Talk:Police abuse of sex workers in the United States

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 September 2019 and 9 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): DiaEdie.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:28, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Using primary sources

In regard to the notice about using too many primary sources and quotations, it was my goal to present the primary sources, with quotations. On the other hand, Wikipedia has been successful by doing things a particular way, and I don't want to mess that up. So I'm looking for another place to host the current content while I try to dig up secondary sources to use as the basis for a new version of this article. I am trying to change this to comply with Wikipedia's standards, but I don't know how long it will take. BurroLoco (talk) 20:11, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

added some information about prostitutes

Added a bit of history of what demographic engages in street level prostitution. (DiaEdie (talk) 00:09, 28 November 2019 (UTC)) Added another paragraph.

adding more information

Adding citations and a sentence I hope I am following guidelines. thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by DiaEdie (talk • contribs) 04:39, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

added a new section

I put in a sentence on decriminalizing sex work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DiaEdie (talk • contribs) 19:42, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Officers who have been accused or convicted of rape

Added some information on Police officers who used their badge to rape sex workers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DiaEdie (talk • contribs) 00:49, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Studies

I'm going to remove the studies sections. They're seen as primary sources per Wikipedia's guidelines and would need to be covered in independent and reliable secondary sources like a literature review in order to be mentioned here.

The basic issue is this: studies like this tend to be hard to replicate, they're limited in scope, and the journal/publisher doesn't actually provide any commentary or context to the study. There's also no guarantee that the study findings are correct - the publishers only look to ensure that the study has no glaring errors that would immediately invalidate it. These secondary, independent sources would provide this by putting them into context and providing commentary, as well as providing a more in-depth look into the findings and whether or not they would be legit.

The scope is incredibly important when it comes to claims from individual people, as what may be true for one person may not be for all. Even if there are some general similarities, we can't guarantee that one person's experience is general enough to where the next person would mirror their statements. There's also a question of cherry picking, as someone could ask why one study was featured and another wasn't. Finally, just listing the study findings isn't really giving a general overview of what they say and with studies there's going to be a question of original research since they're not really looking at a wide variety of studies and research, they're going to be looking at their own findings. Some studies may have a literature review or a section that goes over general information about prior research and those may be usable, but only if they aren't being used to back up a theory posed by the study (or similar).

In any case here is a link to the history with the studies. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 05:21, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure I totally agree, but don't disagree strongly enough to object to the changes. Presumably the "primary sources" tag can now be removed? The article as it now stands seems sufficiently referenced so I don't understand why you've added the refimprove tag.

Editing this article as both ReaderofthePack and Shalor (Wiki Ed) is not good practice and may possibly be interpreted by some as an attempt to make your WP:BOLD edits appear to be supported by another editor. --John B123 (talk) 08:48, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

• Sorry about that - I should've mentioned that on here. I started editing with my work account but then started wanting to make more edits and thought it would be better to move to my main account, as the edits were beginning to get more extensive than I'd initially intended. With the studies, they were accompanied by original research summaries. If the studies can be accompanied by secondary sources it would be one thing to have them listed, but they weren't and at the time it was easier to remove them to streamline the article . I'm not opposed to re-adding them, but per WP:RS guidelines they would have to be accompanied by secondary sources that cover them to some degree. If they're notable studies then there should be coverage out there. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 19:42, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I did look at it myself previously and came to the conclusion that the studies provided useful information but there were problems verifying them. Undecided how to resolve this, I ended up doing nothing. --John B123 (talk) 10:18, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

• The content needed to be completely re-written from scratch, as the prose itself was raw data at best (sometimes without a lot or any true context) and at worst was a reflection or annotated bibliography with things like "This is a working paper that was never published, as far as I know." The content also needed secondary sources for the studies for verification and to establish where they're notable. Essentially in order to fix it, you'd need to TNT the section and start from scratch. My thought was that it would be better to TNT it and mention it on the article's talk page. I'm not opposed to having a section that has data by state, but it needs to be written and formatted per Wikipedia's guidelines. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 16:02, 2 December 2019 (UTC)