User talk:BOFSIGHS

Hamilton University
Hi. Its really easy to add a reference. Just enclose your reference in tags like so: * <John Doe - mayor of everytown, USA

The footnote will appear automatically. There are additional templates that you can use to further cite a newpaper article or book (see Citation_templates for the gory details). If this is confusing to you, then you can always just add the citation directly to the article, and somebody will help clean it up. CosmicPenguin (Talk) 00:48, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Glad to see that you successfully navigated the problem of adding references. Nice work! Regretfully, however, I deleted your addition due to a biography of living persons concern. For a person who is not inherently notable (and mayors of small cities generally are not notable) and whose degree has not become newsworthy (for example, due to a scandal), "outing" them by highlighting their diploma mill degree appears to violate WP's policy on biographies of living persons. See Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard/Archive46 for a related discussion. Cheers! --Orlady (talk) 16:23, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

As for the notability of a small-city mayor, see WP:POLITICIAN. The fact that Wasilla is smaller than Riverdale does not change that equation -- Sarah Palin probably would not be notable is she had stayed mayor in Wasilla. --Orlady (talk) 17:43, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * On my talk page, you wrote: Concerning your deletion of my Hamilton University entry, Isn't a mayor an elected 'public figure' that should be held to a higher standard? Riverdale Georgia is larger than the city that Sarah Palin was a mayor of; and she has been responsible to the public ever since. Must the public wait until a former mayor is chosen for a higher position in order to question their resume?BOFSIGHS (talk) 17:31, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I sympathize with your points, but Wikipedia is not an outlet for investigative journalism. If someone local wants to dig into her resume and expose her degree, then we may have a WP:RS item to include in the Hamilton University article, but Wikipedia does not report independent investigations by its contributors (see WP:OR), particularly when the subject of the investigation is a living person with a reasonable expectation of privacy (and no clue that the content is being published in Wikipedia).