User talk:Vfrickey/Archives/2016/January

For your entertainment
When I came to the article, I decided to place a NPOV tag and test the waters. And got a sharper reaction then I expected, but a meticulous review of problems was demanded and then rejected. Anyways, I originally began with no handicap and came out with WP:BLP and WP:IRS and took aim at the very unreliable sources - especially Huffington Post which was used 13 times. Cwobeel responded with "To make it real simple for you: Both The Huffington Post and Vox (part of Vox Media are reliable sources." The section is worth a read and it shows why even basic changes are an issue. I'd stop at the analysis of the Huffington Post - because Huffington Post is gone from the article and it will remain gone. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 07:14, 5 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm stunned at people who pretend to be fastidious about reliability on sources when they criticize "The Volokh Conspiracy" because it's not under the direct control of the Washington Post's editorial desk, but consider the Huffington Post, which goes beyond having a liberal editorial agenda to actual journalistic malpractice (such as in the [Dornella Conner story], which involved an Internet-wide pattern of plagiarism in addition to very selective reporting of the facts of the case to support sensationalistic headlines) to be a reliable source.


 * This isn't even an exceptional case of press bias for the Huffington Post, but I was surprised that they allowed their correspondent to phone in a story that was obviously plagiarized from someone else's work (because Ms. Conner's name was IDENTICALLY misspelled by the correspondent in the same way as the Yahoo! News article on that same incident, and Vox 's article, and firedoglake 's article).


 * This isn't just group think on the part of all these news sources, it's editorial anarchy and complete flouting of the Canons of Journalism - in the service of a political agenda and, of course, the fiscal health of the various "news sites" involved - "if it bleeds, it leads," and those sites chose to leave out vital details of the incident to paint a very different picture of it from the truth - as related by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Samantha Liss in [their own article] - Ms Liss got the injured woman's name right, quoted the woman and her family at length on the incident, and included the inconvenient truth that everyone agreed the driver of the car Ms Conner was in when she was injured was about to mow a St Louis County Police detective down when he fired the beanbag round at it. But leaving that detail out probably got the other news sites major eyetracks and other things that make money for them.


 * Hope you read my reply to Dyrnych, who said


 * "We rely on reliable sources to do fact-checking; in fact, one of the hallmarks of a reliable source is that it has mechanisms for fact-checking. So let's let them fact-check and stop pretending that we're better at doing so than they are... ".


 * Obviously he's ignoring the very clear shitstorm of press misstatements, piling on, and general confusion of a consensus (in a very sensationalistic press community) with verifiable facts which characterize national coverage of the Brown shooting and the Ferguson riots. The people who accept this garbage as fact are often self-righteously critical of Fox News.  If an editor had dared to cite Fox on this incident, you and I both know very well that the edit would be reverted on NPOV grounds at the speed of light, but the same people who'd be doing the reversion cite even more strongly non-NPOV sources in the leftist fringe media. Thanks for fighting that. loupgarous (talk) 20:46, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't know if you bothered to read my comments or their context, didn't understand them, or just don't care. I'm not defending "leftist fringe media," nor have I ever done so.  In fact, the comment you keep quoting as though it was made in order to support HuffPo, firedoglake (whatever that is, I don't know or care to figure out), or Yahoo News was actually made in opposition to another editor's use of Wilson's transcript as quoted in a Daily Kos piece in order to debunk reliable sources.  Then ChrisGualtieri started quoting the transcript to debunk Cwobeel's debunking.  That was my concern: either it's reported in an RS or it's not, and it's pointless to use non-RSes or our own analysis of primary sources to engage in some kind of competitive debunking.  If we're worried about the sources, criticize the sources and don't waste time arguing about whether something in Daily Kos (an obviously non-RS for fact) is supported by the primary sources!  Did you read my reply to you?  That should have clarified things.  Instead, you're making wild accusations about my supposed defense of a bunch of sources that I've never defended and "accept[ing] this garbage as fact." Honestly, it's kind of puzzling. Dyrnych (talk) 21:46, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * ping @ Dyrnych In my talk page, I seem to have conflated your stance with that of other editors, and I sincerely apologize if I mischaracterized your views. But I stand by my assessment here of your statement


 * "We rely on reliable sources to do fact-checking; in fact, one of the hallmarks of a reliable source is that it has mechanisms for fact-checking. So let's let them fact-check and stop pretending that we're better at doing so than they are, which is just leading to the same idiotic squabbles over whose version is The Truth."


