User talk:Skyvine/(Notes/Draft): CeaseFire Cure Violence

Worklog

Old material from Cure Violence talk page

I'm digging through old newspaper articles about CeaseFire/Cure Violence, it'll probably take a while but I'll share a draft of what I have here (UPDATE: notes/draft now on a user subpage) for collaborative purposes. Note that this draft is just what I'm finding in the newspapers, I'll merge it with the existing content later. Each city name is intended as a heading, but I'm keeping them as plain text in the talk page to avoid confusion with topics. Skyvine (talk) 22:27, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

UPDATE: I'll use subheadings, it doesn't seem to be too confusing that way. I'm organizing everything by city right now because that seems a natural way to do it while I'm collecting notes, but it might not end up that way. I already have at least one separate section, about the 2007 budget cut in Illinois, because it's a cross-city issue. There's some comments about efficacy in that section, but it's all a public perception or public claims of efficacy. The actual research on efficacy will be in a separate section that I'll look at once history is complete. The claims of efficacy are historically relevant because they might impact future budget decisions (I'm getting the impression that they will eventually get funding restored, since people keep pushing for it, but I haven't gotten that far yet NO SPOILERS XP), and even if they don't they are still notable evidence of public perception. The articles sometimes cite actual research which I'm noting down for use in the efficacy section. Skyvine (talk) 20:21, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

UPDATE: I moved the notes/draft to a user subpage because I read somewhere that's common and it seems like it's a lot of clutter for the talk page, not to mention the references appearing below a separate topic instead of the end of the draft.

Currently, I'm expecting to end up with an abbreviated history section discussing the origins and expansion, then organize everything else into 3 sections: "Efficacy", discussing academic research on the impact; "Partner Organizations", discussing how they work with hospitals, schools, and traditional law enforcement; and "Criticisms", discussing the periodic comments I'm seeing about CeaseFire being untrustworthy or "rewarding felons" by working closely with former gang members. I can also discuss Hardiman's dismissal here, as well as a possibly noteworthy story about a person leading a gang while working for CeaseFire. Skyvine (talk) 23:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

UPDATE: I spent some time restructuring the content into a more encyclopedic form/voice. I also started some prep work on the main article by splitting the "Evaluation" section into 3 subsections: "Evidence", "Criticisms", and "Notable Endorsements". I'm not really happy with the listicle format of the endorsements, but that can be fixed later. It's easier to integrate the evaluation incrementally because things can be added piecemeal, but I don't think that updating the history piecemeal would leave the article in a good state for readers. Skyvine (talk) 01:20, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

New Material

Continued mostly minor changes to the cure violence page, such as correcting typos and updating infobox metadata. Moved the worklog to this page (yes, the very one you are reading right now!) and updated the contents of the talk page to explain my intentions more broadly, so that it's actually useful to anyone. Also "merged" the violence interruption page and decided not to merge the credible messenger program page, see notes on the Cure Violence talk page for details. Finally, I updated my user page because apparently making bad faith edits for money is a significant problem as evidenced by its discussion in the TOU (updates look cool!), and I want to make it clear that that is not me, in spite of the fact that I am putting a lot of work into updating the page of one specific organization and it's probably pretty clear to anyone paying attention that I personally look favorably upon the organization (as mentioned on my user page, NPOV is important to me, and I welcome feedback if I have allowed my personal viewpoint to corrupt my editorial work). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skyvine (talk • contribs) 01:29, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Went through 2015 and 2016. There are far fewer interesting sources, most of the time CeaseFire is mentioned it's offhand comments about how a thing happened in the past or there's an article which discusses a person that used to work for CeaseFire. I'm also searching "cure violence", but that has missed most of the interesting stuff even after the renaming. The local org is still called CeaseFire, Cure Violence is the larger coordinating body. I think the current history draft might be too detailed on Chicago in particular, it's a weird thing to figure out though because what was originally CeaseFire Chicago split into 2 organizations, CeaseFire to continue the local work and Cure Violence to oversee all programs. So the original Chicago history is deserving of extra weight, but it's not clear where that should end. I suspect that it will become more clear once I start looking into other local programs such as the one in NYC, because then it will become clearer when it moved from local to national (apparently to global as well?), and the common threads across locations will become clearer. At this time, it doesn't seem like it makes sense to have separate articles for each local program, and even if they did it would be difficult to discuss CV without discussing the local programs it works with so some amount of content on different local programs makes sense, but trying to be exhaustive would probably not be useful to readers. I don't really see anything about CV in particular, but since I'm just looking at Illinois newspapers at the moment that makes sense. I should probably broaden my search to national organizations talking about CV instead of zooming in on a different local program, once I'm done with Chicago. Which will hopefully be soon, I'm 16 years into their 23-year history, and the pace of notable stories is slowing down. Still lots and lots of stories about cease-fires happening that aren't actually about CeaseFire though. >.< skyvine 🏳️‍⚧️ (talk) 01:54, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Still in "collecting sources mode". I've gone through all of the relevant articles in Illinois, also searched some online-only sites, but not much new came up. My main takeaways from all of this are that funding instability is notable, media outlets rarely say anything negative (I specifically searched RealClearPolitics to find anything critical since ground news rates it as the only lean-right outlet in Chicago and it's mixed factuality [this is typical for reputable and large publishers], but only a single article mentioned them and didn't say anything substantial), and there are significant tensions between them and cops in spite of some semi-successful attempts at collaboration. I'm going to try to find sources from national outlets next, then move on to NYC. skyvine 🏳️‍⚧️ (talk) 01:05, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot less info about the history in NYC compared to Chicago. I suspect that the amount of reporting on them during the first decade or so of their existence is not representative of what I can generally expect to find. For history, I think it does make sense to talk about the early Chicago history in detail, since that was how it got started. And it would be useful to have the other histories as well if the information was available, but it's not. That's no reason to exclude the information that is available though. I'll edit what I have to fit with this approach and go through the current article contents again to make sure that I'm merging not just replacing. Other implementing sites can be mentioned, even if they can't be discussed in detail. The next most important thing is to go over the studies on the program to create a more robust evidence section. skyvine 🏳️‍⚧️ (talk) 17:32, 21 March 2023 (UTC)