Talk:Jon Brower Minnoch/GA1

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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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 14:08, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is certainly an interesting premise! Having said that, the article needs a fair amount of work. The first thing that stood out to me was the short length and suspicion of missing elements. To take a rather glaring example: Minnoch has a mugshot pictured, clarifying that he was arrested at 19 for burglary...but no arrests are mentioned in the article! There's evidently quite a bit missing about Minnoch's personal life, with only enough detail to raise further questions (e.g. the lack of clarity around his relationships and children, and complete absence of any mention of his parents/potential siblings/etc). If the sourcing exists for what we have, it should exist for more, even if it may be difficult to find considering it would overwhelmingly be pre-internet and not necessarily digitized. (If there's a mugshot, for instance, there's more about his arrest and why it happened -- some of it might not be usable in a BLP, but this is not a BLP.)

While this is the most significant issue with the article, and some work would need to be done on it before many further comments, there are a few other bullet points I have to note:

His first wife is mentioned as preferring to go by her middle name. Why does her first name necessarily need mentioning, in this case?
'WA' shouldn't be used for 'Washington', as it's ambiguous between many locations.
[S]uggesting a genetic cause for his condition is far too big a claim to be made by that source -- obesity is complex and multifactorial, including obesity onset in childhood, and the sense in which it's 'genetic' is fairly complicated. Probably we shouldn't speculate on why he was fat at all, except to note the very obvious fact he lost substantial amounts of weight when eating less.
80% fat should be clarified as having a body fat percentage of 80%, to avoid ambiguity. (For...juxtaposition purposes, it also might be good to rearrange this such that his claims about water retention immediately follow this sentence.)
The fair use picture is justifiable, but the current justification used on the file page doesn't work, because multiple public domain photos of him exist and are in the article. However, there aren't free images including his body, so the FUR should be amended to clarify that none of the free images actually show him as 'especially fat' rather than 'guy with double chin'.

I'll be able to make more comments as the article is expanded. Vaticidalprophet 14:08, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GA Fixes

Hi @Vaticidalprophet! Thank you for taking the time to review this article! I am happy to address some of your initial concerns:

For starters, many aspects of Minnoch's personal life are simply unknown. Believe me--I have searched far and wide for sources. Practically all RS about Minnoch is already cited within in the article.
Re: mugshots. As stated above, I have searched diligently for a source about Minnoch's arrest back in 1960. But, alas, there is no information about it (minus the mugshot itself). I have searched all possible archives. If need be, we can cite the mugshot itself (or we can simply remove the mugshot photo--but it's a really good photo).
Re: other personal life stuff. 1) Minnoch had no siblings. 2) I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "the lack of clarity around his relationships". Minnoch was married twice--both marriages are noted in the article. There really isn't any other relevant information to include about his relationships. 3) The article notes Minnoch had 2 children. I might be able to find their names, if you believe that is relevant to include in the article (names added!) 4) I think I am able to include the names of his parents! (names added!)

Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:54, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So, what I'm thinking here is: if he was arrested, there are records of the arrest. There are likely news articles, and there are certainly primary sources around his arrest. In a BLP, these wouldn't be usable, but this isn't a BLP. This is something that can be an interesting learning curve for editors going between BLPs and BDPs (in either direction), because the sourcing and due weight requirements can change quite a bit. I definitely respect the issue with finding sources, but I also note everything currently in the article has a link to some kind of free online archive (e.g. Google Books) -- keep in mind a lot of things don't make it there! Similarly, if we know he was an only child, can we source that? I have seen the expansions to add some detail about his parents and children (given the names, it might be worth just saying 'sons'...unless we happen to know he named his daughters John and Jason), and I'm very happy with that. I'm not asking to double the size of the article or anything, I'm just poking a little about some details that are reasonably likely to have some kind of source, even if it's primary or couldn't go in a living person's article with their more specific considerations. Vaticidalprophet 13:11, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum: I've been looking through Newspapers.com, which you'll have access to through The Wikipedia Library, and found his mother's obituary with some details on her (career, that she outlived her son, confirmation of grandsons). This also confirms his middle name as his mother's maiden name, which seemed likely to me. Vaticidalprophet 15:33, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've beefed up the personal life section considerably. But i'm still struggling to find a source for the arrest. I did manage to find this one article published a day after Minnoch's arrest about a series of burglaries in the area committed by seven juveniles, two of whom were over the age of 18. But there is no specific mention of Minnoch :( Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 00:28, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm currently inclined to say we should leave out the mugshot for now, until we can find more sourcing (even primary) about it -- while WP:MUG is BLP, the element of [b]ecause a police booking photograph can imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime is still relevant, so I'd at least like to see some kind of in-text confirmation. Aside from that, I'm happy with the structural changes and will launch into a prose and sourcing review soon. Vaticidalprophet 14:06, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed! Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 19:37, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GA Fixes

His first wife... --Fixed
'WA' shouldn't be used for 'Washington'... --Fixed
[S]uggesting a genetic cause for his condition --Fixed
80% fat --Fixed
The fair use picture is justifiable... --Fixed Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 22:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Further comments

The article is relatively short, so my comments shouldn't be too much of a wall of text.

