Talk:Thomas Bartlett Whitaker

Note regarding auto-generated issue tags in edit summaries, for recent major edits

With regard to recent edits of this article, the WP bot system that is running has generated issue tags in the edit summaries, in particular

• Tag: possible unreferenced addition to BLP [repeatedly], and
• Tag: references removed [a few of these].

In neither case are these tags truly accurate to the editing that has been done. The foci of these edits have been to

• properly organise the content (dealing with all trial content in one place, same with appeals, commutation, etc.);
• properly source all content from independent/third-party, and secondary sources, and
• to present the citations to all sources in a consistent manner.

The major aim of identifying biased and otherwise unreliable content, and misused or otherwise unreliable sources remains to be accomplished.

The issue tags have been generated in the process of these aims. The only basis for the appearance of the "addition to BLP" issue tag in the edit summaries is our changing the location of already appearing, unreferenced content placed by earlier editors of the article. Any time new content that has been added, it has been added with a new, reliable source.

With regard to the removal of references, please see the next section. Generally, little of this has actually happened, and when it has, it was either temporary (until a new, reliable source could be placed), or it us called for under WP:VERIFY and WP:RELIABLESOURCES.

2601:246:C700:558:D87:7AFA:6C0D:481A (talk) 17:38, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Major edit to make article structure chronological, consistent, etc., and to reduce Whitaker sourcing of article

The aims of the recent major edits are stated above. There is one further thorny issue that must be addressed regarding the earlier and continuing sourcing of this article, about Thomas Bartlett Whitaker (TBW).

In the editing to remove redundancies of content, and to make the article structure chrono/logical and consistent, and the citations reliable and consistent in format, two problematic citations with regard to WP:NPOV were discovered, and a third general WP:VER issue was identified.

The citations were to work published, directly or indirectly by the convicted felon himself, or by his immediate family (in particular, his father). The identified problematic works include (in inverse order):

• Whitaker, Kent (2008). Murder by Family: The Incredible True Story of a Son's Treachery and a Father's Forgiveness. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781439139981. Retrieved January 6, 2022.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) See also this archived version, ISBN 9781416578130, which requires registration for access. This is a full-length treatment of much of the history of the son's murder case, by the father, Kent (KW).
• ABC News Staff & Whitaker, Kent (January 19, 2009). "'Murder by Family': Read Shocking Excerpt". ABCNews.go.com. Retrieved January 4, 2022.</ref> Apart from a short introduction, ostensibly from the ABC News staff (and therefore presumably fact-checked), the bulk of this citation is to a long excerpt from the same book, by the father.
• Various references to content at the website "Thomas Bartlett Whitaker (TX)". Minutesbeforesix.com. 2017-04-25. Retrieved 2017-04-25. This is the website founded by the convicted subject of this article, TBW (with, per other published records, the outside assistance of his father), a site that presents, extensively, his writings, and records of his trial (see link contained within the citation), a site functioning under his control (i.e., as a personal website). Despite now having a voluteer staff, he remains listed as the Creative Advisor, in addition to being a founder. And while the site now accepts contributors from across the American penal system, it began as a venue for TBW to post his own work; the Contributors tab at the home page continues to feature TBW's image. There is no gainsaying that TBW historically presented his own perspective via this site, and there is little evidence to argue that this does not continue to be a venue for him to do so.

In addition, there was and is a continuing issue with other autobiographical source material in this article—material from interviews of TBW and KW, and author bio and award recipient webpages, where, absent evidence that it undergoes fact-checking by the posting organisation, such content constitutes non-independent, autobiographical information unsuited to encyclopedic writing. This is a general issue at Wikipedia, and while being attended to for this article, it is a secondary issue at present.

For the state of the article with respect to the use of these issues, see this earlier version. In this earlier version, 19 historical sentences cited the two KW sources (book and excerpt), and overall, 12 of the 36 total non-legal (non-case law) article citations were citations to works authored directly by TDW or KW (TEN from TDW and TWO from KW).

Actions taken

1. All citations to the "minutesbeforesix.com" site that constituted non-independent sourcing of purported factual, historical content of the events reported in this article—early life, description of the murders, investigation and trial, appeals, and commutation—were hidden from sight (removed via <!-- markup), and tags were placed in their steads. There were two exceptions to this, a quote from TDW, indicating his response to the commutation (where a personal view and source were appropriate), and the statement in the article communicating that TDW had founded the blog in question (where citing the blog as a second source was appropriate).
2. All appearances of TDW sources in the citation list that were not otherwise justifiable were removed. For instance, there were several appearances stating that TDW had won writing awards while in prison, that—rather than citing a news source stating that he had won an award, instead—presented a citation for an online source of the piece that was purported to have won the award (i.e., the citation failed to support the factual content of the sentence, instead promoting the written work of the TDW). All such cases were removed as citations (e.g., with the information salvaged in a new "Writings" text section), but with tags placed in each instance, calling for a news citation.
3. All appearances of the repeated citation of the KW book and excerpt were allowed to remain, but were marked with inline tags, to indicate that the content needed to be checked, and the citation supplemented or replaced.

Further important issues

At least two additional content reliability issues were identified, which will be summarised here. As preface, note that the problems that arise with regard to these issues are accentuated by the observation—from initial attempts to verify content—that the article repeatedly reflects an earlier pattern of placing inline citations where content does not match source. That is to say, it appears that text was composed, and then sources that were not actually the sources from which content was drawn were added as the inline citations, leading to appearances of purported facts not actually appearing in the inline citations provided. This again is a common problem at WP, and is only highlighted here as a matter of context for the preceding and following problems. (See also close of this comment, for ongoing work on this.) With regard to other problems identified:

FIRST, there are repeated references to the following reliable book source,

• Mitchell, Corey (2010). Savage Son. New York: Kensington/Pinnacle. ISBN 9780786020133. Retrieved January 4, 2020.

