User:Cullen328/sandbox/Coffee

List of Jewish American authors - a case study
I appreciate the kind words in the section above about my contributions to rebuilding List of Jewish American poets but that was an accidental side effect, as it were, of my efforts to rebuild List of Jewish American authors after Coffee wreaked havoc on that list at 23:45 30 December 2019 (UTC).

Coffee was editing at a rapid clip at that time, spending only a few minutes each to devastate many Jewish American lists. In this case, he removed 145 authors from this list in a single edit. Let me make it perfectly clear that this list had unreferenced entries, as did the others, and clearly these lists need work. The question is what kind of work should editors be doing in such cases? Thousands of lists have similar problems and also need work. I am not opposed to doing that work myself as can be seen by my recent edit history which shows that I have spent most of my 2020 editing so far trying to rebuild this particular list. I have added 71 authors back to that list, all with references and many with two references. I have devoted a lot of research time and mental energy to save this list the right way, as I have done with at least one other major list in the past.

Coffee is quite fond of quoting cherrypicked sections of policies and guidelines over and over again, presumably under the theory that if an argument is not persuasive the first time, he can convince other editors by repeating the argument verbatim seven times. I don't know about the rest of you, but that tactic does not work for me. Let me quote a portion of our core content policy Verifiability, which offers some very wise advice that should inform any further discussion of this fiasco.

Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source. Whether and how quickly material should be initially removed for not having an inline citation to a reliable source depends on the material and the overall state of the article. In some cases, editors may object if you remove material without giving them time to provide references; consider adding a citation needed tag as an interim step. When tagging or removing material for lacking an inline citation, please state your concern that it may not be possible to find a published reliable source and the material therefore may not be verifiable. If you think the material is verifiable, you are encouraged to provide an inline citation yourself before considering whether to remove or tag it.

Coffee's edits to Jewish American lists were as if that first sentence contained the word "must" instead of "may", and as if none of those other sentences had been written, debated and accepted as policy. It was almost as if he was a bot operating under the simpleminded algorithm "no reference for list entry = deletion mandatory". Consider the horrifying damage that such indiscriminate deletionism causes. With a single mouseclick, Coffee eliminated Nobel prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pulitzer prizewinner Bernard Malamud, Pulitzer prizewinner Herman Wouk, and Chaim Potok, an Orthodox rabbi who wrote a smash bestselling novel The Chosen, which became a Hollywood movie. He also removed very well known American Jewish women authors Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag. All these writers are dead so there are no BLP concerns. There is no need to provide a reference that the sky is blue or that Paris is the capital of France or that the apple is a fruit, because those facts are self-evident to intelligent people. Similarly, it ought to be self-evident to anyone with even a passing familiarity with 20th century American literature that those six writers should not have been removed in a single mouseclick. The best solution would have been for Coffee to provide those references himself. The second best solution would have been to add "citation needed" tags. The third best solution would have been to do nothing and move on, since these claims are self-evidently true to intelligent editors at all familiar with the topic, and there were better things for Coffee to do at the time. Instead, Coffee chose the worst possible "solution", mass deletion of those writers by a single mouseclick.

When criticized, Coffee responded with elaborate wikilawyering replete with his usual repetitiveness. Questions were met with evasiveness, dogmatic pedantry, and an insistence that his radically deletionist edits were somehow mandated by policy, and intended to protect "the Jews". In my opinion, Coffee has shown himself not competent to edit Jewish topics or lists. I will leave it to uninvolved editors to craft a specific solution.