This article is written in Australian English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, realise, program, labour (but Labor Party)) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.
This article was nominated for deletion on 13 June 2022. The result of the discussion was keep.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
Catherine Coffey is within the scope of WikiProject Australia, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Australia and Australia-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.AustraliaWikipedia:WikiProject AustraliaTemplate:WikiProject AustraliaAustralia articles
This article is within the scope of the Australian Women in Religion WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Australian Women in religion. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.Australian Women in ReligionWikipedia:WikiProject Australian Women in ReligionTemplate:WikiProject Australian Women in ReligionAustralian Women in Religion articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women's History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Women's history and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women's HistoryWikipedia:WikiProject Women's HistoryTemplate:WikiProject Women's HistoryWomen's History articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Religion, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles on Religion-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.ReligionWikipedia:WikiProject ReligionTemplate:WikiProject ReligionReligion articles
Catherine Coffey is within the scope of WikiProject Catholicism, an attempt to better organize and improve the quality of information in articles related to the Catholic Church. For more information, visit the project page.CatholicismWikipedia:WikiProject CatholicismTemplate:WikiProject CatholicismCatholicism articles
This article is within the scope of the Women in Religion WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Women in religion. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.Women in ReligionWikipedia:WikiProject Women in ReligionTemplate:WikiProject Women in ReligionWomen in Religion articles
As I said in the AfD discussion, well done @Kerrieburn on your hard work in improving the article!
I think you now need to take a hard look at "Family life and death" and ask which parts of it are really necessary to keep. The final four paragraphs in particular are still written in YOUR voice; the reader hears *you* interpreting what are essentially primary sources, instead of using a neutral, factual encyclopedia voice. Furthermore, do readers really need all that detail about the children and their birth and death dates? There is a tendency with women's biographies in particular to want to pad them with all the detail about their children, especially if there is little else that is known about them, but it often ends up taking away from their main achievements, and makes it look more like genealogy web site research rather than an encyclopedia. You can be confident now that the rest of the article is strong, and you don't need so much other "stuff". Just keep the key facts and lose the rest; even the final quote from the obituary could be a much shorter "partial quote" instead of all that. You really can say more with less and make it even better. Cielquiparle (talk) 12:36, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your suggestions and advocating to keep the article. I will be doing more research and writing a lengthier biographical article about the subject (where I can incorporate additional sources and expand on the content included) but I am glad that the Wikipedia article is now much stronger. Kerrieburn (talk) 21:19, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for cutting that section down; I added back a sentence about the children (based on what it says in the obituary, while avoiding the whole "how many children did they actually have and was the obituary technically accurate about the total number" question (quite common in 19th-century bios), so see what you think. Maybe you already did this, but if you want to name Thomas as the surviving child, you could still look for his obituary since you know when he died. (The best way to use Findagrave, etc., is to mine them for clues for further research rather than citing them directly as a source; I would still strongly recommend going back and fixing this in other bios if you can.) BTW – The way to cite databases like Trove is to put them in the "via" field in visual editor citations. Cielquiparle (talk) 05:39, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]