Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Railway surgery/1

Railway surgery

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.

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: With this GAR open for over seven months, and neither side willing to engage, I am closing with no consensus. My own personal checks showed a general alignment between the sources and the article; there may be minor source-text irregularities, but the major accusation of 'severely US-biased' is not justfied enough for a delisting. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:52, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Severely US-biased, confuses railway-operated hospitals with doctors paid by railway companies to represent them in legal cases involving medical matters, contains blatantly false statements like "in Europe, the majority of injuries were due to collisions, hence passengers rather than employees formed the bulk of the injured" that because of the way the article is written are very hard to remove without major rewrites or massive excisions. --Eldomtom2 (talk) 16:30, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The article is biased towards the US because the detailed sources are American. What's more, those sources explicitly state that railway surgery was espeially (even uniquely) developed in the US. The alleged blatantly false claim is what the source says. There has been a discussion on this on the article talk page, but new sources have not been offered. It may be untrue that US railway surgery was unique, but without sources showing that, we can only write from the sources we have. That's how Wikipedia is supposed to work isn't it? SpinningSpark 18:44, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can say that it's due to lack of sources, but a) have you actually looked for foreign sources, and b) that does not justify the confused presentation of the article that fails to clearly delineate between countries where railways actually provided medical care and those that did not. Second, the source for the blatantly false claim does not say what it you say it does - it divides railway injuries into four categories, but absolutely nowhere suggests that they are ordered by frequency, or that the author had any great knowledge about accident frequency in the first place. That you misread the source so badly makes me skeptical that you have represented the other sources accurately.--Eldomtom2 (talk) 20:42, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I looked for sources quite extensively. I'm not very competent in languages, but did not turn up much at all outside the US except a few scraps in mostly 19th century sources. The Great Britain section (and by extension Western Europe) makes it very clear that railway surgeons in that country had a radically different role "...primarily as medico-legal consultant regarding injury claims rather than practical surgery." I'm at a loss to understand why you think it doesn't say that. India is the only other country with a specific section and there the emphasis is most definitely on treatment of the injured.

On the statistics, Bond does give an indication of numbers "Accidents belonging to the first class enormously preponderate..." That is, passenger injuries. That this is different in the US and employee rather than passenger injuries predominate is given in Herrick with some statistics. (Note I have just adjusted the page range in Herrick to include the numbers he gives). SpinningSpark 09:51, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've also reworded this to avoid the claim these classes are in statistical order. SpinningSpark 09:58, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You have still kept the completely erroneous claim that passenger inujuries outnumbered employee injuries in Europe, which the source says absolutely nothing about. Further, with regards to countries, the article spends far too long talking in terms of a mythical international "railway surgery". Most of the article should be placed under a US heading. --Eldomtom2 (talk) 14:29, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. I have dropped off a hopefully-neutrally worded request for input at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains, since this review seems to be stuck for quite some time. SnowFire (talk) 13:18, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I have seen this on the GAR page and read the page a few times in the last few weeks and finally realised why I kept on coming back to it. Specifically I have been wondering where the dividing line between Hospital train (plus adding in Rail ambulance) should be and if, perhaps there should be some sort of merging of content? Gusfriend (talk) 10:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Eldomtom2 and Spinningspark: It seems as if nobody else knows enough to know which side of this dispute is "correct," hence this GAR being stuck in an unclosable position. Since it seems like you two are the ones who care the most about the article, is there any sort of compromise that could be had here? Nobody else has even edited the article in the past 6 months. I think you're the only people who can resolve this. SnowFire (talk) 01:15, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really have any more to say than has already been said. The closer needs to assess for themselves whether or not the article meets the GA criteria, in particular whether or not it fairly reflects the sources available. I'm willing to do further work on the article, but I can't do it from sources that don't exist. SpinningSpark 10:35, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I have no knowledge of railway surgery, and am only looking at this article because this GAR was mentioned at WT:GAN, but it seems to me that Eldomtom2's objection to the source for the claim about relative injuries in Europe versus the USA is legitimate. The article currently says:

In Europe, the majority of injuries were due to collisions, hence passengers rather than employees formed the bulk of the injured. For instance, in Britain, accidents on the line such as crushing between wagons and being struck by trains (accidents suffered mostly by railway staff) were far fewer than passenger injuries through collisions in 1887.

The source given says accidents belonging to the first class enormously preponderate. The "first class" is contusions and shocks resulting from slight collisions; the source does not say that the victims are mostly passengers. Nor does it say whether this enormous preponderance applies to Britain, or to Europe as a whole (which is it?) Nor does it say that it is referring to 1887. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:50, 2 January 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.