Talk:Call for help

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This article was nominated for deletion on August 23, 2005. The result of the vote was keep (and possibly merge). An archived record of this vote can be found here.

Contents 1 Restoration of removed paragraphs 2 CDang's Contributions 3 Unencyclopedic 4 RfC 5 "ask for precisions" 6 Disambiguate PCP 7 Prescriptive 8 Declaring emergency on an aircraft 9 PCP reference 10 Merger with other articles 11 Proword

[edit] Restoration of removed paragraphs

As I got no answer from the user who removed the elements, I restore them:

• the fact that a protection should be performed first: of course this does not belong to the "call for help", but it belongs to the context and is not out of topic; the call for help is not an isolated act;
• the [[category:first aid]]: most first aid instructors agree that the call for help is maybe the only thign a people should remind from a first aid course, this is the reason why a classification under "first help" is important for me.

Additionally, I do not think that

"The aim of a call for help is to get an advice (e.g. medical advice) or a rescue team in case of danger."

is a tautology:

• this gives an aim to reach; beeing in the wilderness and shouting "help!" is "calling for help", but it does not allow to reach the aim;
• it is important imho to know that a phone call will not always be followed by sending an ambulance (contrarilly to what everybody sees in, movies);
• a suicide attempt is a "call for help", but it is not the topic of the article.

[edit] CDang's Contributions

The aim of a call for help is to get an advice (e.g. medical advice) or a rescue team in case of danger.

As well as the poor English, the meaning of a Call_for_help is quite clear to English speakers. Calls for help from lay people in e.g. U.S. or U.K. that qualify as emergencies (not prank calls etc.) will respond in waves of rescuers, in what is known as the chain of survival - for medical emergency, citizen rescuer, first responder, paramedics, and so on. Similarly for fire, police, sea, mountain.

Calls for help for help from non-lay people, for example from the pilot of an aircraft in UK airspace with smoke in the cockpit and loss of hydraulic pressure to the undercarriage, might generate a different response (diversion to alternate base, talk down by ATC and GCA, foam on runway for belly landing.) But this is all somewhat irrelevant. And even in the hypothetical example I gave, UKAIR probably would provide some company.

It is important to make a protection prior to call: to protect yourself, the casualties and the other bystanders from the risk. It is necessary to first evaluate the risk (this will also be a useful information for the rescue team); if you cannot remove or neutralise the risk, mark out the dangerous zone.

Not part of a Call_for_help. Part of Emergency_Action_Principles, one of which is a Call_for_help

Wrolf, you don't have to be rude. I know as a french guy that my english is not that good, you can jsut improve it instead of removing it. I let a message in your talk page, and performed the revert after 8 days without any response from you.

Concerning the ground of your modifications, I agree with you, except that:

• the pages in english might be read by non-english people (e.g. people from countries without wikipedia in their language, or willing to translate them);
• the role of an encyclopedia is to make the concepts clear, so assuming "everybody knows it" is imho out of topic; it does not harm to be precise, especially when the page is not that long;
• there was no link with Emergency Action Principles, you could just have added it, completing the EAP page (very poor for the moment) with the extracted text. However, I think it is very usefull to remind here the principle of protection (even if very fast), because over-accident is really an important risk.

Cdang 09:54, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

CDang: some of your English is so bad that no one could understand it, native English speaker or not. Your contributions are often basically inadvertent vandalism.

Perhaps you would be better off discussing your proposals on this page, after consulting with a few English language First Aid/CPR reference books (I have at hand the American Red Cross, PADI, and BSAC). Wording like "make a protection" is not English, and your meaning is not clear. I cannot fix what I cannot understand.

[edit] Unencyclopedic

Something about this article seems unencyclopedic... an encyclopedia is not meant to be a repository of obvious common sense like "in an emergency you should call for help"... Apply the "would any of our competitors have an article on this topic, with this title", I would say no... --137.111.13.34 23:13, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, the article does not explain to call for help, but how to call for help. It may seem obvious to you, but mind that this is politics, in the wide sense of the word (management of the city, of the polis-politis). The "call for help" requires a structured communication network, and a structured asnwer (dispatch, rescue team, emergency departments...); these structures are designed by political decision (laws, regulations...) and can vary from a country to another, or simply not exist.

Therefore, what seems obvious to you might not be for other people, especially non-English or American readers...

By the way, what is an "encyclopedic" article? Cdang 08:48, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I would be interested to know if your criticism applies as well to the August 16 2004 version. Wrolf 19:24, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree that the article is unencyclopedic, in any version I looked at. By "unencyclopedic", I mean, for lack of better words, that the topic or material is not typical of encyclopedias. It might be better as part of a Wikibook or changed to be less of "how-to." Maurreen 18:07, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I tend to agree that it doesn't really need to be here. The infrastructure prescribed to handle emergency situations should be included, but it would be better in something like Emergency Service, and not an article that focuses on the "call for help." Just some thoughts. ElAmericano 19:15, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I do not see why a "how to" would not be part of an encyclopedia. The description of a blast furnace for example, is nothing more than a "how to make steel". Of course, this does not mean that the Call for help article is encyclopedic, this just means that the argument is not accurate.

Additionally,a lot of "encyclopedic" articles started with nothing more than a dictionnary definition.

