Talk:Disappearance of Leah Roberts

Wiki Education assignment: Technical and Professional Writing

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2024 and 7 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Emlynn18 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Eaturvegeez (talk) 19:10, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Intended edits

Hello! I am working on editing this article for grammar, syntax, and structure in my sandbox. I will transfer the edited article soon. I have attempted to maintain fidelity to the original content of the article, and I am making mainly technical rather than content edits. Emlynn18 (talk) 17:48, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

As the original editor, thank you for posting this. If there is anything I can help you with, do let me know. I have this page on my watchlist. Daniel Case (talk) 23:15, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the warm welcome! I will make sure to let you know if I need help. I plan to clean up minor details like syntax and subtitles mainly, but I will keep you updated if I plan to make any larger revisions! Overall, it's a solid article and I don't think it needs much work; you did a great job with it. Emlynn18 (talk) 18:00, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Looking forward to what you do! Daniel Case (talk) 21:17, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

My edits are now live. I changed "Roberts" to "Leah" to clarify when the article was referring to Leah vs. Kara vs. Heath, corrected grammar and syntax, improved the encyclopedic tone in the lead, added subtitles to make the article more user-friendly, and edited the "Investigation" section for readability and organization. I hope you find these edits to complement your original work well. Emlynn18 (talk) 20:47, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

OK ... I actually went back afterwards and ... wound up doing a lot of rewriting on the intro, basically creating a third version after the one that had been there for years and your recent revision. Don't feel that this was the result of anything wrong on your part ... your rewrite brought to attention some issues that had been there since I first wrote this article back in the late 2000s, and were screaming out for change.

To begin with, the date she disappeared. We have (along with too many sources) treated it as March 9 (24 years ago! Great!) but it should actually be March 13. March 9 is the date she left Durham to drive across the country and was last seen by anyone who knew her well. On March 13, there's the video footage from the gas station along I-5 in Oregon early that morning, and then the two witnesses at the restaurant in Bellingham later that day. Those are undisputed, so we should say March 13.

Now to some things in your edits I addressed:

• You recast the lede to put her name first and in bold. Per MOS:BOLDSYN, this, at least the latter, is permitted. But as the article is about the event of her disappearance rather than her life, I have always written the lede of the many articles about missing/unresolved dead/unsolvedly murdered people I've written since this one to reflect that: usually the date, the person's name, and what they were last seen doing, or last seen doing alive (See Disappearance of Steven Koecher, Disappearance of Ben McDaniel and Disappearance of Tiffany Daniels, for examples).
• Redundancy: "She is the youngest of three, and has an older sister named Kara and an older brother named Heath." There are two examples in this sentence: 1) If she's the youngest, it is not necessary to state that her two siblings are older. That's implied. 2) If you give people's names, it's understood that those are what they are, without having to say "named".
• My understanding of MOS:SAMESURNAME has been that it is only necessary to use the first names to distinguish family members when you are discussing them both ("When referring to the person who is the subject of the article, use just the surname") at the same time. I have thus gone back to using "Roberts" when her sister isn't part of the narrative, which is most of the article.
• I also tend, because of my background in journalism, to go with that provision of MOS:NUM that allows the choice of going with AP style, spelling out numbers nine and lower but using figures most of the time for higher numbers (at least in American articles, since British style is to spell out up to 99). I think it's a little more efficient of space, and easier on translators.
• You also did a little bit of overlinking ... terms like "lung" are pretty widely understood and it's not like the article on it would really help the reader understand the Leah Roberts disappearance better.

I also decided to take that gas station possible sighting out ... over the years it's come to seem more and more like a red herring that doesn't really belong in the intro.

OK ... I hope I didn't throw you with all of this but you have helped improve the article! Daniel Case (talk) 05:49, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi! You didn't throw me at all. Your edits are fantastic and they helped to polish the work that I did. Thank you so much for your corrections and revisions. It's been great to work on this page collaboratively with you--I appreciate you letting me give it a go and then fixing up my work. I hope to run into you elsewhere on Wikipedia! Emlynn18 (talk) 18:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Between you and me it seems we removed about 4-5K from the article, a sure sign that there was some fat in the text.

If I ever nominate it for GA (which I'm not sure I'll do since I generally like those nominations to be of articles a lot longer than this, but at the same time I'm really not sure that there will be anything more to add, ever, unless Leah turns up somewhere living under another identity or recently dead (à la Robert Hoagland)) I'll give you coauthor credit. Daniel Case (talk) 21:30, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much! It's been a pleasure working with you! Emlynn18 (talk) 16:09, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

You're welcome! I hope you continue to contribute! Daniel Case (talk) 18:48, 19 March 2024 (UTC)