Talk:Jeff Mullis

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 January 2020 and 16 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): AdSaunders.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Peer Review American Government

Hi! I want to start off by saying that your Wikipedia article looks decent, but I believe there are plenty of areas that you could improve. To begin, the opening paragraph shouldn't be nearly as long or contain as much detail as your opening paragraph does. The opening paragraph should really only be 1 or 2 sentence introducing the subject of the article. The very first line "Jeff Mullis is a state senator of the Republican Party representing the 53rd district in the Georgia State Senate." would have been more appropriate. The other information can be placed at later points in the article. Good job with the table of contents and the infobox. I would try to include a picture of state senator Mullis somewhere in the article, preferably at the top of the infobox, although you might have tried to put one in and it got deleted because of the wiki copyright restrictions. I ran into that problem on my own page and am not too sure how to get around it. Otherwise, good table of contents and infobox. The intro could use some work but that's an easy fix.

Now, onto the main sections of the article. Good job on the legislative service. You made each assembly a hyperlink to their respective wikipedia pages so props to you on that. Overall, this section looks decent but if you just wrote a sentence out instead of bullets, it may look a little neater and more appealing. But, that's just personal preference. It looks fine as is and gets to the point. The positions held section could use some work in my opinion. You list every position that state senator Mullis has held, but I think for this section it should be written more in paragraph form. Or you could better organize the data by making a table to clean it up. The next section "awards and recognition" should include sources and not be written like a resume, but more like an encyclopedia. Finally, the "Bills Sponsored by Jeff Mullis" section needs to be totally revamped. No one wants to read every single bill that he has sponsored and it just clutters the page. Rather than listing each individual bill, you could list some or group them together and make more general comments about the bills that he supports, such as "he supports bills that give minorities more rights" (just an example). And you can link the full list of bills he supports somewhere in the article, but don't include every bill in this section because it clutters the article.

To finalize, this article needs some work. Rather than listing all the statistics in this article using bullet points, consider using other ways to organize the data, such as tables, paragraphs, etc. The article should not include your thoughts but I suggest that you make it more than just pure statistics. With these improvements, the article will be more useful and more enjoyable for people to read. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Remynewton7 (talk • contribs) 20:34, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Restore the revisions

The bio was not an html bio on the official state senate site. It and the official were released by the Georgia State Senate press office in January 2021. As such, neither the use of the Official photo nor verbatim use of language from the press release violate the copyright.

The revisions from the first paragraph incorrectly incorrectly removed should be restored for the same reason above. The revisions should also be restored as utilitarian biographical language is not copyrighted. Additionally, can anyone explain why the sentence below is preferable to the removed language?

“Jeff Mullis continued to run for state senate until 2016 and he won all of these elections.” -It’s false. “Until 2016” ?? Did anyone bother to check the SOS website? He won in 2016, 2018, and 2020.

Furthermore, even if a copyright claim was made against the article with the removed edits, fair use is a given since the source was cited and listed as a press release. I’d take that case all day and easily win summary judgement.

The restored last paragraph is clearly biased and intended to drive a narrative. It should be stricken from the article. Editorgal2007 (talk) 10:40, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

The press release was not released under a compatible license and cannot be copied regardless of whether it's attributed. Additionally, even if it was not a copyright violation, a press release is not an acceptable reliable source for an encyclopedia because it is not independent. The now-deleted image was also not compatibly licensed and does not meet the non-free content criteria, specifically criterion #1, since this is a biography of a living person. The last paragraph in question is reliably sourced to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Catoosa Walker News; I think it is relevant to mention a bill for which Mullis was the primary sponsor. DanCherek (talk) 12:13, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough. But the bills discussed were dropped and portions incorporated into SB202. Why not simply state he was the primary sponsor of the controversial SB202 election integrity act? If one can’t resist discussing the details then why not mention a little known fact about the legislation? That upon taking effect Georgia will be the first and only state in the nation to make all ballot image scans subject to public disclosure under the Georgia Open records act, something previously only seen in San Francisco. And cite sources for that? The paragraph as it stands singles out two bills that were bills filed and dropped with portions incorporated into SB202. Also, the language used to describe the legislation should not be verbatim talking points from the chief democratic leader in the state. One side says SB202 restricts voting rights. The other says that it is an improvement of election processes in Georgia. The entire country is aware of the Abrams narrative that the bill is supposedly an assault on voting rights.

Or is it common to discuss initial versions of bills sponsored then dropped rather than final versions of prominent bills sponsored then signed into law? Editorgal2007 (talk) 01:21, 17 June 2021 (UTC)