Talk:Simon J. Gathercole

Entry Written By the Author himself?
The tone of the whole article is suspicious. Not only the article reads like a backcover appraisal, but hoever wrote it has a very nuanced and detailed knowledge of the author and says exactly what the author would say about himself.Shouldn't someone look into this?
 * I agree, and I did look into it. I don't have any doubt that at least one of the editors is the subject of the article, and that several others at least have some sort of conflict of interest.


 * Some information introduced is trivia, and trivia that likely only someone who knew him would know. Other additions are an extensive wall of suggested works and bibliography that is among the largest I've seen on Wikipedia.


 * Still other additions are extremely promotional, and definitely fall way over the line of WP:PROMO and WP:PEACOCK.


 * It should also be noted that the promotional language when it has a citation is specifically cited to blogs; unreliable sources.


 * In the case of all of those additions, this is the only article they've edited, or nearly the only one.


 * However, I'm not opening up an SPI because at this point; it's not [currently] disruptive, and even if there might be some sort of concerted effort to puff up this page, with all of them being IP editors, it would be fruitless without it becoming an ongoing problem.


 * As I said, I have looked at the other edits from the time the page was created by established editors, both registered and unregistered. That is, those editors who don't appear to have some likely conflict of interest, or this being the only article they've edited (with one exception). Nearly every one of these edits appears to be either copyediting, or some attempt to tone down the promotional nature and wording of the article.

So if there's no serious objections, I think the article should be rolled back to the version before these changes were introduced. "Rolled back" as in manually restored; I'll keep the contributions and just copy the text back. Any pertinent information that might fall in the cracks in the meantime can be certainly be added. It would reduce the article to a stub, but that's all the article is without the promotional material, bibliography, and trivial information.

In case some of those IP editors come back and read this comment, please read WP:COI about disclosing a conflict of interest, and avoiding articles where you might not be able to be neutral about the subject (especially if you are the subject of the article). Also, see WP:RS to see what we consider reliable sources, and WP:BLP as to what can be written about a living person. Spoiler: almost everything has to be referenced by reliable sources.

Quinto Simmaco (talk) 15:13, 5 November 2017 (UTC)