Talk:Marcia Herndon/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: CorbieVreccan (talk · contribs) 22:45, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

I suggest this be put on hold while the Bio subject's claims of involvement/membership in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are checked. There are things in the article that just don't line up, and evaluating for other encyclopedic criteria is premature while foundational issues of reliability and verifiability of the data are still uncertain and quite probably incorrect. The issue has been raised at the Indigenous Wikiproject for further input and discussion. - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 22:45, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Initial feedback is looking really bad. Obituaries are never used as RS sources as they are not generally fact-checked, and the three main sources here are all obits. One of the main sources used here, the JStor obit by her colleague Carolina Robertson, is full of howling inaccuracies, but has been treated as a reliable source. It cannot be used to source issues of Native identity, involvement in Indigenous community, etc. as the info is not credible. I think her friend simply took at face value and repeated tall tales told by the bio subject without any investigation. - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 01:01, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Context is everything. When she was beginning to teach, termination as a policy was ending and tribes were reestablishing their sovereignty. As you say, universities didn't check and people could get by with making claims. For the record, when I picked up the AfC draft, it had all sorts of OR about her Cherokee work. I trimmed all of that and pointed out that it was unlikely that she was Cherokee. I also pinged Yuchitown to look at it and agreed with ARoseWolf that it should be posted on the Indigenous project page. I have absolutely no problems whatsoever with Cherokee being removed entirely, though without a note about the problem, a drive-by editor may well reinsert the claims. One of the reasons I nominated it was to get more eyes on it. A note on your statement about obits, that would hold true for standard obituaries. The two main ones I used were academic obituaries. Ethnomusicology is peer-reviewed and the Bulletin of the International Council for Traditional Music is refereed. In any case, that doesn't mean they are free of errors, but academic obituaries in peer-reviewed journals are not the same as a paid obit or one that is written by family for a newspaper publication. Thanks for picking it up. SusunW (talk) 04:57, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Has anyone checked out her collection at the University of Maryland? It is very clear where she got her stories, her 'medicine knowledge', her knowledge of language etc. If she had picked this up in community she would have met with Walker Calhoun. Her field notes are all listed in the collection and he is not mentioned. Not only was he the authority on tradtional Cherokee music within EBCI he also had considerable knowledge when it came to traditional medicine. But she's got a copy of Swimmers formulas. That's not learning in community, that's learning from a book and I've been told his formulas were written in code - don't know if there's truth to that or not. I highly doubt she was recognized as a storyteller by the community either. The Origin of Medicine can be found in a number of boks, she seemed pretty fond of Moody. Indigenous girl (talk) 21:53, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I have no way to access them, as I am in far southern Mexico. There is a contact the curator link in the description of her papers. It might be well worth shooting them an e-mail? I tried early but Mexico is blocked? or just my provider? SusunW (talk) 22:22, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * You can just look at the titles and see that she was reading hokey and actually taboo stuff. You can look and see who she interviewed and corresponded with. She had primers for the language. She had a little book on medicines that you can buy at Qualla at the gift shop. She had Moody's book. I closed the site so I can't remember everything, I know she has Swimmers formulas. It seems as though everything was culled from print. And her depiction of the pre-ballgame dance at Qualla differs drastically from what has been explained to me. Some of it is really insulting, like the part abut the fat lady. The elder I spoke to said that's bs, never happened doesn't happen now. Indigenous girl (talk) 23:36, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Here's the problem we have. Our OR has led us to the conclusion that she was more than likely not Cherokee and that her work on them is more than likely not based on insider knowledge or expertise. We have no independent sources that actually confirm our conclusions, or at least I found none. As I see it, we have two ways we can go: 1) we remove all references to anything Cherokee in the article or 2) only list the Cherokee articles in selected works but without further discussion in the article. Either way we go, I think we need a note explaining the omission so that others do not reinsert it. SusunW (talk) 13:05, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I noted that one user in the WIR discussion wants to wait till we're not paying attention and then put the notes back in, with nothing said about policy or consensus. One of the problems with all the notes that have been removed is they contained a significant amount of WP:OR and WP:COATRACK. A compromise would be hidden text in the places where some might be tempted to add the false claims. Another would be to cut the sources that have inaccurate info. I am strongly for cutting the bad sources. The Ethnomusicology obit, for example, despite being in an academic journal, was clearly not fact-checked. Anything calling her an Indigenous elder should not be used; it's too flawed. If text explaining the falsely claimed Cherokee heritage is put back in, in needs to be carefully written as to not be editorializing, opinion, or OR. I'm