Talk:Gillian Guess

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Untitled

This article is a work in progress. Deleting it would not be useful to anyone. All the facts of written in this article ARE CITED in the links provided at the bottom of that page. If you follow this links and read the artices (written by the Surpreme Court of British Columbia, thus they are of a highly reliable source) you can see that everything written in this article is true and can be verified by the reliable sources (ie, statements by police, crown prosecutors, sworn witnesses).

Notability

I'm going to suggest, and I hope the admin checks here, that this woman is, in fact, notable due to the publicity she was involved in during and after the case referred to. However, the article definitely needs proper sourcing - as it stands, it's probably deletable. Tony Fox (arf!) 06:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To the editor at the top of the page: court documents are generally considered to be primary sources, and not really useful for sources. However, I've got some gifts for you:

Archived Macleans article

Another Macleans article

BC Report magazine article

North Shore News article

archived Vancouver Sun article

-- CBC article, with other links

The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess biopic

Please make use of these as sources for the article, otherwise someone else will propose it for deletion again. I'd get them sourced, but I haven't really the time, and it's a good learning experience! Tony Fox (arf!) 06:35, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What ticks me off is that some people wanted to delete this article even though it has references, while no one is threatening to delete the article "jury" from which this article stems, even though that article has absolutely no references to back it up.

I think the concerns when this was started surrounded the court records - if I recall correctly, when I first saw it, it did need sourcing and probably did fit the speedy deletion criteria. I'm familiar enough with the case to know that it's got enough background to be able to meet the sourcing demands. The delete was probably a bit too speedy, unfortunately. Really, they were just doing their job in that case. No harm done - it's sourced now and should stick. Tony Fox (arf!) 05:45, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Sourcing

This article still suffers from primary sourcing. This is a problem because Wikipedia is not a place for original research. Please remove the court documents and replace these references with appropriate third-party knowledge of the events. I have also removed a section related to the activities of Guess in jury deliberations because it was not neutral and bordered on libel with claims of harassment and that violates the Bio of Living People rules which means the material must be removed immediately. It would also be good to look into how to use the name= field for the ref-tagging so that multiple references from the same source are combined into a single reference line instead of reiterated multiple times at the bottom of the page as it is currently formatted. ju66l3r 18:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Response

Thanks for cleaning up the article. However, there are three things I want to discuss with you.

Firstly, I don't see the problem with using court documents. The reason court documents are used is because they are verifiable, reliable, and neutral. Secondary sources on the Gillian Guess affair have a very strong moral bias of condemning Guess for her sexual deviance. I did read the wikipedia policy on primary sources, and it does say they are acceptable if they are neutral. I prefer using court documents over media reports because court documents have a higher degree of neutrality than what is stated in the media.

Second, I re added the harassment statement, but reworded it as "other jurors accused Guess of changing thier minds." In this way, I am not saying Gillian Guess harassed other jurors (that is debatable). But it is a fact that other jurors accused her of harassment. The harassment statement is also critical to her conviction. Say she voted to acquit, but didn't harass other jurors to also acquit. The outcome would have been a mistrial, and the accused persons would certainly have been tried again. But what the court found was that Guess harassed other jurors to change thier minds and also acquit the accused, and that was how she was convicted. She was not convicted for her own decision, but for her alleged harassment of other jurors.

Third, I am going to clean up the multiple sourcing as you requested.

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Raindreamer (talk • contribs)

The problem with using primary sourcing is outlined in the WP:OR policy. Specifically, primary sourcing leads to analysis/discussion from the Wikipedian using the source rather than using a secondary source where the analysis is done for the Wikipedian to quote thus making WP a tertiary source. Primary sources describe what happened, secondary sources analyze the facts, tertiary sources present analysis in a neutral way for knowledge. If the article is quoting the primary source, it frequently moves into analysis of the presented facts and breaks neutrality.

For example from this article, prose like "it seems that it was Guess who was first attracted to Gill..." is analysis of the situation and breaks neutrality of PoV. Wikipedia articles need to be encyclopedic in nature and not newspaper-esque. This article reads heavily like a journalist's account of the trial rather than a tertiary source of information regarding the case and outcome.

Also, please remember to finish all talk page changes with four tildes (~~~~) to add your signature and timestamp for readability of the comments later. Thanks. ju66l3r 00:34, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Potential Conflict of Interest

I've added a "Potential Conflict of Interest" tag at the top of the page. The reason is that a substantial portion of the article (the sections entitled "The Secret Trial" (unreferenced) and "Analysis by Harvard Law School" (only one reference, bare url, dead link)) were both posted in 2014 by the editor Gillian Guess, who has only posted four edits on Wikipedia, all to this article. See contributions and diff to the major edit, May 26, 2014. I will be reviewing the unreferenced material in these two sections for reliable sources.

Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 02:25, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Additional comment: as of today's date, the editor Gillian Guess is responsible for 31.2% of the article according to XTools, which is a substantial contribution. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 02:35, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Harvard Law page is here. I have remove all the content copied from that website, as it is dated January 21, 1998, which predates the creation of this article and even of Wikipedia itself. So to include it here is a violation of our copyright policy. — Diannaa (talk) 15:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]