A fact from Carol Mutch appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 February 2024 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Dr. Disaster's office collapsed in an earthquake on this day in 2011?
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Latest comment: 8 months ago10 comments4 people in discussion
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
New enough, long enough, and properly sourced. QPQ done. The only copying found by Earwig involved proper noun phrases and publication titles, non-problematic. Interesting hook, but one of the hook sources doesn't mention the "Dr. Disaster" nickname at all, and the other one makes no connection between the nickname per se and the office collapse. (It connects the nickname to her disaster research and the disaster research to the office collapse, but saying she was named because of the collapse seems like a stretch and a WP:SYN issue.) Can we either get better sources for that specific connection or a hook that doesn't try to make that connection, please? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:30, 14 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the review David Eppstein. I'm sorry if you found the citations confusing - there are three sentences, with two sources at the end, one source indeed contains the hook fact, the other is supporting facts in the preceding sentences. I could repeat the sources every sentence if you prefer but I've always thought that looks cluttered and a bit repetitive. Let me know if you'd like me to change it.
The hook doesn't say that she got her nickname because of the office collapse but after it. Which is correct, no? I was trying to make a hook that was interesting enough to invite people to click to find out why she's Dr Disaster, without spelling everything out. DrThneed (talk) 21:00, 14 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
It may literally mean only that one event was subsequent to another, but putting them together in this way implies that there is a causal connection, for which we do not have a source. See WP:SYN. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:05, 14 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
The article doesn't connect her office collapsing and the nickname. The hook support sentence, Mutch wasn't in the building at the time, but the disaster led her to focus on researching how teachers and schools cope with catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, pandemics, and shootings, and how they recover afterwards., which connects the two, doesn't have a cite? Both next-following-cites mention the incident, but neither of them seems to connect them other than as a fun fact. Valereee (talk) 19:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
ALT2: ...that Dr. Disaster's office collapsed in an earthquake on this day in 2011?
I guess. It's not quite as interesting, and one could quibble that she wasn't Dr. Disaster when her office collapsed, but I'm still ok with this variation. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:18, 22 January 2024 (UTC)Reply