Talk:Philadelphia Fire Department

New Emblem

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  http://www.phila.gov/fire/about/index_homepage.html

Has anyone seen this first emblem anywhere? I haven't ... where is this online?Philly jawn (talk) 02:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I have seen it on some t-shirts. Since sometimes (talk) 17:53, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

And there was a post on Phillyblog about it, too. Since sometimes (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

• Link? Philly jawn (talk) 21:56, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Foreign language names

• Spanish: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%20-%2007.09%20%28Spanish%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBjNxJq - Departamento de bomberos de Filadelfia
• Chinese: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%20-%203.09%20%28Chinese%20-%20Mandarin%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBSSBDu - 费城防火部门
• French: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%20-%203.09%20%28French%29%20Revised.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBntqCO - Département des Pompiers à Philadelphia
• Korean: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%2007-09%20%28Korean%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBUV2N9 - 필라델피아 소방국
• Russian: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%20-%203.09%20%28Russian%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBgRFux - Филадельфийский Пожарный Отдел
• Khmer: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%2007-09%20%28Cambodian%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBaS9mc
• Vietnamese: http://www.phila.gov/fire/pdfs/Home%20Fire%20Safety%20Checklist%2007-09%20%28Vietnamese%29.pdf - http://www.webcitation.org/6BpBX4RHY - Sở Phòng cháy Philadelphia

WhisperToMe (talk) 12:16, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Line of duty deaths

I am curious about the notability of Line of duty deaths and their inclusion in this article. To be clear, I by NO MEANS want to diminish the sacrifice or anything of that nature. The department I am close to just lost a firefighter last week. But I am curious if this merits inclusion. There are certainly some cases where they do. The Granite Mountain Hotshots for example, or the Emergency workers killed in the September 11 attacks. But in both cases those killed are not listed on the departments page, but in separate articles. I recommend not including this list in articles but would like to get other's input. --Zackmann08 (talk) 17:33, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

The existing guidelines for stand-alone lists at WP:LISTN would seem to apply. A stand-alone list article is a good approach only if the deaths have been discussed as a group by independent reliable sources.—Stepheng3 (talk) 18:48, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

That makes sense to me...The PFD has not only lost a lot of firefighters but has had some significant incidents where multiple lives have been lost. In my opinion, that's notable in and of itself. Therefore, I could see moving both the "Firefighters Killed in the Line of Duty" and "Multiple Firefighter Fatality Incidents" sections from this page and to their own dedicated page. Maxwellwarner (talk) 19:13, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Line-of-duty deaths are a significant part of any fire department's history. Listing such fatalities and their causes in every such department's article may even help prevent the deaths (or injuries) of current and future firefighters just by informing them about the fatal mistakes made. Your subjective interpretation of Wikipedia's terms of use seems to pale in comparison to potentially saving firefighters' lives and preventing their injuries.--PhiladelphiaInjustice (talk) 13:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a statistics book, a shrine, a training manual for firefighters, etc. It is an encyclopedia. This is not about Wikipedia's "terms of service", this is about our inclusion guidelines. There is far more verifiable material out there then we would even dream of including. For example, we do not include the construction costs of various fire houses, lists of current or past firefighters, GVW of various engines, distances between various firehouses, nicknames for various companies, etc. While all of this material is available in reliable sources, including all of it would result in a bloated, unreadable article. Generally, the way we decide is coverage in independent reliable sources discussing the topic of the article in general. An article about a specific firefighter's death is not about the Philadelphia Fire Department, the topic of this article.

A blog by a "fire buff" listing all of the current and past fire houses he is aware of is not a reliable source. It is also not about the Philadelphia Fire Department, it is about one tiny aspect of the PFD.

