Talk:Craig Hamilton-Parker

Wait just a cotton pickin minute
This page just popped up on the WikiProject Paranormal alert - never heard of the guy before and you would think if he has made all these amazing predictions the world would know of this guy. So red flags for me. Looking at the sources and what do we have ... Linkedin, Independent article full of celebrity predictions (none verified), Esquire (same as the Independent), Leicestershire Live, HuffPo, Dan Viet. (these are all within a couple days of each other and read like a press release) Then we have The Australian, The Silver Times, The Spectator and The Guardian. And Psychic News? Seriously? The Atlantic is probably the only RS and they include a short paragraph for Hamilton-Parker in a long list of other predictions for the end of the world. Sorry not buying it - this person does not pass the notability threshold, not even on the fence. This is going to have to be AfD and I'll do it if no one beats me to it. So NO on the DYK. Sgerbic (talk) 21:59, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I began the deletion process. RobP (talk) 22:05, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The Australian and the Guardian are both quite confidently RS. I strongly doubt the HuffPo piece is a press release, considering it's tearing him apart. The Independent and Esquire are both falling for him, which, you know, is what it is, but are high-profile enough that if they're falling for him it's worth noting. Vaticidalprophet 22:06, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
 * @Vaticidalprophet I had completely forgotten about this and now re-reading it over again more carefully I see I over-reacted, made a bad argument and was wrong. I apologize. Sgerbic (talk) 19:01, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Sgerbic. I'm thankful for your apology, and I don't want you, either, to take me for someone trying to attack you (the "witch hunt" and, horrifically, "Night of the Long Knives" language from some other people in this discussion has been frankly horrifying). I took this article off my watchlist some time ago, but looking at some of the tags that have been put on it in the meantime I'll probably have to fix it up a little bit. My position here is that I care a lot about BLP policy, and I'm sensitive to anything that concerns me it'd undermine it. (There have been more recent cases of this in different topic areas that are similarly hard; there's an editor who's been nominating a lot of problematic political BLPs at GAN where I suspect the situation might end up at BLPN soon.) I really don't like that the whole situation has wound up at Arbcom and I wish the community had found a better way to handle it, but the combination of BLP with the offwiki element is tricky. A long time ago, an acquaintance made a joking proposal that Arbcom should be replaced by the different 'sides' of an argument competing to see who could improve an article the most in a given period of time. I think that'd be a net improvement for the project. Vaticidalprophet 20:09, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you - I have been editing since 2008 (I think) and I have zero experience with admin pages, I try to not learn the Wikipedian language in order to not slip into it when working with new people so this is all very new to me. I don't know if I have ever heard of ArbCom before. I completely understand that you are not one of the editors that are hounding and piling on in these threads. When I read your post I thought I better take another look at what I did, because obviously something went wrong. I'm glad I did as I have learned a few things. @Rp2006 may well want to take another look at how this all was handled, but I don't speak for them.
 * There has been some odd discussions about GSoW being an off-Wikipedia group, the speculation here has us as a nefarious group, the paranormal community for years has us equal to the Illuminati, running Wikipedia from behind the scenes. If I had so much power, why would I be dragged into all this drama over and over again? Why would pages I have written get an AfD or heavily edited removing what I wrote? The fact is that we are just editors that I train, we edit in many languages and are here to work on pages of the paranormal and science, we have just published 1,963 today. We didn't start out to be a "thing" it was just me stumbling around Wikipedia trying to figure it out and not get banned, I made a ton of mistakes. People started contacting me asking how to edit also as they were unable to figure it out, and in time we learned from each other and many have moved on to become excellent editors. We designed basic training that has been vetted by many editors, and made it mostly visual. You all have been working alongside GSoW editors for years and no one cared. Chess put up a playlist of some of my hokey training videos, and I have a series of videos of me just turning on the camera and editing, explaining as I go. My user page has information about our training and we have a website, so I'm not sure why people think we are hiding what we are doing? Last year we talked about making all the pages we have written public, and were seriously thinking about it and how best to do so. Then BAM we get hit with this drama. Outing, harassment and editors doing their darn best to collect all the names. And once I make that list live, it will exist forever here and another mess like this will arise in time and even though it has been quiet for years, suddenly the horses are off to the races again.
 * We also are very interested in BLP and actually just people in general. We have just published #570 in English and it's such a joy to learn about people. Wherever they fall on the paranormal spectrum they are still people and still deserve the best we can create. We strongly believe that discussions about the page should happen on the talk page. And I apologize to whomever is reading this now thinking that I am breaking that rule but having a conversation about ArbCom and not the target of this page.
 * Our topic areas might not coincide but I hope to see you around Wikipedia @Vaticidalprophet and with our interactions you learn that we all have the same goal. And I apologize again for my brisk manner and incorrect statements. Sgerbic (talk) 23:13, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The intro and Psychic predictions section of the article are cringeworthy to read. Predicting Brexit, Trump's win, and a pandemic sometime in the future are things tens of millions of ordinary people and professional forecasters have done and doesn't require psychic powers. A good publicist can make anyone a famous psychic. Let me know if there is ever a vote someday on cutting back this overly emphasized part of the article.  5Q5 &#124;&#9993; 13:18, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Understanding of citation policy
, I have no issue with your prose edits, but your reference edits are betraying a lack of understanding of WP:V and acceptable references.