 * ChrisGualtieri says he's eliminating citations which don't comply with the standards of reliability he's citing WP:IRS and care to avoid mischaracterizing the acts of living persons WP:BLP. I'll let ChrisGualtieri defend those acts, because I think he understands the issues better than I do.
 * However, other editors are apt to take your statement blockquoted above as permission to include material with serious deficiencies in NPOV and sensationalism because "they're reliable sources." You were very definite in your language there, and I don't think there are any alternate interpretations possible to


 * "We rely on reliable sources to do fact-checking; in fact, one of the hallmarks of a reliable source is that it has mechanisms for fact-checking. So let's let them fact-check and stop pretending that we're better at doing so than they are".


 * To me, that means we have, once a news source is judged "reliable," to stop looking at how plausible its statements are in individual articles and give their editors and journalists room in this article to say things which may be misleading. We're not supposed to stop looking at whether a "reliable source" dropped the ball in one particular article, because that will lead to misstatements of fact being in the article.


 * Of course, we have to take care that we're not applying blanket judgments to news sources that do usually meet our standards of reliability, or being too quick to apply WP:SENSATION to every thing a news source prints. However, there are stories, such as this one on Michael Brown's shooting and the ensuing riots, that have a very tight press cycle and are bound not to have good fact-checking.  The case I cited on Donnella Conner's blinding when a policeman fired a beanbag round at the car she was a pasenger in while the car was allegedly being driven toward him is, I hope, not very typical, but it involved two sources which other editors here have defended as "reliable" (Vox and Huffington Post).  There's no "court of journalism" in which charges of plagiarism and sensationalism can be brought, because freedom of speech necessarily means "freedom to misspeak."  But that means in making this article a reliable source of information on the shooting of Michael Brown and related events, we do have to fact-check as far as researching alternate accounts of a disputed event and using good editorial judgment to decide what belongs in this article. loupgarous (talk) 22:30, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your apology. I certainly did not mean for my comment to be taken as carte blanche for editors to include misstatements of fact.  Reliable sources should certainly not be taken at their word—and we should not quote them—when it is demonstrable that they have misstated a fact.  But I am not at all confident in ChrisGualtieri's ability to distinguish a misstatement of fact from a disputed fact, which is one of the reasons that I stated things in stronger terms than I might normally use.  Similarly, I object to an editor performing a factual analysis of opinion sources to conclude that an opinion is invalid or wrong because it contains what, in that editor's mind, is a misstatement of fact. Dyrnych (talk) 22:50, 5 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I won't bother with handicaps or educating editors like Cwobeel on the finer points of why something is wrong. I took Dyrnych's tone and argument specifically as an attempt to defend the source because of the context. It is understandable that if the response comes on the heels of illustrative example that such a response seems directed at me - and often is - without analyzing the merit or reason as to why it was made. In that case, I was showing Cwobeel the dangers of using poor sources like Daily Kos - even if they use primary sources. In that case the primary source was misused by the Daily Kos so I explained why Daily Kos was wrong by using the primary source as the example. That was what I was illustrating. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:26, 6 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I see at least three separate issues here -
 * First, and it's the one I'm most interested in engaging other editors on, is that idea "Hey, if someone got it in print, it's a reliable source." Wrong and indefensible.  Not only are editors, journalists and writers in general human and prone to error, but by making a religion out of publication, wikipedia's setting itself up to be part of the grand echo chamber of modern journalism, where consensus trumps truth. That has lead to, in several occasions over the history of journalism, the ability of unscrupulous publishers and editors to hijack the narrative on a subject - William Randolph Hearst did it several times, and the fact that his presses used yellow paper gives us the term "yellow journalism" - pretty much the way ALL popular journalism now works.
 * Second, discernible editorial slant is everywhere. Fox News is exceptional only because the polarity of its slant is noticeably different from the rest of the press - you could substitute "liberal" for "conservative" in our article on Fox News and come up with a good description of how CNN, MSNBC, the former Current TV (now Al-Jazeera's US operation), and the news divisions of ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS/NPR do their business.
 * Yet, there would be open and virulent internecine character assassination in wikipedia should editors ever explore, say, CBS News' record of lost libel cases due to their leftward-slanted coverage of US politics. You can't even draw attention to the fact that Bill Ayers made bombs, planted bombs, and exhorted his friends in the SDS Weather Underground to do likewise without having people accuse you of editing on Christmas so no one else would see your edits ([Wikidemon] accused me of that, then whined about it when I drew other people's attention to it).
 * So I see your point on impeaching the Daily Kos and Huffington Post as "reliable sources." Huffington Post in particular is the mirror image of Fox News - in both cases, someone with money (Ariana Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, respectively) decided to bankroll a news outlet with the avowed intention of inserting political slant into news reporting. But we have editors who are ready to swear on all the holy books of Mankind that Huffington Post doesn't have an explicit slant and can be trusted on everything; the same people who use the epithet "Faux News," because they only want their narrative to appear anywhere.  We're well-defended here at wikipedia from accepting Fox News as gospel - our article on Fox News is heavily non-NPOV on the issue of Fox's political slant.
 * Fine, everyone with a pulse has a political slant. But
 * Third, Huffington Post, Vox, Yahoo!News and a host of other online news sources all ran the same story (the [Dornella Conner blinding]) with Ms. Conner's name identically misspelled and other details of the story either reported almost identically, word for word, or suppressed in the same way.
 * To me, THAT is when we start looking very critically at how news sources do their job - when they permit and even encourage plagiarism (because in the sources I mentioned, it was rare to see attribution of other news sources in the articles concerned, which might have mitigated the clear copying of errors from article to article) and suppress details in the coverage of breaking news to make their copy more sensational, THAT is when they ought to lose credence as wikipedia sources. Our job here isn't to perpetuate clear and very nasty journalistic sins on the part of organizations who want to pretend they're being objective.


