Talk:Caitlin Doughty

The Order of the Good Death

There may be enough material on The Order of the Good Death to create a standalone article. There's a draft at Draft:The Order of the Good Death for those interested in contributing. — Brianhe (talk) 18:46, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I kind of planned that way: to spawn articles on The Order, and perhaps Ask a Mortician and a book article for Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, whenever sufficient source material accumulates. Alternatively, the first step might be to create an umbrella article on death acceptance and/or the funeral industry reform movement. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:41, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

I boldly expanded the draft and moved it to The Order of the Good Death. — Brianhe (talk) 07:59, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Merged in content

It looks like a lot of content was merged in from Women in the funeral industry. This article ended up with more content about the order of the good death than The Order of the Good Death article, so it needs to be rebalanced. The paranthetical sourcing his going to be re-checked since the sources didn't get moved over. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:30, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

I couldn't figure out how to save the 'cost of funerals' material. It's not biographical content about Catlin Doughty. It's a thesis that argues the case against overpriced funerals. We already have a summary of Doughty's activism and the goals of her work. We don't need to actually have a platform that presents all of her arguments. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 03:55, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Certification details

In this diff, Dahveed1954 modified a part of the section "Early career in the death industry".

New text

After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated with a certificate of technology in mortuary science.[3] In California she could have obtained an embalmer's license to practice by passing an apprenticeship/internship and the CA state examination without attending mortuary college. To be a licensed funeral director in CA requires the completion of a mortuary science education and passing the CA state examination.[7]

Former text

After one year at the crematory, Doughty attended Cypress College's mortuary science program, and graduated as a licensed mortician,[3] though in California she could have obtained a license by passing a test without attending mortuary college.[7]

They have given, as a source, this document, without adding it as a reference to the article, only as an edit summary.

I'm not reverting this edit, despite its deficiencies, because there was already a clear discrepancy between the article's text and sources that were being cited. But some reconstruction of this section is required, now that the errors have been pointed out.

1. source [3] gives the sequence "attended Cypress College", "became a certified mortician" without support for "graduated as".
2. source [7] indeed includes Doughty's claim that she could have simply taken a licensing exam to become a funeral director.
3. the licensing document pointed to by Dahveed is current for 2017, but contains a disclaimer that it is a compilation not asserted to be authoritative. We also cannot tell from its text if the regulations in force several years ago when Doughty was going through the process were the same as those compiled in the document for 2017. Dahveed may know the answer to this latter part out of their own personal knowledge, but that's not a source we can use here on WP.

I'm not able to resolve these issues right now, but may return sometime in the future to try, if nobody else has taken up the task. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 04:29, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

California licensing and certification process

Re this edit by Dahveed1954 (talk · contribs), the document at Regulations In Funeral Service Licensing, Continuing Education and Pre-need is crowd sourced. It says on page 2: "Completed by Conference Members... The information on jurisdiction laws which is contained in this publication was compiled by The Conference for comparative purposes only. THE CONFERENCE DOES NOT ATTEST TO THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION." This doesn't quite meet the bar for identifying reliable sources, in particular because it seems to have been put tether in an undefined open-forum process. Over at WP:QUESTIONABLE it explains that this is essentially self-published. The two publications we cited for the statement that Doughty "graduated as a certified mortician, though in California she could have become licensed by passing a test without attending mortuary college", NPR and The Atlantic, meet Wikipedia's standards for reliability because of how they are edited and fact-checked. That doesn't mean they are THE TRUTH, or infallible. Far from it. It only means that they are the kinds of sources from which Wikipedia is written, for better or worse.

