Talk:JC's Girls/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Ritchie333 (talk · contribs) 14:03, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

This looks like a fascinating article to review. I'll say upfront that I'd describe myself as mostly asexual and hence I should be able to approach this from a neutral point of view. My initial thoughts are the number of sources used are fairly small for an article of this size, though I used a similar number for Jaywick recently and there was no problem.

With atrocious timing, I notice you've just taken a wikibreak as I started this. I've been on WP for almost a decade, and this has been in the queue since August, so waiting until February won't hurt. Or I might ping someone else who's up for taking charge of any action points I find.

Specific comments will follow. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:03, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Lead

• The article is about 22K of prose. For that, a lead of around 2-3 paragraphs suffices. The lead is perhaps a little long, but not by very much
• "also called the JC's Girls Girls Girls Ministry" - this name does not appear anywhere in the body, and hence is not verifiable
• "an American evangelical organization of women who evangelize to female workers in the sex industry" - might be simpler to say "an American evangelical organization of women in the sex industry"
• "but does not try to persuade them to leave the sex industry. The organization also supports women who wish to leave the sex industry" - suggest "The organization supports women wishing to leave the industry, but does not directly persuade them to do so"
• could "conversion" wikilnk to conversion to Christianity? (In which case the link in the second paragraph should drop out)
• "She founded JC's Girls on Good Friday in 2005" - a month would help here, not everyone knows Good Friday is the first Friday after the first full moon after 21 March, and even those that do can't remember when it was ten years ago ;-)
• "it was based at Sandals Church in Riverside" - what is "Riverside"?
• "that received much traffic and news coverage" - might be simpler to say "much media coverage" - traffic could imply there were queues everywhere as people wanted to chat to them
• " and based the organization at Central Christian Church" - worth mentioning the church was in nearby Henderson, Nevada not Las Vegas itself
• Per WP:BLPSOURCES, the quotations in the lead ought to be cited, even though it can normally be lax.
• "or not explicitly encouraging strippers to stop stripping" - to avoid repetition, maybe "or not explicitly encouraging sex industry workers to quit" would be better - presumably their message was for anyone in this industry generally
• I'm not sure the bit about Raëlism is necessary for the lead, as its not directly about this organisation

Ideology

• "began to engage with softcore pornographic models and call girls as well" - don't need "as well"
• "Grecco (2007), n.p" - this book source needs more information, ideally a page number so the fact can be easily verified
• "Members often wear eyelash extensions, stiletto heels, skinny jeans, and skin-tight t-shirts" - the Daily Express is perhaps slightly more palatable than the Daily Mail but still generally not considered a suitable quality source for controversial BLPs and so this should be removed or toned down to something like "Members shun conservative dress styles" (which is mentioned in the Observer source)
• Is WorldNetDaily a good enough source for BLPs like this?
• "in the softcore and fetish genres" - softcore and fetish could be linked
• "trample fetish specifically" - "specifically" would sit better in front
• "she converted to Christianity and eventually left the sex industry, although no one attempted to tell her about Jesus." - how do you convert to Christianity without hearing about Jesus first?
• "a close friend of hers who was working as a stripper had died[7] of alcohol intoxication." - might be easier to put the two sources together at the end of the sentence. Also, the source specifically mentions alcoholism which is different to alcohol intoxication, implying there was a long term problem rather than an accident
• "Veitch began to evangelize to strippers because she wished someone had evangelized to her" - to avoid repetition, could one of the "evangelized"s be changed to a different word?
• "One of her clients was Lori Albee,[3] a housewife with two children and no experience with the sex industry" - per WP:BLP, why is having no experience with the sex industry important?
• "Veitch told Albee about her friend who had died in loneliness and depression" - I think just "had died" will do here
• "Albee suggested that they start evangelizing to other strippers." - to avoid repetition, maybe "contacting" instead of "evangelizing" would be better
• Might be worth summarising why the other organisations except San Diego disappeared?