 * Huffington Post, Rolling Stone and Yahoo!News are examples of very wealthy organizations whose editorial practices would be laughed out of the news rooms of most universities' campus newspapers. Just because they can afford to send people who wouldn't make the cut as campus journalists around the world as "correspondents" and equip them with awesome toys doesn't save their work from being biased crap in many cases. They'd have to work hard to come UP to Fox News's standards (and Fox News's misstatements of fact can be listed in a single, if long, paragraph - they actually do go back and retract their mistakes, which the other big network news organizations only do on the verge of being sued). And the victims of Rolling Stone's reporting on alleged campus rape ought to wind up owning that magazine AND the house of its publisher based on the utter lack of fact-checking on the last big story they did.


 * That's my take on the situation. I'm not in favor of blanket bans on any news source, but I agree with you that there is an unjustified attitude prevalent here that the mere fact of its publication in a "reliable source" justifies the insertion of anything, no matter how provably untrue, in a wikipedia article. loupgarous (talk) 13:42, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Alice Dalgliesh & Robert Heinlein
I was led here by your Usenet remarks about cultivating the Alice Dalgliesh article.

None of the Heinlein books she edited won Hugo Awards. Farmer in the Sky (or Satellite Scout) won a Retro Hugo Award in 2001, but that is distinct from the Hugo for contemporary work.

The phrase "Besides the Hugo Award" might be changed to "Besides the Retro Hugo Award" but, frankly, the sentence works well if it is dropped altogether. Other awards, coming while Dalgliesh was still alive, mean more.

Under "Publishing Highlights," Heinlein's The Door into Summer was published by Doubleday, not Scribner's, so Dalgliesh was not the editor. It should be removed from the article.

Check the quotation marks on Heinlein's remark about "good Freudians." They are slippery.

I'm inclined to agree with your remark that Grumbles from the Grave may be too hard on Dalgliesh. As I recall, the second volume of Bill Patterson's biography of Heinlein is more sympathetic to her. And Bill was quite expert on the correspondence between them.

