User:SnowyCinema/Post

The dispute thus far has mainly been over how much content exactly should be included and excluded about the death of Alden Brock. The problem is that the flood itself, in general, happened in lots of camps throughout Philmont. However, the subset of the flood, which arguably made the flood gain notability in the first place, is the death of this young Scout, something that has never happened before in the history of Philmont and shocked many people nationwide, especially other Scouters. The whole paradox here is that the general aspects are less noteworthy than the specific, more individual incident. The paradox is also that because of this, content in the article was getting mixed up with each other; one moment you're talking about general stuff, and the next you're talking about what happened with Alden Brock, or what Brock's situation was, or how people reacted to Brock's death.

The state of the article currently, as I'd split the articles, is minimal; it now mostly talks about the general aspects of the flood, and leaves out the death of Alden Brock, except in one single section that notes it and a few sentences in the lede. That would actually be fine with me in most cases, I mean the flood article looks really good at this point in its current revision as noted on User talk:Barkeep49 (besides the section about Brock, maybe a few more sentences could be added and it definitely needs to be cited now that the "main article" was reverted back to a redirect). But something tells me that this revision still just doesn't tell enough.

Please also note that a lot of this article I wrote when I was younger, and age/experience can make a huge difference on the way one writes, so content of older revisions might not necessarily reflect my current views on what should happen with the article.

The problem remains that I don't want to go off-topic too much, but some information that's slightly off-topic might still be worth noting. I'm going to go through and outline individual paragraphs of the article to be considered, and I request that all involved parties take all of these into consideration. I'm going off some older revisions here, so you might wanna look through those to find the relevant sections:

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 * Background:
 * The current paragraph here, which talks about the crazy monsoon season that was happening at the time, is completely okay. We don't need a sentence talking about the totally unrelated 2015 Ghost Ranch flash flood (and I don't even know that that needs an article, but don't AFD it yet, I'm gonna review it later), so I moved that flood article to the "See also" section, which also includes Ute Park Fire, another notable incident at Philmont in the 2010s. We also don't need a whole paragraph discussing the 1965 flood, since that is already covered in enough detail over at Philmont Scout Ranch; a single sentence about it here just to give implication that this is what one might call a "50-year-flood" is good to have though. So this paragraph is fine as it is.
 * Older versions had a L3 section about Alden Brock. The first paragraph noted aspects of Brock's life before attending his Philmont trek. I think including some very basic details about who he was is relevant if you're talking about his death. Basic details would include how old he was when he died (noteworthy aspect) and/or the year he was born, and where he is from. Perhaps using his full name (as in, including middle or middle initial) in that same sentence would also be acceptable. These basic aspects of his life were noted in several sources used in the article. / However, older revisions also included a sentence about what school he attended, and the fact that he was involved in sports. Even though these details are noted in several sources, this is totally irrelevant to both the flood and his death, and in this regard is trivial information. I support this sentence's removal. / The sentence about him being a Scout with Troop 380 in California for two years, and him being a Star Scout, is relevant because it is basic information about his prior Scouting experience summarized in one sentence. While his rank may seem trivial, it is actually very important in Scouting, and while it may not necessarily relate to the event, it gives you an idea of what point he was at in his Scouting career. I mean, this is a Scouting-related article, after all. / So I feel like this paragraph, with disregard to information about his education and extracurricular activity, is worth including at least somewhere on Wikipedia, so that you can get a basic feeling of who he was before knowing about how he died, and how people took his death. Otherwise, you're just looking at a name, and nothing much more, when you read the rest of the article.
 * In this same L3 section, there was a paragraph noting Brock's situation at Philmont. I feel this is relevant for a similar reason to the above paragraph: it tells you Brock's general situation at Philmont, which again, gives you a bigger picture of how the incident went down and what its relevance is.