Talk:Bruce Williamson

Red link revert
Chubbles has informed me that I am wrong to delete the red link "Bruce Williamson (saxophonist)". In his defense his edit summary contains an acronym: WP:MOSDABRL. Interesting thing, though, is that this section of the Manual of Style makes my case better than his. The first sentence says, "A link to a non-existent article (a "red link") should be included on a disambiguation page only when a linked article (not just other disambiguation pages) also includes that red link". There is no linked article on that line. In other words, it's a line that has a red link but no blue link, a situation which usually leads to the red link to be removed. I've done enough disambiguating to have seen that done many times.

The second sentence says, "Do not create red links to articles that are unlikely ever to be written, or are likely to be removed as insufficiently notable topics". I have my doubts that Bruce William saxophonist is notable. I'm confident that it's v. likely never to be written. Click my name for more proof. I have a lot of experience to back up the claim that Bruce Williamson saxophonist will be one more stub, PROD, or AfD in Chubbles's twelve year backlog. The most recent argument on my behalf was his inability to tell me anything about Bruce Williamson weeks ago when I brought this up. If Person A is going to write an article about Subject A, shouldn't Person A know something, anything, about that subject? Otherwise why write the article? But weeks have past, giving him ample time to have learned something about the subject or looked for sources about the subject. Has he done so? I don't know. He keeps telling me to stay off his Talk page. If I stay on this page, he can ignore me and continue doing what he has been doing. They are called Talk pages, after all, but I can't force someone to talk. From my perspective, refusing to talk, to address the subject, looks like a weak dodge. It's a losing strategy. Instead of strategies, why not simply be honest? Vmavanti (talk) 21:32, 7 September 2020 (UTC) Vmavanti (talk) 13:21, 8 September 2020 (UTC) Vmavanti (talk) 13:22, 8 September 2020 (UTC) Vmavanti (talk) 16:00, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Bruce Williamson (saxophonist) is, and was when you wrote this, linked to Art Lande, so it meets the qualification to be included at MOS:DABRL. I'll also pipe the MET listing for it, which currently links to the dab. Chubbles (talk) 01:36, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
 * How can Bruce Williamson saxophonist link to Art Lande when it's a red link? It doesn't link to anything.
 * "pipe the MET listing". Say again in English?
 * Click the link for Bruce Williamson (saxophonist) and then click "what links here". Art Lande links to it. WP:MET's listing for Williamson now also links to it, as well, indicating Williamson has presence in a music encyclopedia. Chubbles (talk) 15:43, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:MET proves nothing. We have already discussed your faith in encyclopedias and how they relate to Wikipedia. You persist in a false belief. Wikipedia is not a church or religion or a movement to which one attaches existential meaning. This might be a good time to remind you of the purpose of disambiguation pages. "Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered by Wikipedia". This refers to existing articles, not non-existent articles. There are no conflicts with nonexistent articles—because they don't exist. "Mercury can refer to a chemical element, a planet, a Roman god." My third point is that including red links without blue links encourages IP users to do the same. I can tell you from experience that it happens often and that WP editors remove them per documentation. Let it go.
 * The link here indicates to a person interested in the jazz musician, and landing on this page, that we do not currently have an article on him, but that we recognize we should. (If he were truly non-notable, I would agree with you that we would want to remove him.) But dab pages, like red links generally, can reflect that Wikipedia is not finished, and Williamson's lack of an article is an example. Chubbles (talk) 16:10, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Vmavanti (talk) 23:13, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * True Art Lande page links there, but this is not from the main text of the page. It is from the chart on the page that is one of many exercises in Wikipedia in excessive creation of links. Not everyone who performed on some instrument as part as some album is default notable. this is one of many schemes that would make Wikipedia 10 times as big as it is and lead to it being unsupervisable. No one has shown notability here.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:13, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Williamson's entry in Oxford Music Online is partly visible here: Chubbles (talk) 16:21, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Chubs's answer to the topic of notability has been various but usually some form of negative. He dislikes the idea. He thinks the definition of notability ought to be changed, particularly when it comes to what he considers the elevated pursuit of the arts. He has told me people or organizations (and so on) are automatically notable if they appear in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, which was bought by Oxford University in England and can be found, for a fee, at Oxford Music Online. His long list of stubs and orphans contain many articles from that three-volume work. His argument is that encyclopedias are tertiary sources that necessarily use secondary sources. The existence of these secondary sources guarantees not only notability but the existence of ample resources to write a Wikipedia article of substance. He doesn't know anything about Bruce Williamson. He opens one of these books, picks a subject, sees if there is an article about that subject, and if there isn't then he creates a red link or a stub. I wouldn't call it the worst idea in the world. But as the sole criterion for creating articles it fails.