Talk:Mark B. Cohen

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[edit] Cleanup done

Lot of reformatting. I removed a bit of the "I love Mark Cohen" NPOV from the article which was just a bit over the top for my taste, but the spirit of the article is still there. There was a lot of extraneous information in the article which frankly could go since its covered somewhere else. If anyone has any questions about the edit, we can certainly discuss it here.Montco 06:04, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

The editing removed praise of Cohen, but inserted criticism by a reporter who has criticized many public officials. The reporter's journalistic ethics were attacked by the Columbia Journalism Review when he smeared a legislator (Daylin Leach) who had satirized him, at http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/cooper1.asp.

The criticism of Cohen certainly violated NPOV, and was ignored by the opposition Republican Party--which stuck with its decision not to nominate an opponent to Cohen after the criticism occurred, allowing Cohen to run for re-election unopposed--and by Cohen's Democratic legislative colleagues, who promoted him on December 5, 2006 to Whip contingent upon the Democrats having a majority of the legislature in January, 2007.

The best way to meet the NPOV standard is to print neither praise nor criticism and let facts which have had important public impact speak for themselves. I should have deleted Michael Race's praise of Cohen (inserted by the original author), and I am content to have you delete it. User:Zulitz/Zulitz 19:59, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't have any issue with praise as long as its verifiable and by an independent source. The Inky article is at least an independent source. If you want to insert the Race comment back in, I don;t have a problem. But I would offer some context for the praise. I don't have the news article so its hard for me to do that for you (or for the original author). If you have other articles in the paper offering him praise for work on a certain issue, by all means put it in. Criticism is just as legitimate as praise. And you'll find that in many articles out here. There is a problem (and I am not accusing you of this at all) that when criticism of a politician is put into an article (take Re. DeWeese as an example), supporters of that person are more content to attack and delete the criticism rather than write a quick note about some good things the person has done. Again, if a politician has been credited with some good things, that's fine. If he has been criticised as long as its factual, then that's ok to me. In the end, if we want to agree to leave the article factual (and patrol it to ensure that it stays that way) I am fine. Montco 04:12, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WP:ADVERT

This article reads like an advertisement, and was possibly written by the subject himself (or a surrogate). The artile itself states that he enjoys writing for the Daily Kos and phillyblog. Either way, I will be tagging it as an advertisement. It comes perilously close to getting a few other tags, but I will refrain for now.

• There were way too many links to the Daily Kos blog, approaching the level of (WP:LINKSPAM). I think I cleaned out most of them.
• There was too much background on the family. Several of them have their own pages, and that is where such information should go. Just because space on wikipedia is unlimited, doesn't mean that everything can be put in an article.
• Amazon book reviews are definitely not appropriate for wikipedia. Again, approaching WP:LINKSPAM.
• Listing of facebook friends is also not appropriate. (Are you kidding me?)
• Not sure why John Edwards was referenced in the 1st paragraph.
• Also needs more supporting material about the "high yield" changes to the pension plan. That seemed too [wonky|Wonk (slang)] for this article.
• Use of "stadia" may be technically correct, but "stadiums" is fine for English users.
• I think this was the worst problems of the article, any criticism was structured as coming from an identifiable person who was then attacked. Ex: adding that a reporter was censured by someone or once worked in government for the other party. Not sure why that is relevant to the criticism being charged, except to try and soften the criticism. This would be OK in small doses, but no positive accolades about the subject were augmented in that way.
• First-hand quotes from the subject is considered original research, and not allowed.
• Way too much name dropping

To sum: this article contained too much fluff in places, too much detail in places, too many link in some places, and not enough citing in places. It still needs a lot of work.--RedShiftPA (talk) 20:24, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

• • I changed the WP:ADVERT tag to the WP:PEACOCK tag. I think this is a better description of the tone of article.--RedShiftPA (talk) 07:32, 31 December 2007 (UTC)