The section "Firefighters Killed in the Line of Duty" should be trimmed to the three sentence summary at the beginning and moved to a section summarizing the history of the PFD. There is lots of other extraneous material as well. Mostly, the lists. It's all likely true and sourced or sourceable. It is, however, not encyclopedic content. - SummerPhD (talk) 15:06, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Excuse me for disagreeing, one who advertises his alleged PhD (no doubt in a liberal art). Your claims about inclusion criteria are not carved-in-stone facts, they are only your opinions and interpretations. You are merely a contributor to Wikipedia, as anyone who can write his name can be; you do not own it. My interpretation of Wikipedia's guidelines is that a list of firefighter deaths and their causes does indeed belong in the referenced article, not just for the benefit of firefighters but also to educate the public. Said fatalities are not the meaningless trivia that your inexplicably angry post has compared them to. If you show me a specific Wikipedia rule or guideline that supports your position and debunks mine, I will no longer dispute your position. Further, you are correct about the firefighter buff's website not being an acceptable source, even though all of the information contained therein is accurate.--PhiladelphiaInjustice (talk) 15:56, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Let us please try to keep this civil and not resort to individual attacks people. --Zackmann08 (talk)

My alleged PhD and your guess as to the field my alleged degree is allegedly in are completely off topic here. While I gather that you are upset with my opinion, I am neither "inexplicably angry" nor claiming ownership of this article. I am merely a contributor here, as are you and the other editors working on and discussing this issue. In the end, WP:CONSENSUS will be the deciding factor.

I do not have one policy or guideline that specifically calls out this list as inappropriate. Rather, I have numerous guidelines that -- taken as a whole -- I believe seem to say this information does not belong in this article.

• Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information - This list is neither comprehensive nor selected by some independently relevant criteria. A comprehensive list would include every firefighter who died in the line of duty. This one clearly does not. Rather, it includes some of the deaths that have occurred since 1975. How did we decide on 1975? We didn't. It's simply where some editor's interests and/or sources picked up. How were the names selected for inclusion from 1975 on? Whatever someone ran across coverage for. It might be comprehensive, it probably isn't. As the individual entries are individually sourced, we have no way of knowing. Essentially, this is an indiscriminate collection of some firefighters who have died in Philly. It isn't all of them, it isn't the notable ones (in our terminology, none of them are notable -- they do not have their own articles]], it isn't the ones that fit any other criteria. It is the ones that someone saw a source for and added to this article.
• No original research We do not have a secondary source listing all of the deaths ever (or since a particular date). Rather, this list has been cobbled together from numerous disparate sources. That no reliable secondary sources seem to have seen fit to publish the complete list should give us reason to consider why we would.
• Primary, secondary and tertiary sources While we can no doubt find a primary source for the list (i.e., the city or some similar "official" source likely has a list somewhere), we do not have a published secondary or tertiary source for the list as an entity.
• Wikipedia is not a memorial site
• Wikipedia is not a directory Wikipedia is not a list of every album Polydor Records ever released, everyone who has ever climbed Mt. Everest, etc. We can easily find sources mentioning various soldiers killed in (whichever war/"police action"/whatever). We do not include these lists unless we have independent reliable secondary sources discussing the list.
• Topic. This article is about the Philadelphia Fire Department. What does the average reader learn about the PFD by reading the name "Robert Fisher" that would not be gained by a summary of the information?
• Adding individual items to a list/People notable for one event/Lists of people Every person on this list is notable for one event. Those individual events are not major portions of this article. If we were looking at an article on an individual fire, it would likely make sense to include the names of firefighters who died in that fire. In the case of individual fires that are significant portions of the PFD's history (we would have to stretch this to get the list above perhaps ten fires), it likely does not make sense to include the individual deaths at, for example, the Bodine Street fire. With this list, we are well past that point, listing firefighters who died in fires that are not notable on their own and do not merit mention in the article (i.e., we do not -- and we should not -- list all of the individual fires these firefighters died in).
• Wikipedia is not a newspaper We do not have a list of murder victims (or murderers) in Philadelphia (whether "since 1975" or not), though we could construct such a list in a way not at all unlike the way this one has been onstructed.

