Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Media reports of persons hospitalized involving the 2019 vaping lung illness outbreak

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge to 2019 outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 05:51, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Media reports of persons hospitalized involving the 2019 vaping lung illness outbreak

Media reports of persons hospitalized involving the 2019 vaping lung illness outbreak (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Proposing merge and redirect to 2019 outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products (which I already did but which was reverted). Most of the content of this article is a list of individual cases, which seems like excessive detail. I think it would be better to simply give statistics and describe the general pattern of illness, which we already do on 2019 outbreak of lung illness linked to vaping products and Vaping-associated pulmonary injury. There have been thousands of cases, and there doesn't seem to be anything in particular to justify inclusion of these particular cases directly from newspaper reports, so it seems like this is verging on original research. It may also be original research to say that these cases are affirmatively part of this outbreak without being confirmed by an official health agency. The introduction makes some sweeping claims that exaggerate the outbreak by being less than specific and using breathless. Some parts of the intro give how-to information, and talk about smoking cessation in a way that seems a bit one-sided and somewhat off-topic - and that's already covered at electronic cigarette. The only part of the article I thought needed merging was the list of lawsuits, which seem individually more notable. -- Beland (talk) 22:16, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and I should have at least pointed out WP:NOTNEWS. -- Beland (talk) 23:45, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge and redirect - if the media reports are worth noting, they'll already be references in the main article; and large swathes of the content were, last I looked, direct cut'n'pastes (not sure in which direction). If the media reports are a story, cite those RS stories about the media coverage, rather than enumerating the media coverage. (Enumerating media coverage as if it's a story in itself is an unfortunately common form of on-wiki puffery and synthesis.) - David Gerard (talk) 22:24, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Health and fitness-related deletion discussions. SharabSalam (talk) 22:33, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. SharabSalam (talk) 22:33, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge and redirect I agree with this proposal. I've been following this article since it was created because I found it so confusing: the way the title reads, I was expecting an article about the media coverage of the illness, but instead it seemed to become just a coatrack for every sick person story that mentions vaping. (In the article, the word "media" only occurs twice, in the context of social media, which makes the title even more misleading.) There are already existing articles on the outbreak. This article seems to be an excuse to dwell on symptoms and harms of vaping without a real context. Schazjmd (talk) 22:45, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. The main article is focused on the outbreak rather the media reports. There was a discussion about a split. The main article is way too long for a merge and there are over 50 citations in the new article. The new article is a notable topic. QuackGuru (talk) 23:01, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Has the duplication been removed? Is it merely a list of coverage - or are those 50 citations to RSes talking about the actual media coverage as their primary topic of discussion? - David Gerard (talk) 23:12, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Most of the citations are in support of the stories of specific people. When those are removed, I think the article is too short to be viable on its own. So the question of merging largely in my mind comes down to whether that content should be kept or deleted. -- Beland (talk) 23:45, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • So a string of anecdotes that failed the editorial cut in the main article? - David Gerard (talk) 23:47, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well, editors can make their own judgements; I would cut them from either article. -- Beland (talk) 02:53, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep We often have sections on notable cases of disease X. Slitting it off into a subpage is fine.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:22, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hmm, if you're sure ... A lot of this stuff, and pages and sections of this sort, is an attempt to get coverage that fails WP:MEDRS into medical articles. This one in particular, and the main article, used to include references to The Sun and the Daily Mail, for instance, which one editor tried repeatedly to edit back in. But if you think this sort of thing can work ... - David Gerard (talk) 02:17, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not sure what makes these cases notable, though, in the sense of being significant in the course of the outbreak. They seem to be just random people who happen to have been victims of the outbreak who have been covered by the press as individual examples. -- Beland (talk) 02:52, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • David Gerard, you claimed one editor tried to repeatedly to edit back in is historical revisionism. QuackGuru (talk) 09:44, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Change title and focus, keep Note - I regularly comment on QuackGuru's public discussions as I know this user as a regular from WikiProject Medicine where we are both participants.

The content of article is not about media. Instead it is a list of cases for a 2019 epidemic presented in prose. Change the title to something like "Cases in 2019 vaping lung illness outbreak". If this content gets merged into the main article, then immediately someone will say that it is undue and delete it. I described this pattern of Notable article-> AFD-> Merge-> UNDUE in an essay at Wikipedia:Removal of Wikipedia articles on notable topics. Public health content like this often comes from news and not medical journals so I accept journalism here and am not expecting academic sourcing. A similar public health issue which we cover from journalism is Category:Mass shootings in the United States by decade, where there is an article for every month based on local news coverage. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:49, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete The opposite of what an encyclopedia should be doing. Th epidemic is of course notable , and the press coverage of it will be in the main article. The individual hospitalizations are not. Collecting this sort of primary information of what is after all trivial events individually isundue emphasis. Bluerasberry, would you suport similar articles for a list of everyone who was hospitalized in the opioid epidemic? of heart disease? DGG ( talk ) 10:17, 26 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@DGG: I see your point that having such articles for all diseases is not useful. For heart disease I would never support because it is routine. For opioid epidemic, I would support a list for the early days of media coverage, but not now 20 years into the epidemic when it is normal. I think that I would support list articles for deaths at the beginning of an epidemic when the concept of dying in a new way is itself the focus of the story. If someone dies of heart disease now, they would only be in media if they themselves are media worthy, and not because of their cause of death. We have a similar article in List of HIV-positive people. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:11, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As I recall from the 1980s-90s and even after, much of the interest in whether a person had AIDS was from homophobia, especially for public figures still in the closet, as almost all gay public figures were at the time. Thus the argument can be made that the listings have historical relevance. I do not think vaping is parallel.

Additionally, I am surprised nobody has mention the blp implications of our reporting on the medical record of named living individuals without their consent. Previous practice has been that thefact that the reports have sources from relatively minor press coverage does not justify putting it in an encyclopedia . DGG ( talk ) 19:40, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. The article is well-cited, and given how current the topic is, this information should have a Wikipedia presence on its own. --- FULBERT (talk) 16:11, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.