The "new Nostradamus" attributed quote is entirely appropriate under WP:NONENG; it's attributing that "the people who believe this guy is a psychic call him by this name". This is a representative solid example of "the people who believe this guy is a psychic".

More concerningly, you've removed a source for being behind a paywall, which is completely inappropriate and in total violation of WP:V. WP:PAYWALL makes it 100% clear that a source being paywalled is completely acceptable. In this case, you've removed a ref from Australia's paper of record, which is entirely acceptable. Also, I suspect you may have misread what it was addressing, considering that it was debunking his claims to being a psychic. Vaticidalprophet 03:12, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * This statement at WP:V: "...means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source" is clear. It is not possible under these circumstances to verify the claims. I understand the last resort approach is to allow such material. But here, surely there are refs you can find that are in English AND accessible. RobP (talk) 03:26, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * That statement is not, and is very intentionally, by at this point twenty years of consensus not "they can be verified in an instant by a monolingual English speaker paying $0 for results accessible on Google". This is me following best practice, not last-resort practice. In fact, the FUTON bias tends to make articles worse, not better -- non-paywalled news sources in particular are not infrequently lower quality. Vaticidalprophet</b> 03:28, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * This is not what WP:V and WP:RS say, it is not what they mean, and it is not how they've ever been interpreted before. If you'd like to change the policy to deprecate all non-English content, that seems like a conversation better-suited to the talk page for WP:RS or the village pump. jp×g 03:39, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * It seems that the argument concerning FUTON bias refers to scholarly journals and NOT news articles concerning a "psychic" like we have in this article. RobP (talk) 03:42, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Would you prefer the article be balanced in favour of the FUTON sources that think he's a psychic rather than the paywalled ones that point out he changes his predictions retroactively? <b style="color:#000">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 03:45, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Hard to answer that (I say facetious) - as I cannot actually verify what is in the paywalled references. RobP (talk) 03:51, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Like I said, though, this is simply not what the policy is. The fact that a reader cannot verify all information from a Web browser for free is not required for a source's inclusion. Such a policy would fundamentally break the encyclopedia: cite book, for example, is used on more than a million pages. (And there are plenty of ways to view paywalled content (instutitional subscriptions, browser extensions, archive websites, Google cache, libgen, sci-hub, etc); have you tried these?) jp×g 03:58, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * And like I said, I understand the reason for the policy... cases where there isn't a choice. This isn't that. I have written something like 20 articles, 2 GAs... and have never had to rely on such refs. Not once. Just because something CAN be done does not mean it SHOULD be in a specific case. Someone is being stubborn here. But so be it. RobP (talk) 04:08, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * (If you want to count articles and GAs, both your interlocutors have more.) <b style="color:#000">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 04:09, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 * In addition, I'd suggest that never having needed to use a paywalled or non-English source, far from being a point in favour, suggests you're insufficiently cautious/in-depth with your sourcing. It is extremely common for articles at those upper quality levels you allude to to have such sources, regardless of their topics. The only articles I've written with none at all have been on niche aspects of Anglophone Internet culture (and even then some have had them). <b style="color:#000">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 04:12, 24 March 2021 (UTC)