Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Veterans Health Administration scandal of 2014/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 14:07, 4 December 2014 (UTC) [1].

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Veterans Health Administration scandal of 2014

Nominator(s): Pine^✉ 07:46, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Greetings. This is my first Featured article nomination. This article, Veterans Health Administration scandal of 2014, describes an important situation in United States politics and health care administration that came to widespread public attention earlier in 2014. The scandal has been widely reported in the United States national press, and has been the subject of numerous investigations including those of the Veterans Affairs Inspector General, the FBI, the U.S. Congress, and the White House; some of those investigations are ongoing. There continue to be press reports about the status of the Veterans Health Administration, its parent organization (the Department of Veterans Affairs), and the ongoing legal and medical system developments related to the scandal. The article has just passed a Good article quality review, and I hope that it can become a featured article. I take pride in noting that Google displays this article at the top of search results for the subject "VA scandal". I look forward to discussing the article here at FAC. Regards, --Pine^✉ 07:46, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Pine, welcome to FAC. I'm afraid I'm going to oppose this nomination at this time, as I think the article still needs some significant work. Since it just passed GA yesterday, you might consider running through peer review to get some further suggestions. There are a few things that GAN doesn't check that FAC does - in particular, MOS compliance and citation formatting consistency. On both of these the article needs more work. Also, the lead is hard to follow as written, and having so many super-short paragraphs is stylistically not a good choice. In regards to the article's prose, I'm seeing a number of grammatical errors ("began collecting patients waiting times data"), some weasel wording ("experts said..."), and just some general lack of clarity and flow. Finally, with new sources appearing as recently as four days ago[2], this article is already out of date, and it might be better to hold off on nominating it. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:48, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

support I agree with much of what Nikki mentioned, perhaps we can work together on cleaning up the minor changes as this process evolves. Darkstar1st (talk) 03:00, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Nikkimaria, in order to fix problems I need specifics about where the problems are.

1. Citation formatting inconsistencies: where? Please be bold in making improvements. Peaceray said that he's an expert on citations, so I hope that he caught and fixed the vast majority of issues with citations.
2. MoS compliance: please let me know where the errors are, or be bold in making improvements.
3. Grammatical errors: please let me know where the errors are, or be bold in making improvements.
4. "General lack of clarity and flow": please be specific.
5. "This article is already out of date": information about subjects on Wikipedia evolves constantly. For example, despite Barack Obama being an ongoing newsmaker and producing information that is notable on a frequency of multiple times in a day or even an hour, the Wikipedia article about him achieved FA status. Where is the line drawn between being comprehensive (as required in the FAC criteria) and being constantly updated? The latter is unrealistic.
6. "The lead is hard to follow as written": what improvements do you suggest?

Thank you, --Pine^✉ 04:12, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Pine. I opposed rather than simply commenting because a lot of the heavy nitty-gritty work necessary should be done away from FAC (perhaps at PR, which has historically been the venue for that kind of thing). I will provide you with some quick examples of problems, but these should not be considered comprehensive:

1. Va.gov vs va.gov vs www.va.gov; missing italics in FN69 and FN53; extra italics in FN48...
2. Missing comma after 2014 in first sentence; odd line break in Agency executives infobox parameter; inconsistent capitalization of terms, as in "lack of data at the Federal level"...
3. VA funding section is a good example, as it alone includes multiple errors

Additionally, while re-examining the article, I noted some instances where the phrasing appears to be uncomfortably close to that of the cited sources. For example, compare "The United States Office of Special Counsel is investigating reports that two schedulers at the Ft. Collins facility were reassigned to Wyoming after they refused to comply with instructions to falsify information" with "The OSC is also investigating two schedulers at the facility who were reassigned to Wyoming after refusing to comply with instructions to hide true wait times". This and other such problems should be addressed, and I would suggest you withdraw this nomination until that is done and a comprehensive paraphrasing check performed. Nikkimaria (talk) 06:40, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Nikkimaria ok, thanks for those bullet points, I will study them sometime. Regarding paraphrasing, the rule is "Limited close paraphrasing is appropriate within reason". Paraphrasing without sourcing is plagiarism. I believe that I was careful to cite my sources, and I would have hoped that Peaceray would have flagged anything that he found to be problematic. Also, there are only so many ways to state information, and I'm not sure how someone would cite facts provided in an article without quoting or paraphrasing the article. If there is some important principle that I'm misunderstanding here, please let me know. --Pine^✉ 07:07, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Also I'm pinging Peaceray over here specifically to ask his opinion on the paraphrasing issue. This is not because I want to instigate a fight here; I want to understand what is considered appropriate paraphrasing and sourcing, vs. what is considered to be inappropriate paraphrasing. --Pine^✉ 07:10, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm continuing my research here. Quoting Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing#When there are a limited number of ways to say the same thing: "Close paraphrasing is also permitted when there are only a limited number of ways to say the same thing. This may be the case when there is no reasonable way to avoid using titles and technical term, and may also be the case with simple statements of fact." The section that I linked here seems to cover a similar situation to the quotes that you mentioned here, and seems to describe this type of paraphrasing as being within the bounds of acceptability. Also, Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#Can I add something to Wikipedia that I got from somewhere else? says, "Facts cannot be copyrighted. It is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Wikipedia."

