Talk:2015 Philmont Scout Ranch flash flood

Death of Alden Brock split

Well... what I would do is make the title of this article something like 2015 Philmont Scout Ranch flash flood and the death of Alden Brock, but look at the length of that title! It's way too long. The current title is already really long (but necessarily), so we don't need more words there. PseudoSkull (talk) 19:41, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I really wish that this flood was actually noteworthy enough reference-wise to actually allow a split. Unfortunately, I don't think so. Regardless, some information about Brock is relevant to the flood. If the flood just happened and no death was involved, then it would have about as little information as the 1965 Philmont Scout Ranch flash flood, which I recently just merged with Philmont Scout Ranch because the article was so short. Keep in mind that the death is relevant to the Scouting world in the United States; there have not been many deaths at Philmont in the past, and this one was much more dramatic than the several heart attacks and asthma attacks, for instance, which could happen anywhere. Edit: ...not to undermine the fact that those people died of course, no certainly not, just saying that this is a more unusual death, and the first flood-related death at Philmont. PseudoSkull (talk) 19:53, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Knowing that an IP editor has disagreed, posting my support that death of Brock should be encompassed on this page (but had been covered with overcitation at the minimum previously). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 05:30, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Content dispute

An IP editor and myself have been disagreeing on what exactly should be included and excluded in this article. They have been taking out some major points, and while some of the removals were okay, some of the things removed were, in my opinion, things that should be noted.

To clarify, back in 2015-2016, I worked very hard to make this article what it was for a long time. I spent lots of time digging through news and a few other sources to make an article that exhaustively covers both the flood and Brock's death in great detail. So sourcing really isn't a problem so much here; we don't need to be looking for new content; everything that's shown in this revision is pretty much the stuff we have to work with here.

The dispute thus far, in July 2018, has been over how much content exactly should be included and excluded about the death of Alden Brock. The problem is that the flood itself, in general, happened in lots of camps throughout Philmont. However, the subset of the flood, which arguably made the flood gain notability in the first place, is the death of this young Scout, something that has never happened before in the history of Philmont and shocked many people nationwide, especially other Scouters. The whole paradox here is that the general aspects are less noteworthy than the specific, more individual incident. The paradox is also that because of this, content in the article was getting mixed up between the flood and the incident; one moment you're talking about general stuff, and the next you're talking about Alden Brock's death and related. Naturally, it just seemed to me like these needed to be naturally separated. The nature of this article is that you're going from general to specific quite a lot, and that just makes it hard to stay on track.

The IP points out that the main topic of the article is the flood, and not Brock's death. This presents a major problem, in that the whole reason this flood was talked about so much was precisely because of Brock's death. It would have gotten some news coverage without the fatality occurring, sure, but it wouldn't be nearly as much, as can be seen with the small amount of sources I could dig up about the 1965 Philmont Scout Ranch flash flood. Without his death, this article wouldn't be able to exist at all. Also, the death had an impact on the Scouting community.

The article talked about his funeral, for instance, which the IP has repeatedly removed, but the funeral is significant because hundreds of people attended it. Many of these people didn't even know Brock personally, and many of them were members of the Scouting movement. That's pretty unique in my opinion. Scouts nationwide really felt for this a lot, and it shows particularly in sources about the ceremony.

The article is in a very good state right now quality-wise, as of this revision, but the problem is I feel it's not covering enough. But the bigger problem is that it is going to be difficult to cover essential facts for the reader to understand Brock's death to an extent which I feel is enough.

The Death of Alden Brock article covered such details, most of which I feel are essential to note somewhere in an encyclopedia. The Death of Alden Brock article looked beautiful, as it covered all necessary content about the death in a way that would not be intrusively off-topic in another article. Details about Brock's background, his death itself, investigation of his death, reactions to his death, and perhaps even his funeral and other ceremonies, are essential pieces of information to note, and we need to find a way to organize at least a summary of these essential understandings into the article, better than the way it is presented now.

I have the following suggestions:

• Have a specific section about Alden Brock, and leave the rest of the article as it is (this has already been done but). Expand this section to cover details about the above points: his background, his death, investigations, reactions, and ceremonies. Probably the section needs to be limited to about 3 paragraphs at least, 5 at most.
• By extension, having a section about Brock that includes subsections might be acceptable. This section might have the following L3 sections: "Death", "Reactions", and possibly "Ceremonies". This would probably would not be as good of an idea, but doing so allows us to at least include a bit more content.
• We must also be somewhat cautious with this section. We can't include too much content in it. I mean, the Death of Alden Brock article shows that this section could be huge in size, as huge as an average WP article.

What we want is a focus on the general flood, but we also have quite a bit of info to include about Brock's death. The way to go is not to combine content as was previously attempted to do. We need to separate out content that talks about general aspects of the flood from the individual aspects of that sub-incident, while still keeping them in the same article... I will attempt to create this section. I suspect the IP, or someone else possibly, will try to remove much of the info I add to the section, but please don't remove it without discussing it first! I want to reach a consensus here so that this separation problem can be resolved. PseudoSkull (talk) 06:56, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: PseudoSkull (talk) 06:56, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I would suggest not getting hung up on the name. If needed that can always change. Instead I would go where the best reliable sources take you. That is going to be about Brock to a real extent because his death is what seems to have driven the coverage (one need only look at the headlines to see this). If this means that the article ends up at Death of Alden Brock and this is a redirect, so be it. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 07:07, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Going with the sources is precisely what I did with the article before. By your words, previous versions of the article would have been better in a more updated form. Nearly all sources used talk mostly about Brock's death; the flood's general aspects are merely a side aspect of these news sources. There are a few sources that focus specifically on the flood in general, but not as many. Looking at the article in its current state, you can see what I'm talking about, as literally is evident in some of their titles.

If I follow the sources directly, I'm going off-topic a lot in the middle of the article, because what they're doing essentially is mixing the two, as I talked about above. I don't think that's necessarily what Wikipedia wants. It's certainly not what this IP editor wants. That's one of the reasons it made sense to split the article; stuff that needed to be noted wasn't easy to note in one single article. However, the facts about Brock might still survive if some of that info made it into a single separate section. One of those two things would work here; the death of Alden Brock and the 2015 Philmont Scout Ranch flash flood are somewhat separate topics that both need to be noted in the encyclopedia. The main question here is how it should be noted; should it be in a separate article, or a separate section of the existing article? That's what's up for debate here. @Barkeep49: If the death of Alden Brock article should be restored, all it takes is to revert it back to the previous revision and we're pretty much done. It might still be necessary, but I guess that's up for debate here. PseudoSkull (talk) 07:25, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: forgot to ping PseudoSkull (talk) 15:26, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@PseudoSkull: I have edited back in some of the removed information about Brock (using Visual editor so citations might have been duplicated) that seems encyclopedic in my view; much of the other pieces of information felt too detailed for Wikipedia. At this point I'm likely to step back from this article and leave it to those editors who are more interested in this topic. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:35, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Other than renaming the section to either "casualties" or boyscout troop I am fine with the article as it stands now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1010:B025:55E7:7FCE:A4E7:47CC:7B70 (talk) 23:53, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Inaccuracy

My name is Logan Reed and i was there, five total were swept away in the flood. LoganReed123 (talk) 03:59, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Also the water level of the creek rising the previous day had nothing to do with the flash flood which is a flood defined by how quickly things go from normal to flooded. The camp was not responsible in any way for a record breaking flash flood harming anyone, even if they were informed of rising water the day before by a group of casual observers. LoganReed123 (talk) 04:07, 9 February 2021 (UTC)