This article is a bio of Caitlin Doughty, and not a guide on becoming a mortician in California. The exact details of how you would go through some kind of on the job training in lieu of schooling are beyond the scope. We aren't writing how-tos for anyone. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 04:41, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

It is a biography of a self appointed critic of the funeral industry by someone who attended the same school that I did. It seemed to be a self written post and I felt that she was making claims for herself that aren't possible. Stuffing the resumé to appear more important. The law for licensing requirements in CA hasn't changed in a long time, not when she went to school, nor today. So I was trying to clean up what was possible for her to have achieved since the article makes no real claim that she has ever been licensed in any state. Perhaps this is better documentation for licensing in CA. http://www.cfb.ca.gov/laws_regs/ccr_funeral_regs.pdf ---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dahveed1954 (talk • contribs) 05:30, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I wrote most of this, not Doughty. What you read was what was published by NPR and The Atlantic, among others. Anyway, I changed the wording slightly and removed some detail, since we aren't that interested in the exact process for licensing and certification here. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 07:25, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Press release?

DGG tagged this article with Press release. Why? Please be specific. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Works and appearances deleted, contrary to MOS:BIB

MOS:BIB, it is typical to have "books or other works created by the subject of the article (under a section heading 'Works', 'Publications', 'Discography', etc. as appropriate)". But this edit summary says "removed section on podcasts, etc. They are not normally included. The books are already discussed in the article." I don't follow this reasoning. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:44, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Promotionalism

It is customary to list major publications. Trying to list small ones is usually considered promotional, with the possible exception of really famous writers. The policy here is NOT CV. (this is especially true when the material consists only of excerpts from the principal publications) Similarly, the extent of detail of a book is normally proportionate to its importance, and the detail here is excessive--so excessive, that it amounts to a advocacy for her views. The policy here is NOTADVOCACY. The best experession of how much detail should be included in an article is WP:EINSTEIN. It's an essay, not policy, but it encapsulates many WP policies.

Additional indications of promotionalism are:

1. the bookstore portrait in addition to the main one--it doesn;t even show her clearly, and there is no unique or special informational value. All authors read in bookstores--it's their principal manner of advertising, and including it amounts to includingan advertisement for her.

2. The photgraphs of the subjects discussed in her works, essentially serve to illustrate funeral practices, not to show the nature of her works.

3 The discussion of funeral practices is the sort of subject background characteristic of advocacy. It essentially says "the author is important because their subject is important". What's appropriate instead of this is links to the appropriate WP articles.

4 The exchanges in interviews between her and the interviewer are again, the sort of detail which properly belongs in the person's website. The same goes for exchanges on her blogs or websites.

In summary, a good rule of thumb for discriminating promotionalism from encycopedic writing is whether the page would look appropriate as the person's website.

Reconsidering the article, I have added hwat I consider the appropriate tag: "Advertising" . DGG ( talk ) 23:10, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

I think in particular the images need to be changed for sure. They relate to the broader topic of funerals, but have nothing to do with her as a person. Perhaps a shot from one of her videos to provide an example of what she does there?

It could also benefit from a controversy section I think. I'm a big fan of Caitlin, but she has faced plenty of backlash. Mentioning at least some of that would make for a more balanced view. Birb ebooks (talk) 09:08, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

The illustrations refer to the topics in the text. They illustrate the things mentioned in the article, which are not everyday things that readers have seen often, such as a crematorium. Further, the broad concept behind Doughty's work is to increase familiarity with the setting and instruments of death, and the illustrations are examples of that.

As far as all of the other so-called promotion, they are all related to why this article even exists at all. A bio includes trivial details like the subject's birthdate or where they went to school, but the meat of any bio should be the reasons why we even have an article about them. The thing they are notable for. If someone is notable as an athlete, we write about their athletic career: their style of play, perhaps strategies or techniques they pioneered for their sport, attitudes they expressed about the game, evaluations of their playing made by important experts on the sport. We might also mention the athlete's hobby or a part time job or many other things, but unless one of these is also part of why they are notable, we limit how much space we devote to that.

Doughty is notable for her advocacy, using several media for that advocacy. "OK, she's notable as an advocate. An advocate for what?" The bulk of the article is spent describing what she advocates for. Moreover, the contents of the article closely reflect what is found in all of the best quality sources about Doughty. They briefly mention she's from Hawaii or had a cat or whatever, but the majority of what good sources dwell on is what the subject advocates.

