She could have hired a driver or maybe taken the train. What do all the other public servants do? And she didn’t really slow down afterward, so I don’t think she was getting old. All of the explanations, including others more likely, could be presented as quoted by her.

• stretching out the reporting of her elections to the each body of the legislature, stating them each separately, without much information in between.

• She had very controversial opinion on abortion (see the Oral History at least), trying and failing to get legislation passed in the 1970s that would have allowed abortion without any restriction except that it be performed by a physician. There is no mention in the article. It was also an important issue of the day.

• her Autobiography has a co-author, not mentioned.

• I couldn’t check the new sources you added about her being the first to perform a same-sex marriage in Oregon as I would have to pay to get access to the Oregonian’s archives (I don’t live near a library that keeps archives of the Oregonian). But I don’t understand why it takes four additional sources to show that there was a special ceremony before the offical announcement, demonstating that Roberts was in fact first.

Also, there is some repetitive sentence structure and words. Again, you have made improvements, but specifically:

• From 1988 to 1991 she was a visiting professor in political science at Oregon State University.[4] In 1988, she received recognition from Portland State University, Oregon State University, and Lewis & Clark Law School.[4][31] She also served on the state's Commission on Higher Education in the late 1980s.[32] In 1992, Roberts was given the award bearing her name from the Oregon Women Lawyers.[3] She earned the E. B. MacNaughton Civil Liberties Award from the ACLU in 2004.[4]

• In March 2004, she presided over the first legal same-sex marriage in Oregon that was held during a brief period when Multnomah County issued marriage licenses to people of the same-sex.[33][34][35][36][37][38] In 2006, the American Bar Association awarded her the Margaret Brent Award from its Commission on Women in the Profession.[39] As of 2008, Roberts serves as a private mediator in the Portland area,[1][8] and is a senior judge in Oregon, subject to recall to serve as a temporary judge.[40]

• Betty Cantrell Roberts (born February 5, 1923) is a former politician and former judge in the U.S. state of Oregon. She was the 83rd Associate Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, the highest state court in Oregon. She was the first woman on the Oregon Supreme Court, and had also been the first woman on the Oregon Court of Appeals.

• In 1972, Roberts was re-elected to the Senate for another four-year term.[14] [15]

In 1974, Roberts became the first woman to run for governor of Oregon, but lost in the Democratic primary to Robert W. Straub.[7]

These are not really bad, if half of them were fixed, I would be satisfied. Finally a couple of other things. Roberts middle name is listed as Cantrell, but the infobox say R. as her middle name. And the two references to tape 1 of the Oral History are the same.

I’m sorry I didn’t get a second opinion as suggested, but that is for if the reviewer has doubts, and I don’t feel equivocal about my points. In reply to what you said, the 3 marriages issue, I don’t agree that it isn’t at all negative: she says herself that 'the third time was when she finally got it right'.[2] It’s not that big a deal, but if it makes sense for summarizing or flow, saying there have been three marriages belongs. And the “Oral History” was already in the article, and also is readily found by googling, so you could have found out about why Roberts quit.

I also felt that this was becoming an editorial dispute over NPOV and thought it best not to get into something that could go on and on. If you want, you can appeal the evaluation by posting to the talk page for good article nominations at the Good article reassessment page. Or make some more changes and resubmit for another review by a different editor.

I would appreciate if you could refrain from ad hominem arguments-- they aren’t very sporting, and they are often used when one is weak on the facts. And veteran editors still make POV mistakes, it's in human nature. In any case, I have 1½ years here and 1,000 edits (mostly not quick automatic ones like spelling and vandalism reversal)-- so I’m not green. I am new to the GA review process, and so I take my time doing a review.

Anyway the article is better than before the review[3], and on that I’m sure we can agree. Diderot's dreams (talk) 17:25, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

This has been taken to GAR. Aboutmovies (talk) 00:51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Possible source for expansion?

Found a review of Roberts' memoir, by professor and political commentator Bill Lunch: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ohq/110.1/br_3.html

Thanks Pete. Looking at it though, it doesn't appear to have anything new or that isn't covered at some of the other book review sources used in the article. But if I ever come back to the article to try for GA again, I'll look a little closer. Aboutmovies (talk) 06:58, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Recent changes

While something here or there might be incorrect, the bit about her working at Sheppard Field is not, per her own words: "I was an operator, at one of the old switchboards at Sheppard Field, an Air Force base—Air Force training base, it wasn’t a flight school—had been constructed just north of Wichita Falls, and it was growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, it had been started when I was working in the office building where I saw all of these guys in uniform come." Ditto for the discrimination item on the OrCtAp, read the transcripts. Aboutmovies (talk) 22:34, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

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