Lead:

died of cardiac arrest This isn't a great wording, given cardiac arrest is, technically, what death is. The formal cause of death in the body is fine, but in the lead this should just be "died in September 1983".
Is the 'honours' in the infobox hardcoded/not changeable? If it's changeable, then probably worth changing it, because it's a sort of awkward descriptor.

Body:

The first paragraph could do with some restructuring. He was born in Seattle; it's worth giving his place of birth in the first sentence, then discussing the moves. Similarly, his parents should probably be named in the first sentence. Something like Minnoch was born in 1941 in Seattle, Washington, to John Minnoch, a machinist, and June (née Brower), a nurse and telephone operator fits the more conventional format for biographies (then revise the rest of the paragraph from there).
It might be less jarring to have a different sentence flow between Minnoch's BF% and his claims of water retention, like He had a body fat percentage of about 80%, although he said water retention was the primary cause of his obesity. I don't have access to this source to check (Google Books previews vary by location, which is why it's not ideal to cite them, though this is within author discretion), but I also wonder if it explicitly says this was confirmed (and how), or if it was a speculative estimate.
It also sounds better to say where he attended high school somewhere other than 'right at the end of the paragraph about his weight', though I can't quite place where would be ideal. It might work after his childhood weight, or in the paragraph about his personal life. Not sure.
He fathered two sons, named John and Jason flows better as just "two sons, John and Jason", but more concerningly, I can't verify this from the cited source. I believe some other sources gave their names, so this might just be a misreferencing?
The 600-calorie diet might use a piped link to Very-low-calorie diet, to contextualize for people who don't necessarily grok calories as a unit of measure that this is insanely low.
Minnoch consented to his wife's pleas to enter a hospital Is "consented to" the right word here, vs. something more natural like "agreed with" or "listened to"?
Keep an eye out for MOS:LQ -- you have internal rather than external full stops in most quotes.
Minnoch's doctors were unsure how he got so large is a weird line, and not fully in agreement with the source, which (important detail) asks why rather than how. This line can probably be struck.
I notice that source also says 1400lbs was a low estimate (!), which is worth mentioning.
Minnoch soon started to gain weight again Probably worth offsetting with something like 'nonetheless' or 'despite this'. You also use his surname quite heavily in this paragraph, which feels kind of like an attempt at 'elegant variation' that doesn't quite work out; it's usually not ambiguous who's being referred to.
He was readmitted to the hospital just over a year later in October 1981, after his weight increased to 952 lb (432 kg; 68 st). Minnoch managed to gain 200 lb (91 kg; 14 st) in just seven days. I think this might work better with a semicolon than a full stop, because while they're naturally separate sentences, they're all on the same note. (Also, see prior note on surname repetition.)
According to his death certificate, Minnoch's immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest with respiratory failure and restrictive lung disease/obesity as contributing factors This is kind of a run-on sentence (should have a comma before the "with respiratory failure etc" clause), and the slash for "restrictive lung disease/obesity" feels awkward. (It might technically be put as something like "respiratory failure and restrictive lung disease, caused by obesity".

The source issues are the biggest ones of these, but not insurmountable ones. The rest are mostly grammatical/prose. Vaticidalprophet 08:35, 29 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your solid feedback! I'll start working on it momentarily. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:34, 29 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Vaticidalprophet, All fixes implemented. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 00:18, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Dr.Swag Lord, Ph.d, I'm happy to pass the article. I think a footnote on the 'then-largest weight loss' mentioning Khalid bin Mohsen Shaari is reasonable, but it's a relatively minor point, so can be done post-GAN. Thanks for your work on this article -- it's a high-view subject and a tricky one to pull off with sensitivity. Vaticidalprophet 04:37, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Vaticidalprophet! It was a pleasure working with you! Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 05:00, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lead:

died of cardiac arrest --fixed
honors --fixed (removed honors parameter since it appears to be hard coded) Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:43, 29 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Body:

First paragraph --revised
He had a body fat percentage of about 80%, although he said water retention was the primary cause of his obesity --mmmh, this seems a bit SYNTH-y. I replaced the 80% fat source with a slightly better one, which reads: "...was estimated to be over 1,400 pounds, and 80 percent of that was fat."
Put high school in different section
He fathered two sons, named John and Jason --fixed (the visual editor is a bit glitchy and wouldn't want to insert the correct ref so I switched to source mode)
The 600-calorie diet --linked
"Consented" --fixed
MOS:LQ --fixed
Minnoch's doctors were unsure how he got so large --fixed
1400lbs was a low estimate -- Are you referring to this source? It says that Schwartz said "He was probably more than that". I included that in the article.
Minnoch soon started to gain weight again --fixed
He was readmitted to the hospital just over a year later in October 1981, after his weight increased to 952 lb (432 kg; 68 st). Minnoch managed to gain 200 lb (91 kg; 14 st) in just seven days. --fixed
According to his death certificate, Minnoch's immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest with respiratory failure and restrictive lung disease/obesity as contributing factors --re-wrote Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 00:03, 30 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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.