After extensive checking to find this source online, it was concluded that its full text is not available—other editors are invited to find such a source, and to replace the URL in this appearing citation. (The references currently contain the statement "Note, no access to content is apparently available online." for this reason.) The problem that arises with regard to this unavailability is that there is little reason for confidence, based on verification checking to date, that all of the content of the sentences to which these book citations are appended were actually drawn from the book (see the preface to this issue, immediately above). Given disparities already found (see close of this comment), it appears necessary to check these portions of text against this source—something not possible for editor's that do not possess a hard copy of the book. A further issue here is that the original citations are only to chapters, not page numbers, making the verification all the more onerous. (Chapters referenced are now (given the preface to this issue, immediately above) noted using {{rp markup, e.g. , and a tag is attached.)

SECOND, and more technically challenging, various sections in the past attempted in unscholarly and possible dissembling fashion to cite one or more psychological evaluations of TDW, profiles that are unavailable in any reliable form online. Statements such as

A 2009 psychological evaluation, performed in relation to a trial, noted that after high school Whitaker was given "unearned trappings of wealth" and that his thoughts became increasingly disorganized.

were presented with this paucity of reliable sourcing. Specifically, with regard to these cases,

• the evaluation(s) are only apparently available via a non-independent, self-published (and arguably self-serving) source, the minutesbeforesix.blogspot;
• this one source clearly provided what constitutes a primary source, unaccompanied by a secondary interpretive source, thereby setting WP editors up for violations of WP:Original research in their efforts;
• there is otherwise a lack of clarity in the text, and to some extent the citation, regarding relevant dates (date that the evaluation was ordered, period of TDW's life that the evaluation was seeking to cover, etc.);
• there was no factual content to provide context for the evaluation(s), in particular, no statement such as "ordered independently by the defense" (which appears at least in one instance to have been the case), and therefore, no supporting verifiable source related to such critical contextual information; and finally
• there is a glaring failure to provide independent, supportive citations regarding the defendant's state of mind from other comprehensive sources appearing; that is to say, while Corey Mitchell's Savage Son appears as a citation, it is nowhere cited in reference to defendant state of mind, likewise for KW's Murder by Family (yet a poor source, but still better than none in providing insight to be otherwise checked), or for any other appearing source.

(The phrase "[o]ne or more" was used above, because this editor, an academic but lacking legal training, found it impossible, comparing the the source provided to portions of text to which the evaluation citation was attached, to ascertain whether only one evaluation was being referenced, versus more than one was being used—i.e., in the latter case, based on mentions in book/other sources, with editors conflating the multiple evaluations, and therefore omitting other needed sources. This confusion is engendered in part by the evaluation being used to describe state/behaviour well before the crime—see the mention of a 2009 evaluation, quoted above, used in reference to youthful circumstances—as well as in support of a defense based in part on mental state relevant to criminal acts committed in 2003, in a trial for those acts that ended in 2004.)

The action taken here was to hide such purported case-relevant defendent psychology statements from view, as being given inadequate context and being unsourced independently, but to leave it readily available to future editors as <!-- hidden notes. If these sentences are ever returned, each appearance must make clear when the relevant evaluation was ordered, the context of the order (i.e., what legal proceeding), whether it was ordered by prosecutors or by the defense , and then all of this must cite independent sources (i.e., not be hand-selected personal postings of TDW).

Bottom line with regard to this last point: it is wholly inappropriate to cite a blog written by the article's title subject (and a convicted murderer) to provide content for the description of the facts of the history of his own proceedings, in particular with regard to the criminal's motivations and state of mind.

—————

To conclude, I would note four things currently mentioned/contained in the two article tags appearing:

• that given the past serious issue of sourcing purported facts from convict's blog (cites removed) and father's book (cites remain), and other sourcing concerns (like the inability to verify content from Mitchell's Savage Son), the article needs to be checked for bias;
• that given the experience to date with checking particular sentences against the citations appended to them, or to paragraph ends, there is a dire need in the article to check it comprehensively, top-to-bottom, with regard to the accuracy of content versus appearing sources—for instance, checking the first paragraph of the earlier appearing "Murders" section resulted in almost all of that content being marked (because it did not appear in the single cited KW excerpt work)—and, accordingly, there will be a need to edit content to sources eventually found (i.e., to provide further sources and extract from them in place of what now appears), and so the likely need to remove existing content;
• that there is a widespread, general need to provide more and better (reliable, verifiable) sources for the article; and finally,
• that attention from a legal expert is needed, to provide secondary references and opinions from them, in place of case- (primary source-) derived WP:OR on the succession of cases associated with this article (referenced in the various sections, including the case chronology list), and to ensure the published and esp. the unpublished cases are properly cited.

At present, until the top-to-bottom check for bias and check of statement accuracy against source is performed, the cleanup tag should remain. Likewise with regard to the check of the appearing legal information, and the tag calling for an expert.

Cheers, and HNY from this former academic, now ending vacation and returning to honest labour. 2601:246:C700:558:D87:7AFA:6C0D:481A (talk) 20:32, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

What I would do is just rely on the newspaper accounts and any independent (not by the subject or the subject's family). I think it's going to be difficult to find a legal expert who has free time and expertise to really tangle through legal motions. I think it will be easier to rely on a college student w free time who can just parse through the sources I mentioned and write a reasonable summary for the Average Joe (which is Wikipedia's main audience). WhisperToMe (talk) 05:27, 26 September 2024 (UTC)