Then again, that's just my opinion. At rock bottom, if the list remains, we need inclusion criteria. Either the list includes ALL of the firefighters who have died in the line of duty in the history of the PFD or all of those who fit certain objective criteria identified in a reliable secondary source. - SummerPhD (talk) 03:49, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Your opinion is respected and duly noted but again, it is merely your interpretation of Wiki's policies. I am not suggesting that my interpretation is any better, but at least I am trying to constructively expand the present article rather than reduce it on perceived technicalities using an electron microscope powered by (sometimes illogical) rationalizations. Obviously, there would be no way to list every PFD firefighter fatality by name, date and cause because that info is not listed in any "google-able" source - although your idea to do so is clever. I suspect that over half of the pages of this encyclopedia violate its rules, so I have no clue about why you are attacking contributions to firefighter and police articles. This website is already filled to the gills with sub-literate, laughably impertinent, incredibly trivial, poorly sourced contributions, so I do not see the harm in listing a FD's line-of-duty deaths and their causes. Don't you want to encourage people to contribute and not hold them to the letter of your perceived law? I was definitely wrong to use a fire buff's website as a source for closed firehouses (I should have first checked its validity), but I suspect that allowing the line-of-duty fatality list to remain will not harm anything except the pride of its several critics. Perhaps we could offshoot the list to its own article rather than delete it altogether?--PhiladelphiaInjustice (talk) 12:30, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Removing inappropriate content improves the article. That other inappropriate content remains after that removal merely indicates there is more to be done. Yes, other articles have problems. That does not justify keeping problematic material here.

Generally, we have three sets of inclusion criteria for lists. One is the comprehensive list. A list of the mayors of Philadelphia should include every mayor in Philly's history. Next is the "notables" list. List of people from Philadelphia cannot include everyone from Philadelphia, so we include only notable people: those who have Wikipedia articles. Finally, we have the selection criteria list, which I'll come back to.

We cannot include a comprehensive list here because we do not have an independent reliable secondary source for the material.

We cannot use a notables list and none of the firefighters are notable.

This leaves the selection criteria list. "Selection criteria should be unambiguous, objective, and supported by reliable sources." WP:LSC We do not have selection criteria from a reliable source. For example, we shouldn't create List of foods with more than 10 grams of fat per serving or List of films that made more than their production cost in two weeks or List of countries smaller than Texas. While we could certainly find sources for these, the selection criteria are those that we, the editors of Wikipedia, dreamed up. (Further, I can't really imagine what criteria would make any sense here.

What we have now is an indiscriminate list. The selection criteria (which no one actually created, they just kind of happened) for the list are:

• Philadelphia Firefighter
• died in the line of duty
• 1975 or later
• someone found a source.

The ONLY reason we have selected these particular firefighters is because someone saw a source and bothered to add them. If we spun this off to its own article, we would have to title it List of Philadelphia firefighters who died in the line of duty after 1974 and someone found a source and bothered to add them here. Independent reliable secondary sources give us comprehensive lists of Philadelphia mayors, List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, United States Fish and Wildlife Service list of threatened and endangered arthropods, etc. We have "notables" lists at List of Penn Law School alumni, etc. We have objective criteria lists at List of films considered the worst, etc. We do not (and should not) have List of fruits and vegetables that are purple, List of people from Philadelphia who have allergies or List of people killed in accidents on Lincoln Drive since 1983. - SummerPhD (talk) 14:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

The firefighter fatalities listed are the only ones available from public sources. This is not an all-or-nothing encyclopedia. You are entitled to your opinions and interpretations, but so am I - and I believe that line-of-duty deaths belong in this article because they are a significant part of the of this fire department's history and modus operandi. You should be encouraging contributions to Wiki, not finding frivolous excuses to delete and discourage them. Whatever axe you have to grind against firefighters and police officers has no relevance to this website. I suspect that there are better causes to fight for than trashing the work of bona fide contributors.--PhiladelphiaInjustice (talk) 12:58, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

You could make the same case for including the names of thousands of servicemen and women killed in action in every branch of armed services from all over the world, but we don't do that. It's not a case of "trashing the work of bona fide contributors", it's a case of consistency and complying with policy and guidelines.--ukexpat (talk) 13:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Ok SummerPhD. We get it. You have made your point. Let's move on. --Zackmann08 (talk) 15:54, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is not a memorial . in a history section particularly notable events that ended with a death may deserve mention, but any attempt to present a complete list as a section is WP:UNDUE focus. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 01:07, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

• I agree - WP:NOTMEMORIAL is the principal principle here.--ukexpat (talk) 12:33, 13 March 2015 (UTC)