Wikipedia:Peer review/Emergency/archive1

Emergency

We have built up the article Emergency from being a DAB page in to a real article, with both unique and summary content from other pages. I'd like to improve it further, but have a bit of a mental block as to where to focus my efforts. If anyone can give direction to help, that would be great, and it might even make FA! Thanks very much Owain.davies 06:19, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Circusandmagicfan

Review A major problem with this article is that in some aspects it is too general while in others it has a tendency towards being too specific. Don't get me wrong, I think this is an important subject area and the editors concerned have clearly put some hard work into trying to produce an encyclopaedic article. But perhaps some thought needs to be given to the scope and perhaps even to re-titling in order to clarify the definition of the subject.

The difficulty is that the word "emergency" has many subtle variations in meaning even when one is being specific to the field of disaster and emergency management (which itself has subtle variations depending on country and context - for example the umbrella "Civil Contingencies Planning" is often the term used in government circles in the UK). In government/state contexts the term "emergency" will tend to imply the "Dangers to life/health/property/environment" types of definition mentioned in the article. However in commercial organisations the term emergency will often be found in conjunction with terms such as "Business Continuity Management". This is relevant because the work of business continuity management and the work of government emergency planners overlaps and is increasingly interlinked, however the two fields also have differences. On top of this, there are circumstances in which emergency management might also involve public relations and protection of reputation issues.

Even if it is possible to define the subject in a way that constrains it to government/public-sector activity in coping with "Danger to life/health/property/environment" events, there is still the problem of variations from country to country, which are substantial. I just don't think it is possible to write very much in a generic way. Perhaps the answer is to take a new approach to the initial definition of the subject: don't try to come up with a definitive list of characteristics for disasters and try to avoid being too detailed. Leave the detail for more specific situations and instead go for a general preamble stating that in most countries there are arrangements for dealing with incidents or events which threaten life, health, property, the environment, the economy or security on a large scale. There are also arrangements for dealing with events on an international scale or where international assistance is required. Then sub-divide into international and national sections. Then within the national section you need to sub-divide into examples of specific countries. Although the editors have made an effort to acknowledge the fact that there are variations between countries the article still reads as having a US-centric perspective in places. I acknowledge that there are a significant number of references to information sources from the UK and other countries but the way they are used seems to miss the "big picture" of how planning has moved on from the old-style approach of thinking in isolation about traditionally defined "emergencies". The current approach, in the UK at least, is centred around concepts such as "resilience" (see http://www.ukresilience.info), which involves an integrated effort to plan for a rather broader range of threats than old-style emergency planning in recognition of the fact that there is a lot of commonality in terms of requirements, agencies and resources involved. (I know UK planners liaised closely with people such as OEM in the USA when developing the new approach and that US Homeland Security is also a reflection of this combination of integration and broadening of scope).

I note that there are links to other articles which seem to be intended to go into more detail on topics such as Emergency Management Principles (which in turn link to pieces on more specialised and precisely defined subjects such as CHALET). I'm not sure what the article here adds to those more specific articles. Is this intended to be a central core article for the Disaster management WikiProject? If so what does this achieve that is not covered by Emergency management? If this is to be purely about the definition of "emergency" then isn't that a task for dictionary rather than an encyclopaedia? Perhaps it is necessary to go back to the Disaster management WikiProject and consider how this article fits into the structure. Circusandmagicfan 17:12, 23 July 2007 (UTC)Circusandmagicfan

Automated review

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You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, DrKiernan 09:15, 20 July 2007 (UTC)