Talk:David Carradine

About the National Enquirer, the worst of the unreliable sources.

Greetings.
The National Enquirer is an unreliable source; I know it, you know it, do the public know it?
If the whole edition I made had been just replacing the original paragraphs (and all its sources) with this one:

"David Carradine died by auto-erotic asphyxiation (AEA), as it was clearly and definitely stated by the Thai police on June 4, with no need to wait for the results of the autopsy scheduled for June 5.
Also, his ex-wife Gail Jensen stated that he practiced AEA all the time and she saved his life when he almost killed himself in 1984, and, he bought large amounts of S&M paraphernalia at the sex shop where he was a loyal customer, therefore, the case was closed without further investigation.
However, the autopsy photos showed injuries incompatible with AEA, and the testimony of Skip E. Lowe indicated that Carradine had a preference for transgender prostitutes, which gave credibility to the murder by ladyboys hypothesis."

I would see the point of deleting all citations to the National Enquirer and reverting everything. (If I had ever dreamt about editing the section with such a thing, you wouldn't need to revert anything, immediately after waking up, I would have run and jumped from the nearest tall building.)
The whole point of this edition is to state what the most reliable sources available said about the case, clearly separating that from what most of the media creatively said, both mainstream feeding on gossip and tabloids, and tabloids directly "informing" the public. In this case, the National Enquirer takes the cake (closely followed by the New York Post and Perez Hilton, with dishonorable mentions to TMZ, Radar Online, the Globe...) as the most brutal, despicable, piece of sh*t of a tabloid. Which also was the best-selling of American magazines (wonder why...). It had an influence on public opinion that can't be ignored, and in order to state what the Enquirer said, the "contribution" it made to that media circus, as the largest piranha of the tabloids' feeding frenzy, it is necessary to cite it. When a sentence in a Wikipedia article asserts that the N°1 tabloid of the USA said some misleading but influential thing about a certain subject, isn't required to support the assertion with a reference, as any assertion is supposed to be in Wikipedia? The National Enquirer was an awfully popular tabloid, not He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
The quotation of an unreliable source is accepted when the subject is the criticism or analysis of the source, which is the whole idea of the edition. Moreover, it is just a deprecated source, not a banned or blacklisted one; its use is discouraged, not forbidden, and as the Wikipedia:Deprecated sources#Acceptable uses of deprecated sources page points, "Citations to deprecated sources should not be removed indiscriminately, and each case should be reviewed separately. While some deprecated sources have been completely eliminated as references, others have not."
Is it still not clear that saying "the tabloid National Enquirer said this" is not the same thing as saying, "this is true because the National Enquirer said it"?
At this point, I considered changing "the tabloid National Enquirer," to "sensationalist piece of garbage National Enquirer" in every mention to make my purpose crystal clear, but I settled with re-characterizing it as "popular tabloid National Enquirer" to give the reason for mentioning it, and adding a note to every mention to make it super clear to fellow editors and any innocent reader that it is cited as an example of the deepest abyss of bad journalism of the time (yet influential), not as a reliable source, for the full understanding of the case and for future/international readers unfamiliar with the publication and its effects (other than its appearance in Men in Black (1997 film) as a fundamental source...). And be warned, the tabloids thingy gets way worse when arriving at the photos issue. Is it all clear now? If not, I accept suggestions to make it really clear. Please give me some. Thanks. Maykiwi (talk) 21:13, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

References

Maykiwi (talk) 21:12, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

About the Daily Mail, the primus inter pares among tabloids.

Greetings.
I must confess that I was not aware of the special place that The Daily Mail has among Wikipedia's pantheon of Deprecated Sources. It is obviously a tabloid, but, compared to the National Enquirer or the New York Post it appears pretty tame, at least regarding the Carradine case. It doesn't say anything too different to make it noteworthy, until it does.
The reason to return that citation to the paragraph is already explained in its rewording. There was a remarkable interaction between a gossip website, a reputed news agency, and a tabloid, the one that for once reported at the same level as the reputable media, and actually, better. It got Carradine's biological children right (pretty unusual), and remembered that Thai authorities had not released the investigation results, which begs the question, why the other media did not include that detail? Had The Associated Press forgotten it in its report, or the mainstream media didn't care to mention it? But, the main reason to cite the notorious Daily Mail again is, the article has a comments section, as I re-remarked in the paragraph and the citation itself. The media have an influence on public opinion, and popular tabloids have a larger presence than reliable media (wonder why…). The colorful comments of the readers show how the media's treatment of the case contributed to eliciting lingering hostility/contempt/scorn against a man who had been dead for two years already, and then, by omitting an important detail relative to the lawsuit, turned the public opinion against his widow. That's the power of the Fourth Estate for you. The Associated Press did a better job than TMZ, but not good enough, and/or sources more reputable than the Daily Mail did a poorer job than a tabloid.
I don't think it will be necessary to use another citation to the Daily Mail, but if that happens, I will add a more detailed note to all of them, the same as happened with the National Enquirer, to make very clear that it is an unreliable source, even when occasionally it informs the public better than more reliable sources.
(And, when I was re-checking to upload everything, found out that I can't reach the article at the Daily Mail website:
"This site can’t be reached
The webpage at
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027257/Kung-Fu-star-David-Carradines-widow-Anne-settles-wrongful-death-lawsuit.html might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR"
Which can mean many things. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine has a capture with all the comments. So, here we go again.) Thanks. Maykiwi (talk) 21:05, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Don't use the Daily Mail, and its status as a Wikipedia source in an article not literally about that is almost certainly not appropriate either. If you can't make your point without the Daily Mail, your point probably isn't worth adding - David Gerard (talk) 19:51, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