I hope these remarks will be helpful in your gardening work. Beamjockey (talk) 01:33, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your help on this article. I actually posted the first draft of my edits to the article to alt.fan.heinlein, where someone pointed out to me the howling inaccuracy of a previous editor's assertion that FIVE Dalgliesh-edited Heinlein novels earned Hugo Awards, and pared that back to Farmer in the Sky - and I was aware that even that was a "Retro Hugo," but I was concerned that to our readers and to other Wikipedia editors, the distinction between contemporaneous Hugos and "Retro-Hugos" might smack of "undue weight."  So I called a Hugo a Hugo and left the reference to Farmer in the Sky's Hugo in the text.


 * Thanks for the catch on The Door into Summer - a previous editor also credited Dalgleish with Double Star - another Doubleday imprint! Either I or someone else caught The Door into Summer, I believe, and I'm removing Double Star from Dalgleish's credits in the article.


 * Re: good Freudians, I'll revisit the text in question and remove any ambiguities.


 * I've yet to read Bill Patterson's work on Heinlein (apart from his infrequent postings on alt.fan.heinlein). It's on my bucket list, because things just keep coming up.


 * And again, thanks for your help. I intend to look more closely at this particular garden for more meadow muffins NOW. loupgarous (talk) 18:56, 25 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Since my last comment here, I've revisited the section ==Alice Dalgliesh and Robert A. Heinlein== in the article on Alice Dalgliesh to clean up some very substandard syntax and grammar I or another editor committed there, and to make the section more readable and less ambiguous regarding Heinlein and Dalgliesh's conflicts (perhaps placing them in better perspective).


 * My intent all along was not to do a hatchet job on Dalgliesh, but to help (along with you and other editors) remove the original misleading statements as to the number of Hugos awarded to novels Dalgleish edited for Heinlein, and removing references to novels which weren't even published by Scribners (The Door into Summer and Double Star, notably). Thanks for your invaluable help. --loupgarous 01:48, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Archive 18

Archive 5
Hello, you just made an archive page in the main namespace. I don't think that was your intention, so this is a notification that you created that page. IsraphelMac (talk) 16:57, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi in continuation to the message by User:IsraphelMac, I too feel that it was not your intention to create an archive page in the main space. I have blanked the page with proper edit summary and have tagged for speedy deletion. Cheers Peppy Paneer (talk) 17:15, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I indeed was not aware I'd done that. In fact, the text was tagged front and back {{talk archive}).  I placed the text in an existing "Archive 5" from the Archive Box on my User Talk Page, and I think, perhaps, somewhere along the way, the namespace got corrupted.  Please, if it's convenient, could you check my other Archives for this issue?  I'll see to them if they, too, are problematic.
 * Thanks, people. I appreciate your concision and civility. loupgarous (talk) 17:24, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I re-checked the namespace on Archive 5, and it's got "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Vfrickey/Archive_5" - which is the proper namespace for an archived talk page file, isn't it? loupgarous (talk) 17:28, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
 * No, it sure isn't. Compared it to other archive pages which didn't appear in main space. My bad, and if you didn't see it in the page talk itself, or your talk page, I withdraw objection to the page's speedy deletion.  Thanks for the catch! loupgarous (talk) 18:36, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Be careful :-)
Hi, Vfrickey. I wanted to point out something regarding your message to GalaxyStar91 in order to help you avoid possible conflicts and issues as you expand your experience and involvement with Wikipedia. First of all, you did absolutely nothing wrong; my aim is to simply give you advice - that's all :-). In your message, you used words such as "a page of his", and "my site". I highly recommend that you instead directly refer to the articles in question. So, you'd instead say "this article" and "that article". Using "my", "his", or other forms of possessive pronouns like this can lead others to think that you're implying ownership in articles, which is something that is highly discouraged by the community. Of course, this looks like something that you absolutely did not intend - I know that. I just wanted to let you know about this so that you can avoid bad habits made by second-nature and avoid future conflict that may come back to haunt you in unforeseen and innocent ways. I wish you a Happy Friday, and I hope our paths cross again :-)  ~Oshwah~  (talk) (contribs)   01:10, 24 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the catch! And you're right, I really intended for admins to examine the diffs, look at the account, and determine who's really vandalizing our edits.  I'm aware (but thanks for reiterating, it's helpful) that the first thing a troll does these days is forge someone else's tag or username on their dirty work.  I wasn't aware of the WP:OWN guideline, but I can see the point and will so alter my WP:ANI post.


