Talk:John Tillmann

Requested move 4 February 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Move. This is the only topic of the name on Wikipedia; closing early per WP:SNOW. The only other article of this name was deleted back in 2006. Cúchullain t/ c 22:39, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

John Tillmann (art thief) → John Tillmann – Unnecessary disambiguation. Gorobay (talk) 23:23, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * This is a contested technical request (permalink). GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:36, 4 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Question. What makes him the WP:Primarytopic over other people named John Tillman? Artix Kreiger (talk) 02:09, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * John Tillmann is a redlink. There are no Wikipedia entries for anyone else named John Tillmann. The John Tillman disambiguation page lists men who bear a different family name. The art thief would be listed there under section header "See also". &mdash;Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 02:35, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I mean, both spellings could be variations of the name. Thus I ask. no big deal. Artix Kreiger (talk) 03:00, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * A perfectly legitimate question. Under most circumstances we would combine, for example, William, Will, Willy, Willie, Bill and Billy Green under one dab page, but William, Will, Willy, Willie, Bill and Billy Greene under another dab page, with a section header "See also" at both pages. &mdash;Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 03:20, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Please discuss this at talkpage. The title is currently create-protected and that disambiguation seems reasonable with that subtle difference and each name may use the spelling variant –Ammarpad (talk) 03:45, 4 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Support as there is no other entry for a person of that name. If moved, a hatnote to John Tillman (disambiguation) will be helpful. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:19, 4 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Support per nomination. A hatnote at John Tillmann directing users to the John Tillman disambiguation page is all that is needed. We have separate entries for Hoffmann, Hoffman and Hofman, Brown (surname) and Browne (surname), Lawrence (surname) and Laurence (surname), etc. &mdash;Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 06:33, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I just added such a hatnote. —  AjaxSmack 13:59, 4 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Support per nom. —  AjaxSmack  13:59, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Support per only topic with that name, WP:SMALLDETAILS and . --В²C ☎ 21:47, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Support and add hatnote per nom, Roman, and WP:SMALLDETAILS.


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

High likelihood Tillmann wrote much of this article himself
As the title implies, the revision history of this article reveals serious concerns about it being an autobiography and WP:POV. A majority of its content (at least until yesterday) was written by accounts with extremely suspicious behaviors and penchants for praiseful prose. How was this not caught, or at least raised as an issue, sooner? See below for evidence. Any advice on next steps is welcomed.

Tillmann exited prison in November 2015. Around a month thereafter, the user User:Menachemsiodmak created this article and expanded it numerous times over several months. A quick Google search reveals that Menachem Ira Siodmak is the alias of a convicted sex offender in Halifax, which should already raise WP:NPOV red flags. In July 2016, two accounts begin editing Wikipedia within days of each other, User:Artheistsguy and 24.222.44.82. These two accounts alone, until today, were responsible for 54% of all the written content ever added to this article, per XTools (I have downloaded the percentages if more proof is needed). Artheistguy spent two years editing this article (plus a couple edits to his userpage, claiming to be an American) and nothing else on the site. 24.222.44.82 edited this article and the Art heist article, but also the Dorchester Penitentiary article, where the account added information about a former Nazi inmate alongside (known Nazi-supporter) Tillmann in the same sentence. Finally, the only other article the account edited was a List of rivers of Nova Scotia where the account added the name of... a small brook that Tillmann managed to get named after himself. Doesn't get much more obvious than that — except for the IP address geolocating to Halifax, where Tillmann lived at the time. Artheistsguy and 24.222.44.82 stopped editing Wikipedia entirely within just a couple days of each other, in May/June 2018. Tillmann died that December, just a few months later.

None of this is to mention the three photos that Artheistsguy has uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, some of which are used on the Tillmann article. Their origins are listed as coming from "the wife of John Tillmann", "directly from subjects", and "own work". I don't know how else to interpret 'own work' on the 1998 Russia Tillmann photo other than that Artheistsguy is/was John Tillmann himself.

As of yesterday, the three Wiki accounts discussed above combined for ~61% of the article John Tillmann's total authorship. Even if all three were somehow not personally Tillmann's, their timing, writing style, and editing habits point to clear violations of WP:NPOV and WP:COI. Surely I don't need to further belabor why letting a neo-Nazi abuser write his own Wikipedia article is a detriment to the encyclopedia as a whole, but as the cherry on top, information on this article about Tillmann's non-heist-related arrests for alleged violent/harrassment crimes was shockingly lacking (and is still, somewhat). After Tillmann died, even the CBC ran an article about former victims coming forward about his behavior and abuse. But because this article's (alleged) primary author wasn't around anymore...

I've never come across something like this before — I'm relatively new here — but is there some user or group I can report this to? This page needs a serious rewrite. Tillmann fits notability criteria, for sure, but suspiciously self-aggrandizing prose that (even after numerous editors' revisions) still plagues this article. Any advice or comments are welcomed. SunTunnels (talk) 13:48, 18 May 2024 (UTC)