If I'm misunderstanding something, please let me know. --Pine^✉ 07:26, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Oppose I also agree that this article isn't currently at FA status, and would need a substantial amount of work to get there. After the article has been developed further, I would suggest nominating it for an A-class review through the Military History Wikiproject before starting another FAC. Some comments to help with the process of improving the article are:

• I agree that it's probably too early for an article on this topic to be nominated given that it's subject to considerable change
• The topic of the article is unclear - is this about the problems in Phoenix, or a whole bunch of issues? The article doesn't have a clear narrative structure to help readers.
• The lead should be formed paragraphs, not choppy sentences
• Also, watch for straightforward claims cited to an exessive number of citations (eg: "As of early June 2014, several other VA medical centers around the nation have been identified with the same problems as the Phoenix facility, and the investigations by the VA Inspector General, the Congress and others are widening.[5][12][13][14][15][16][17]"
• Also be more precise - in regards to "several other VA medical centers", how many are we talking about here? Lots? A few?
• "The Veterans Health Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, is responsible for providing health care to U.S. military veterans, and is one of the largest healthcare operations in the United States, with dozens of hospitals and medical facilities across the nation. It has had a long and troubled history" - wow, talk about non-neutral. The VA has certainly had problems in the past, but this wording makes it sound like its always been a disaster given it's how the article introduces the agency.
• The article would benefit from more context and analysis of what went wrong
• The statistics in the background section are difficult to follow, and appear inconsistent - did the VA's caseload increase from "63 million in 2007 to 92 million in 2013", or did the "number of individual patients increased by 18% from 5.5 million in 2007[28] 6.5 million in 2013", or is it the case that "the number of veterans of these wars who went to VA for care increasing 200% from 2007[28] to 2013"? The statistical story is important here, but the article really doesn't explain it.
• "As of April 2014, the VA had paid approximately "$200 million for nearly 1,000 veterans’ wrongful deaths"" - what timeframe does this refer to?
• The "examples" section is really problematic. While it's good to include individual cases in the article, no context is provided to help readers understand the purpose of this section, and there's a real risk of cherry picking here (eg, for every stuff up, there would have been lots of success stories - why should readers only be presented the stuff ups without any explanation of the incidence of problems?)
• The responses section seems over-long, and isn't well structured
• Watch out for tabloid material and beat ups - eg, "The official in charge of the Phoenix VA facility, who had been on administrative leave for almost seven months, was fired. While on administrative leave, she was paid over $90,000. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz, said that the payments were "a completely unacceptable use of taxpayer dollars that should instead go to providing care for veterans." " - if the woman had been placed on administrative leave while the issues were investigated, I imagine that the VA was legally required to continue paying her salary.
• "Dr. Robert Roswell, a previous VA Undersecretary of Health and now Professor of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma, said that an appropriate measure of VHA performance was not patient wait times, which were largely outside the control of the staff because VHA employees do not control the number of patients seeking care, but instead a measure of the efficient use of VHA resources such the number of no-show appointments." - Dr Roswell's views are useful, but it seems odd that this section doesn't note anyone suggesting that the focus should be on outcomes for veterans rather than administrative milestones. Nick-D (talk) 06:51, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

About those citations...

As the good article reviewer, I was relying upon the good article criteria. The featured article criteria are as of necessity more stringent. My first objective was to ensure that all there were no dead URLs, then I set about putting the non-template versions into {{cite web}} templates. Along the way I improved some of the citations by adding more parameters were necessary. In many cases I switched to the original source, AP, because AP lists the author whereas many other news sources running the AP story do not. The last thing that I did was to convert all DMY & YMD dates to MDY dates to match what was used in the article.

However, many of the citations lack publication dates, & when I used Dab solver, it transformed many of the pages {{cite web}} templates into {{cite news}} templates. I had not done a close read to determine if that had any unintended side effects, but it looks like the news template italicizes the publisher whereas the web template does not.

I can tell you that any citation that I touched got the publication date when available, the access date, author last & first names, the website. I may not have always added the location & publisher as is my usually practice (unless I am using Reflinks), but then I working my way through a lot of citations & GA did nor require that.

Improvements upon which I would be willing to work are to assure that there are both access dates &, where available, publication dates. That said, or rather written, we (incl. Nikkimaria) may need a discussion about web v.s. news templates. WP:FACR 2.c indicates "consistent citations: where required by criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations using either footnotes (<ref>Smith 2007, p. 1.</ref>) or Harvard referencing (Smith 2007, p. 1)—see citing sources for suggestions on formatting references; for articles with footnotes, the meta:cite format is recommended. The use of citation templates is not required." , My reading of that is that it is referring to consistency of either footnotes or Harvard referencing and not both. I believe the criteria does not forbid using diverse citation templates that may display different textual formats, such as whether or not the publisher is italicized.

Peaceray (talk) 05:38, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Closing comment -- Per comments above, I think the article has been nominated prematurely, so I'll be archiving it shortly. Peer Review and/or MilHist ACR would indeed be the next logical step after addressing outstanding points, prior to considering another run at FAC. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 14:06, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Ian Rose (talk) 14:07, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.