You're also doing a lot of straight-up WP:SYNTH here, leaning on ridiculously long quotes and your footnoted interpretations of them. Wikipedia is not an essay site - David Gerard (talk) 16:12, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, it is clear that here we don't have a problem of my edition being wrong, inaccurate, or badly referenced in the parts where reliable sources matter (and where there are unreliable sources cited, they are clearly identified as such), but the problem is that you don't like it. That doesn't give you the right to delete everything giving not-reasons like the writing is "ridiculous" -in your opinion-, and even less leaving the section as if nothing had happened after the body was found, not even the investigation and the funeral. So, I am undoing all your edits, and improving the Daily Mail citation, which will be the only one from that tabloid. If you wish to improve the edition, do it so in a civil way, not in an impolite one. Please don't make this into a matter of an Administrator imposing himself over a fellow Wikipedian by force. Wikipedia is a place where information is given, and that's what the edition provides. You cannot take away relevant information from it, which you did recklessly, as you did not provide anything better, and left the article way worse than it was before, whichever defects my edition had. Maykiwi (talk) 21:23, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

If you continue to deliberately add deprecated sources to Wikipedia, you are likely to be blocked for disruption - David Gerard (talk) 23:20, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

David Carradine

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:17, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Goodness this article is bad. There is so much uncited material in the article with entire paragraphs just having none. Along with that, the article has been tagged for using unreliable sources since October 2022. This article needs heavy work to be able to be fixed. Onegreatjoke (talk) 14:13, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Tagged everything. Easy Delist. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 19:06, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

• Delist. Not near GA standard. BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 01:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Disputed: Thai police suggested, is not supported by the source.

Greetings.
The assertion "Thai police suggested the death might have been from accidental suffocation due to auto-erotic asphyxiation," is not supported by the reference given, which does not attribute the words "auto-erotic asphyxiation" to "Thai police," but to Dr. Porntip Rojanasunan (Rojanasunand), director of Thailand’s Central Institute of Forensic Science, who did not participate in the investigation and expressed an opinion. The same article quotes Dr. Nanthana Sirisap, director of Chulalongkorn Hospital’s Autopsy Center, where the first autopsy took place, as only speaking about "unusual circumstances" but not elaborating on them.

Among the multiple sources presented in the edition of the section "Death" from October 28, 2022, no one states that a Thai police officer (identified by name and rank) speculated or suggested or declared that the manner of death had been "auto-erotic asphyxiation" (neither did contemporary Thai media, if you care to check them). The Associated Press reported in 2010 (and 2011, according to the Daily Mail) that the Thai police never released the results of their investigation.

I highly recommend editors and researchers to try and find the autopsy results and final report on the investigation by the Thai police, due three weeks to one month after the events of June 3-4, 2009, instead of including unsupported speculation or "suggestions" as official statements. Maykiwi (talk) 21:18, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Cause of death inclusion in infobox

Okay, so after being reverted multiple times after inserting Carradine's cause of death, I will create a discussion here so we can come to a consensus. I believe that his cause of death should be included after analyzing the documentation for the cause of death infobox module thoroughly. Carradine's death for starters without a doubt was unnatural to say the least, as he found hanging naked in his closet with a cord wrapped around his neck and genitalia. Though the reason for him being in the predicament he was in is disputed, It can be agreed upon all that he died due to asphyxiation. These specific circumstances have been subjected through significant scrutiny and are closely connected to the notability subject since his death. I will also make note of how Albert Dekker, another actor who died under similar mysterious circumstances relating to an autoerotic fatality, has his cause of death featured in the infobox. Can editors that oppose the position of Carradine’s cause of death being in the infobox please explain how Dekker's can remain? ₛₒₘₑBₒdyₐₙyBₒdy₀₅ (talk) 19:51, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Hello SomeBodyAnyBody05, and thanks for opening this conversation. I apologize for the revert, but this is one of those situations where I feel that the short mention in the infobox can muddy an issue rather than clarifying it. I am well aware that this position is not universal, and so if consensus forms despite me, no worries. As for Mr. Dekker, first of all, I would note WP:OTHERCONTENT. It's certainly an argument that the information is used that way in the other article, but not a dispositive one, nor for me a particularly persuasive one. I am definitely going to edit over there to take out some detail that is not found in the source (and if it were up to me, I'd take out most of the detail, but I will not do that). There's certainly logic behind your position and I think this is one where we simply have to trust to the wisdom of consensus. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 20:54, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

No objection from me to removing the claim at the Dekker article. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:18, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Death paragraph

A few choices of included information in that paragraph kind of baffle me. Why is it relevant to have a parenthetical specifying that the day of death was a Thursday? Why is it relevant to give the address of the police station involved in the investigation? To a lesser extent, why is it relevant to know what his dinner arrangements where the day before? Or to know when exactly he arrived in Bangkok? Kumagoro-42 (talk) 23:11, 29 February 2024 (UTC)