Riverside chapter

• "On Good Friday in 2005" - suggest "On March 25, 2005 (Good Friday)"
• "Albee and six other women went to a strip club" - the source said "adult entertainment club" which is subtly different?
• "Instead of accepting the lap dances" - just "accepting the dances" will do here
• "They made Matthew's House the parent organization for JC's Girls" - to avoid repetition, just up to "the parent organization" will do
• "The church gave JC's Girls a $10,000 budget" - suggest "The church donated a $10,000 budget"
• "much of this budget was taken up by Veitch's salary" - this implies that Veitch set up the charitable organisation, grabbed most of the money, and spent it on herself, which isn't a particularly nice thing to do. I'd leave this out
• "and were only once asked to stop evangelizing in a strip club" - don't need "evangelizing in a strip club", it's obvious from context
• "and become more physically fit" - the source does not actually say that

San Diego chapter

• I think this section is a little overlong and can probably be pruned down a bit, losing some of the specific details
• "She had been sexually abused when she was a child" - what makes issuu.com a reliable source? For extremely contentious BLP claims such as this, I would normally insist on having two quality sources that are held in high regard
• "because of her response to a question about same-sex marriage" - do we know what the response was?
• "The strippers had been counter-protesting by dancing in bikinis in front of the church during Sunday services while Tommy George, the club's owner, played music from his car." - this bit can probably be left out without losing any encyclopedic importance, if I'm honest
• "some women who had quickly gone from working in the sex industry to evangelizing with JC's Girls soon left the organization and returned to the sex industry" - the source gives the impression they were tempted back (due to money / financial reasons?) rather than going back to the industry completely of their free will

Original website

• This section might be better titled "Website". If this is about the original website, what's the current website like? What's happened since 2008?
• "maintaining Myspace pages that were receiving high volumes of traffic" - might be easier to list specific traffic figures. I doubt the figures were as high as Wikipedia (which is a high traffic site)
• "was receiving around 15,000 hits per day." - this claim needs a citation

Reception

• "Rumours that the organization's funding was being used by Brown for lap dances also circulated." - I'd leave this out
• "Stephen Clark of the Los Angeles Times called the website "edgy" and "provocative" - the trouble with two word quotations is it's too easy to read them out of context, so if you want a soundbite from the LA Times, I'd recommend a longer quotation
• "he did not think that encouraging the women to become Christians would necessarily be helpful" - I'm not sure which bit of the source is validating this claim
• " "Do we ask gluttons to stop eating too much before they come to church?" - is the source citing this reliable?
• I'd leave the Daily Express's view out, myself
• I mentioned this in the lead, but I'm not sure what the specific relevance of Raëlism's reaction is in the body. Or at least, if we'll allow this claim, I can easily think of other organisations that might want to pass comment - the gay community and Muslims, for example. Are there any other reactions to the group.

More in a mo Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Images

• A problem with the images is they don't particularly augment the article's topic. I showed the article to a colleague of mine and to cut a long story short they were not interested in reading it because they thought the pictures of the organisation members showed them in an unflattering light. File:Sophia Lynn at Corruption Party 3.jpg and File:Heather Veitch of JCsGirls at Luke Ford's 40th birthday party 1.jpg are not directly part of this article topic and should be removed. I would restrict photos to members operating strictly in conjunction with the organisation.
• File:Lori Albee, Heather Veitch and Annie Lobert at AEE 2007 Thursday.jpg isn't anything to do directly with this organisation either
• Conversely, the article would benefit from one of the pictures of the churches affilated with the organisation. Commons has many free images of buildings, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't one.

Summary

I've gone through the article now. There's a difficult balance to strike in the article, and plenty of BLP holes to fall down, but the sourcing and writing is generally good, and I've learned something through reading it. I'll put the article on hold pending improvements. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:45, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

• It's been a week without comment, the nominator has retired and a request on WT:GAN has been met with silence, so I'm afraid I'll have to close the review. @Neelix: - if you come back, drop me a line and we can pick the review back up again. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:01, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the thorough review, Ritchie! I have returned to editing Wikipedia, and I have implemented the majority of your recommendations. I believe that all of the exceptions are listed below, along with answers to the questions you asked:

• The phrase "an American evangelical organization of women in the sex industry" doesn't accurately describe JC's Girls; many of the women who are members of the organization have never had any involvement with the sex industry.
• It is not possible to add a page number to the Grecco source because this book is non-paginated.
• I don't see a reason to exclude WorldNetDaily from this article's sources; it receives editorial oversight, and the claims repeated in this article are not extreme.
• Softcore pornography is already linked in the "Ideology" section, so I did not add a duplicate link in the "Background" section.
• The Seattle Times source indicates that Veitch converted to Christianity without anyone telling her about Jesus, but does not explain how such a thing could occur. I could venture a guess, but I don't have an answer that I could support with a citation.
• Lori Albee's lack of experience with the sex industry prior to joining JC's Girls is important because it clarifies that the members of JC's Girls is not only made up of women who left the sex industry, but also of women who simply care about women in the sex industry. This doesn't seem like a BLP concern to me; it might be libelous to claim that someone has a history in the sex industry, but I don't think it's libelous to claim that someone does not have a history in the sex industry.
• I would love to add information about how the rest of the chapters disappeared, but I do not know how this happened, nor do I believe that this information has been recorded in published sources.
• I am not convinced that there is a difference between the terms "strip club" and "adult entertainment club". The Strip club article states that "strip clubs are venues that regularly provide adult entertainment." Also, despite the fact that the San Diego Magazine article uses the term "adult entertainment club", the article is clear that there were strippers at this club, so even if there is a difference between strip clubs and adult entertainment clubs, the relevant location referred to in this article is also a strip club.
• JC's Girls was initially a ministry of Sandals Church, so it would seem like strange wording to me if we were to say that "the church donated a $10,000 budget." Perhaps I'm not understanding what your concern is with the current wording.
• The Seattle Times source states that "Veitch has gotten back in shape," which I have reworded to "become more physically fit". I am under the impression that these two phrases mean the same thing, but we can reword if you disagree.
• Issuu.com is not the source cited here; it is simply hosting an interactive image of an issue of the Strip Church magazine. I have been in e-mail contact with Brown, and she has said that she does not have any concerns with the information contained in this article. The statement about Brown being sexually abused also appears on the JC's Girls official website here.
• We do know what Prejean's response to the question about same-sex marriage was, but I haven't added this information because, as the subsequent sentence in the article indicates through a statement by Scher, same-sex marriage is not relevant to the activities of JC's Girls. Especially in a section that you have singled out as being too long, including this information would be an excessive amount of detail that is barely related to the subject of this article.
• I think it important to clarify that the protests were occurring on both sides of the situation in Warsaw, Ohio. Brown was there to negotiate peace between the two parties, not to convince a single party to back down.
• I agree that the Christian Post source implies that the women were tempted back to the sex industry, but because this idea is implied so vaguely, I am unsure as to how we might add more information on this point without going beyond what we can source.
• I am reluctant to rename the "Original website" section because a simpler title would suggest that the content of this section refers to the organization's current website, which it does not. It is possible that the original website was taken down because it was so controversial, but I don't have any sources to back up that statement. The current website has been so uncontroversial that it hasn't merited any press coverage as far as I can tell, so there isn't anything to be written about it here, beyond a link in the "External links" section.
• The WPVI-TV source is housed on the American Broadcasting Company website, which is widely considered to be reliable.
• Raëlians did not simply make a statement about JC's Girls, but created their own organization in opposition to them. This seems like very important information to include in this article. If an Islamic group reacted to JC's Girls in some way and this information were recorded in a reliably published source, I would be glad to add this information as well, but I do not know of any such sources.
• I am surprised by your objections to the images in this article, and I'm not quite sure what to make of them. The images seem to me to be directly relevant to the subject of the article and the relevant sections, and I can think of very little that would be more relevant, especially in the cases of the specific images you mention. I notice that Prhartcom reverted your removal of these images. I don't think that these images should be removed unless there is broader community consensus that they are insufficiently relevant.

• These are images of the JC's Girls, the subject of the article. They are free images. It's an open and shut case. Yes, it doesn't say "JC's girls" in the background, but that is not a problem; these are the girls themselves. Your friend didn't want to read the article because she saw pictures of the girls themselves in an "unflattering light"? I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. Please drop this argument. I do apologise for having to revert you though, Ritchie333, I don't believe I've ever had to do that before. You make a good point that it would be nice to show images of the girls working at the church; I suppose Neelix has already looked for such an image but he may give it another try. Cheers, all. Prhartcom (talk) 02:35, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you again for going through this article and its sources so thoroughly. I hope that I have addressed most of your concerns, and I would be glad to discuss any remaining concerns you might have. Neelix (talk) 01:57, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back! I seem to recall going through the original comments thinking this was going to be a tough job, and there are still quite a few things to sort out. However, I am going to have to stand my ground on images - just because you can use information, it doesn't follow that you should, and I think it's okay for off-wiki friends to have opinions on content. For example, this widely distributed image isn't free, but if it was, I wouldn't suggested using it as the infobox picture for Ed Milliband. Remember that Wikipedia is in the real world and that readers, especially casual ones, may never have any desire to edit so you may miss important feedback. If people are put off reading an article by an image they weren't expecting, they won't learn anything about the content, which is a shame really. As I said above, this article involves numerous living people in a sensitive topic area, so I think we really have to be careful.

As for moving forward, I think the best cause of action (and what ultimately happened with Widener Library, for example) is to start a new GA review and get a third party to review it. I don't believe Prhartcom has heavily edited the article, so he could do it, and ChrisGualtieri was interested in helping too. In either case, I think that will lead us to a fairer result that reflects consensus. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:37, 10 March 2015 (UTC)