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Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
After a fair bit of simple citation checking and completing, I've added tags to indicate the issues that remain as I depart today. This article has multiple issues. In particular,
This article's lede does not adequately summarize its contents, covering only the smallest part of it. In particular, it presents only one aspect of the subject's judicial decisions and broader career, and does this citing a 13-14 year old local attack-piece dating back to his first federal bench nomination. Likewise, the "Cases argued" subsection is based almost solely on this source. For these 11 (eleven!) uses of this old, biased source, the article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.
In this article's "Early life and education" section and the opening of its "career" section, spot-checking showed discrepancies between appearing inline citations and article content. Moreover, considerable sourcing here remains from the autobiographical Federalist Society, FJC Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, and Georgetown award sources—sources too closely associated with the subject, and so potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral—rather than from entirely third-party, independent sources. As a result of the spot-checking, some earlier citations were removed as being completely discrepant from the article content (e.g., the Waltham local paper article, which gives none of the details of the sentence to which it was attached, and so is now in Further reading). Hence. this biography of a living person is also tagged as needing additional citations for verification.
Critically, this article's "Notable rulings" subsection relies all but entirely on references to primary sources—it repeatedly cites the primary case law, and no sources like reviews and analyses of others, and so is likely significantly a case of WP:OR (Wikipedia editor-expressed expertise, in selecting and interpreting the decisions, rather than these decisions coming from published sources).
FInally, the "Affiliations and recognition" section, perhaps again a result of earlier bias, mentions only one award, an alumni award, and states none of the other ways in which this judge has been recognized by his peers, as described in the many articles that appeared in the run up to the 45th POTUS' nomination of another. Hence, an expand section tag is placed on this section.
There are links for inexperienced editors to learn how and when to remove the template messages (links appearing within the tag messages). Please discuss any issues with these tags or other edits at this Talk entry, or begin to rectify the issues without discussion if doing so constructively (i.e., not simply reverting, but by replacing R. Lord (2013) and autobiographical sources, adding citations where facts are unsupported, etc.). Cheers, Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 18:42, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