 * Thanks again, best regards. loupgarous (talk) 01:20, 24 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Sincere thanks to you and Liz for the catch on my use of the generic sandbox (instead of my sandbox, which I thought I'd used). I apologized to user:GalaxyStar91 for the inadvertent false accusation on User_talk:GalaxyStar91 loupgarous (talk) 01:35, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Kenneth Mahood (October 24)
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Primefac was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Kenneth Mahood and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Primefac&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also get Wikipedia's Live Help real-time chat help from experienced editors.

Primefac (talk) 02:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Vfrickey! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 22:01, Saturday, October 24, 2015 (UTC)


 * Halfway through the Wikipedia Adventure, I began to have trouble with broken scripts which don't recognize when the user (me, in this case) made the changes to the pages in the exercises which the scripts ask the user to make. That's frustrating.  While the awards are nice digital bling for the new folks, better and more responsive scripts would even be better.  Has ANYONE finished these Adventures? loupgarous (talk) 14:33, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Kenneth Mahood (October 30)
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by SwisterTwister was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Kenneth Mahood and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SwisterTwister&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also get Wikipedia's Live Help real-time chat help from experienced editors.

SwisterTwister  talk  07:11, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Kenneth Mahood (October 31)
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by SwisterTwister was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Kenneth Mahood and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:SwisterTwister&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also get Wikipedia's Live Help real-time chat help from experienced editors.

SwisterTwister  talk  04:50, 31 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Would worldcat.org links be acceptable to you for the books listed in "Books Published by Kenneth Mahood"? I read WP:Golden Rule closely, and there was actually no deprecation at all of amazon.com for the purpose of supplying bibliographic information such as ISDB-13 codes and book titles.  I'll source each and every book listed in the proposed article through worldcat.org now.


 * As far as "news and magazine coverage," Kenneth Mahood's work graced the covers of dozens of issues of Punch and several covers of the New Yorker, and Mahood had been elected to the "Punch Table" recognition of his years of being a valued contributor to what was then the premier humor magazine and an influential source of commentary on politics in Great Britain while he drew cartoons for it. I did supply a review of Mahood`s book Name Droppings from the comic critic Win Wiacek`s online blog Now Read This of one of the books - both as a reference to the existence of the book itself as a commercially-published book of Mahood's and acknowledgement by this critic of the following Mahood had from his debut as a cartoonist in 1949 to the late 1980's. i did cite pages from online archives of cover art for Punch and the  New Yorker demonstrating his reputation as a cartoonist and graphic artist for these magazines, both popular and influential when Mahood contributed art to them.


 * Likewise, where's the guidance in WP:AUTHOR supporting that request in the case of individual books which Kenneth Mahood has had published, or supporting the deprecation of all the news and magazine coverage of Kenneth Mahood I have supplied so far?


 * In plain English - how much more coverage of Mahood and his work in magazines and news sources will you need?


 * I'll endeavor to locate more critical review if it becomes clear that when I find it, I won't automatically be asked to find still more. Otherwise, this project aimed at informing wikipedia's readers of the career and work of Kenneth Mahood and which I felt was worthwhile, is taking time which i find difficult to justify in light of what I've done already.  Wikipedia can find someone else, of course, to do this.  It just  hasn't, so far, which is why I wrote and proposed this article.


 * I'll re-source Mahood's list of publications entirely to worldcat.org. After that, I await some firm indication - numbers would be nice - of how many news and magazine articles which show Kenneth Mahood's notability you require to approve the article. loupgarous (talk) 21:35, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

AfC notification: Draft:Kenneth Mahood has a new comment
 I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Kenneth Mahood. Thanks! Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 04:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your help! I confess to being stuck. Google's not giving me much in the way of contemporary comment on Mahood's work, and my own recollections of it (his "pocket cartoons" for the Daily Mail were also carried occasionally in American periodicals to the extent that a Cajun boy in the 1970s knew who he was and what he did) aren't, of course, allowed - they're WP:OR.  None of the other suggested links at the top of the "Declined" template are giving me anything on Kenneth Mahood that I haven't already used, either.