The notion that describing what an advocate or activists stands for is "promotional" flies in the face of countless Wikipedia bios, exemplified by the WP:Featured articles. Try applying the same standards you are claiming here to the very first bio at WP:FA: Eric A. Havelock. Like the Doughty bio, it begins with his childhood, early experiences, particularly focusing on experiences and education that informed his later ideas. It summarizes his political views, and gives details of the direction of his academic work. Then and entire long section is devoted to Havelock's ideas about Plato, Aristotle, etc. We have sentences like, "n arguing for a basic heuristic split between Plato and the contemporaries of Democritus, Havelock was directly contradicting a very long tradition in philosophy that had painstakingly assembled innumerable connections between Plato and the pre-Socratics..." How is that any different than the statements made here for what Doughty argues? You can proceed to the next FA on the page, Hilary Putnam, and repeat the entire exercise. It's describing what the person believed, what they stood for and advocated, and giving the reader full details of what they advocated. That would utterly fail your standards of "advocacy" and promotion. Jump around to aany FA bio, Yao Ming, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, you name it, and you'll find the same so-called "advocacy".

One thing I am unhappy with is that I can't directly quote any critics of the the death positive movement or of Doughty. I have a single unnamed mortician's words, and a little bit of interviewer Terry Gross playing devil's advocate. A few of the book reviews have some criticism, which have been given a disproportionate amount of space simply to try to balance the overwhelming positive content. I have quite a bit of Doughty relaying second hand her responses to her critics, but their words are not published in reliable sources. I went so far as to pay for library copies of the articles "Mortician Wants To Start Death Revolution" (Mortuary management, v101, no 10) and "Ask a mortician" (American funeral director, v135, no. 12) in the hopes of finding extended counter-argument against Doughty in these trade publications. Unfortunately, these articles are much the same as those int he NYT or NPR, simply summaries of what Doughty stands for, with nobody stating their objections.

So yes, it would be nice to have better sourced criticism of her arguments, but we can't create that out of thin air. Neutrality does not require that we play devil's advocate because her critics have not gone on record with their objections. If such publications existed then it would be against NPOV to totally omit them, but that's not the case. If you can find anything like that published, it would be most welcome.

Adding a controversy section to any article is generally considered harmful and against best practices, explained in great detail at WP:CSECTION. Controversy sections are dumping grounds for miscellaneous content, and a crutch for editors who don't bother to properly organize the contents of an article. Criticisms of Doughty's work belong side-by-side with the parts of the article that describe that work. If you want to make Wikipedia better, going around removing "controversy" sections from articles, and merging the contents into the rest of the article is much more productive.

The objection to the second photo is too silly to address. The photo is there because we don't have all that many free photos of her. If we had a better one, we'd use it. Yao Ming has no fewer than six photos of him playing basketball. Advertisements? Or the six different images of the subject in Joseph Priestley. I really question why I should take this nonsense seriously.

If no one can explain how this bio is fundamentally different than the overwhelming majority of bios at WP:FA, I'm going to remove the {{advert}} tag. I'm not claiming any of the writing in this article is pure perfection. If anyone wants to improve the wording and tone, or improve the structure and organization, by all means, do so. But there's no good reason to delete very much of anything here. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:52, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

• Going once? Any comments on how this definition of "promotionalism" would apply to the WP:FA I mentioned, or virtually any FA bio? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:02, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Birth date

For the birth date, this page on reddit is used as a source. I can't find it there. And even if I could find it: is this source good enough...? Laurier (xe or they) (talk) 16:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

YouTube channel name change

Doughty's channel name changed from "Ask a Mortician" to "Caitlin Doughty" between 2023-10-23 and 2023-12-08. Snowman304|talk 07:15, 31 July 2024 (UTC)