not really sure how to do that unless there's a source out there that discusses her making false claims. At the wikiproject we encounter these false claims in bios frequently. We usually just cut them, unless the false claims are a notable part of the person's bio and part of what they are notable for. But when this is the case, there are usually plenty of RS sources we can use that describe them as a pretendian. While this subject certainly made her career partially off these claims, she doesn't seem notable enough for anyone to have written about her fraud. I doubt the EBCI was even aware she was doing this. Unless someone can think of a sourced way to say something brief that doesn't violate policy, we might want to stick to hidden text, up where the grandparents are first mentioned, and possibly in the lede, as well. Also, though I'm responding to the discussion here, as it's where it's happening, I in no way think this article is, or is going to become, GA level. - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 19:23, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * that is not what I said in the WiR post. Please do not assume bad faith. Bringing the situation to wider discussion clearly shows that I am not going to "wait till we're not paying attention and then put the notes back in". I have not edited the article since the question was raised at the Indigenous wikproject on 22 May primarily because the edits need to be made by someone who is acting on behalf of the project, IMO. I'm also quite happy to withdraw the GA nomination and allow you to fail it, since in effect you started a review. SusunW (talk) 19:59, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * What you said was, "It's okay . Right now people are angry. I get it. It may be that when they are less so, the notes can be re-added. SusunW  ( talk ) 14:20, 23 May 2022 (UTC)" The objection is not due to "anger" on anyone's part, it's not wanting to use the 'pedia to perpetuate a hoax, or to violate policy. I'm not trying to start a fight, Susun; you're the one who assigned motives here. Peace, -  CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 21:53, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Exactly, I said notes might be able to be added (not will). Angry in the sense of when heads are cooler, when consensus can be had. I did not say we can sneak them in, or we can wait until no one is looking. You said that. I cannot speak for your intent, but your words to me indicated that I had tried to hide something (and was planning on a future nefarious action), which is the exact opposite of bringing it to the community because there is a problem. I accept your olive branch of peace. SusunW (talk) 22:20, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree with Corbie, no one is angry, that's a common assumption. We simply want the 'pedia to express honesty and factual information. I also agree that this article is not at the GA level as it stands. I have some thoughts on how to source that she was a pretendian but it may take some time. Susan, up at the top you said,"Context is everything. When she was beginning to teach, termination as a policy was ending and tribes were reestablishing their sovereignty." there was also a huge influx of pretendians at this time. Doug Durham, John Walter Pope aka Rolling Thunder, Ward Churchilll, Francis Talbot aka Medicine Story just to name a few. Not only did Marcia not tell the truth about her ancestry, she lied about various things within the community and put this information in her works. She lied to her contemporaries, inflating herself into some kind of healer. There is nothing backing up her claims aside from her own words which were then filtered through her colleagues. I would, personally, rather see no mention of her claims of indigeneity however include her works on the topic. If somebody comes at a later date and tries to add the claims they can be reverted and we can take it to talk. We've done this with far more famous individuals and it's worked. Indigenous girl (talk) 12:20, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * , I honestly hope that you are able to find sources to expose the pretense and I appreciate your work to try to document it. I work on a lot of biographies about contentious people and I usually fall on the side of include the good, the bad, and the ugly. History should be balanced and encompass all sides of an issue. In my opinion, omitting the full picture is why society has so many misunderstandings. But, as I said above, I also believe that the indigenous project should be the ones to make the decision on how this situation is handled. As for whether it could pass an objective review based solely on the GA criteria, I think it could, but I think it wouldn't. It is unimportant whether the article is or it isn't a GA, the point of a review, in my mind, is always to make it the best article that we can. SusunW (talk) 13:46, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Can you not use one of the bad sources as a "reliable" source for its own claim, then immediately follow it with the evidence that she does not have Cherokee heritage? "Her obituary in academicjournal says 'claimaboutheritage'. However, none of her grandparents' family names appear on the Baker Roll." That both clearly avoids putting the erroneous claim into wikipedia voice, and avoids WP:OR. (The Baker Roll is just being used for the basic fact of "not on the roll", and the bad source becomes a "primary" source for "this is exactly what is says".) -- asilvering (talk) 21:42, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * If nothing else the sources with the misinformation are WP:V that colleagues state that she made the claims. There is WP precedent for using something like that to put in a footnote that the claim was made but no evidence was found. As long as, as you say, it's just the basics. - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 22:01, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Better to put it in the main text than a footnote, imo, especially when there is concern about perpetuating a false narrative about her identity. -- asilvering (talk) 23:06, 24 May 2022 (UTC)