There are a lot of things to say about the "call for help" outside the procedure itself, e.g. analyse the call infrastructure in various countries, history of the concept (remember 50 years ago, there was no call for help, you just brought the casualty to the doctor).

Wrolf, I do not like the way you try to point out that the last "good" version should be the last before my first edition. You could at least be honestand write "don't you think cdang messed it all up ?".

Cdang 13:13, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] RfC

I came here from RfC. Does this page still have an active dispute? Maurreen 06:06, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm removing this from the RfC listing. Maurreen 05:16, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Concerning any possible tautology, the disagreement can perhaps be resolved with a statement at the beginning of the article along the lines of: "This article is about requesting help in an emergency."

I apologize if I deleted this from RfC prematurely. If Wrolf and Cdang can't work something out, you can add it back or maybe one of you should leave a note on the talk page of anyone else who has contributed to the article. Maurreen 18:02, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "ask for precisions"

I was unclear as to the meaning of the phrase "or to ask for precisions" in the second item of the telephone procedure list (take a look at the history). I removed it becuase it seemed to serve no purpose and wasn't clear. Any thoughts on its meaning? -- Mjwilco 02:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I assume "precisions" refers to the specific details of ones location? –– Constafrequent ^{(talk page)} 04:56, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I wonder whether Mjwilco doesn't have have a point there; the general idea of getting your call through with important informations is probably what really matters. I noticed with first aid topics that a long list of all possible cases tends to inhibit the initiative of the reader and make them act "by what they remember of the book" (usually it'll give out a disaster :p). Event though we don't have the pretention of being a tutorial, it might still be a good idea to remove this kind of obvious things... Well, my two pence. Cheers ! Rama 08:34, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguate PCP

Could somebody disambiguate the wikilink to PCP? I assume it means the drug here, but I'm not 100% certain. Aapo Laitinen 21:03, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Prescriptive

Like other how-to articles, I object to the prescriptive nature of this article. It necessarily makes subjective moral judgements that seem to violate the neutral point-of-view policy. I would suggest at least that the language be modified to attribute this advice to a particular proponent or proponents, and that the presentation be balanced by supplying reasons or situations where following this advice is inappropriate (for example, some have suggested that a call for help drives away fearful bystanders). Deco 08:58, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Please could you give some examples of the subjective moral judgements in the article? Wrolf 21:59, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Sure. "One should call for help any time life, property, or the public order is in danger." Should one really, always? Besides the fact that there are obviously times this is inappropriate (for example, if you're hiding from an armed criminal), it suggests that you should call for help even in situations of relatively little risk, which could lead to a "crying wolf" phenomenon and endangerment of others, as in the recent Baghdad bridge stampede. And that's just the first sentence of the article. Anything prescriptive is necessarily subjective, and these sort of absolute statements are even more debatable than your average prescriptive article. Deco 21:09, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Declaring emergency on an aircraft

It's not true that the only time an aircraft should declare an emergency is when it's in an immediate danger of crashing; it is used anytime there is an emergency that the pilot-in-command feels requires preferential treatment by air traffic control. For example, a passenger with a sudden medical emergency would be a reasonable situation to declare an emergency. In the aviation world, declaring an emergency doesn't immediately send out the search teams, it alerts ATC to your distress and allows them to give you priority in the system. (If something obviously bad happens, such as you dropping off radar and announcing that you are about to crash, ATC will of course send out the search teams.) So I've slightly reworded the MAYDAY paragraph to make it clear that to declare an emergency, you have to be in a state of emergency, not in immediate danger of crashing. —Cleared as filed. 13:13, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PCP reference

I have never been trained to differentially diagnose someone as being high on PCP (as opposed to deranged and a danger to themself or others from any other cause), and to call for help specifically for that reason.

I am thinking that the PCP reference should be reworded to include the more general case. Thoughts anyone? Wrolf 22:32, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

I haven't read the article in a long time, but that makes sense to me. Maurreen (talk) 05:15, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merger with other articles

Related articles are distress call or distress signal Emergency telephone number and the Wikibooks - First Aid.

My thinking is that a distress signal is remote, but not a dialogue, e.g. a red parachute flare at sea. A distress call is by technical means, and a dialogue - a mayday call with position etc., intended to be answered if possible. A call for help is by persons without any special equipment, such as a first aider, a person who has been robbed, etc., typically by calling out vocally, or by use of a telephone to police, emergency medical services, etc.

I think we should define clearly the scope of these three different terms, or use different ones, or merge them or whatever. Then we should decide whether to continue with three separate articles plus the links in the in-progress WikiBook, or move everything to the one place with three sections, or whatever (updating the WikiBook links if necessary).

We should give some sources to give the appearance of objectivity (of course we are already objective); and show some current day or historical alternatives (ringing of church bells perhaps) to give perspective.

To be honest, I definitely think that a first aider asking an untrained bystander to call emergency medical services is distinctly different from a ship's captain issuing a Securité call on VHF to a coastguard.

Wrolf 22:32, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proword

Can someone who knows something about radio procedure please get rid of the ugly jargon expression "proword" from this article? It should not be inflicted, unexplained, on your readers: its effect is to muddy, not clarify, the article. 138.37.199.199 11:52, 10 November 2005 (UTC)