 * There's some critical reference to Mahood in the Francis and Taylor database, but I'm behind twenty people with just as good a claim to access to new openings in Francis and Taylor as I do.


 * I made a mistake in not just placing this in the article namespace as everyone else seems to do. Now the article's in a "hidden category" of articles with insufficient notability.  I feel that I've produced secondary sources to establish Kenneth Mahood is a notable British cartoonist and a notable Irish artist.


 * Why 27 secondary sources attesting to Kenneth Mahood's 57 year-long career as a cartoonist with publication in Punch, The London Times, the Daily Mail and the New Yorker, and his art work being exhibited and sold at auction based largely on his notability as an artist aren't enough to establish this notability is honestly beyond me. I don't really have more time to waste impressing his notability on those determined to remain unimpressed.


 * This isn't so much a slang at the reviewers (oh, never mind, yes it is) as it is on the unique nature of wikipedia - its rules can be gamed so that it's not superior knowledge of an article's subject matter - even when demonstrated by 27 secondary sources - that determines an article's publication, but the amount of time an editor has to spend in pointless back-and-forth over trivial and even absurd points of fact.


 * Any literate Britisher who read newspapers from 1949 to 2008 can tell you exactly who Kenneth Mahood was. I provided secondary sources to establish exactly that point.  He's notable, but apparently not to the people who are hanging this article up.  Ochlocracy is preventing wikipedia from informing the public, and I've had it.  I'm joining the throng who no longer have time to waste on helping it be better.loupgarous (talk) 14:44, 2 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I'd like to add here that your edits were in the main, great, they made the article better.


 * What you took out was mainly edits I made to marshal more evidence for the notability of Kenneth Mahood. However, I see you removed citations of sources which very clearly showed that Mahood had shifted from painting to creating collages, and where his work has been exhibited, and I wonder why you did that.  However, you're welcome to the project.


 * No reasonable reader of Wikipedia would ask for worldcat.org citations on everything Kenneth Mahood ever wrote, and if I hadn't been trying to approach the issue of his notability that hadn't been established to the satisfaction of two reviewers by plaudits from the British Cartoon Archive (which is funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council), his former employers at the Daily Mail, several other artists and art critics, auctioneers, et al, I wouldn't have put them in the article. The same goes for the prices at which his work has sold as recently as eight years ago - no one pays that sort of money at auction for artists who aren't notable, unless they're speculating (perhaps against Mahood being "discovered" after he dies, I admit).


 * It was defensive editing, and a clear sign I need to step away from this project in particular and Wikipedia in general.


 * Regardless, I'm old and not well. I'll leave the work to those who enjoy it, for I don't, anymore. loupgarous (talk) 16:06, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

One last thing - due to ochlocracy and wikigaming, NPOV here is becoming fiction.
Ochlocracy is mob rule, the notion that consensus is everything. Ochlocracy, and the domination of wikipedia by those who game the system by immediately suppressing edits with which they do not agree, are making wikipedia's vaunted "neutral point of view" WP:NPOV ethic fiction. Eventually, this will bring wikipedia back to its original reputation as an unreliable source.

After 12 years working on the content side trying to prevent that, I want my last significant edit to wikipedia to be a warning that subtlety in pursuing a partisan agenda won't, in the long run, save wikipedia from some very unforgiving judgments later on.

Let's take our article on Fox News. I'm a libertarian, not a conservative. Fox News is not where I get my news, and they have serious shortcomings as a journalistic organization. They have obvious political slant.

Unfortunately, so does the rest of the national press today. It was depressing to see, say, the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown (and its aftermath) in the national, "mainstream" press. And, by the way, our article on the shooting of Michael Brown is excellent. The editing conference in that article's talk page, on which I was tangentially involved, were contentious and involved some unfortunate remarks by almost everyone concerned (me included, and I apologized when I was out of line). But they produced the best coverage of that incident in the electronic press.

By contrast, early on  Time and CNN immediately led with reporting biased toward a version of events later shown on investigation to have been false. ABC News actually followed looters inside the convenience store which in Michael Brown allegedly stole things and assaulted a shopkeeper and filmed them robbing the place and setting it ablaze, then turned their camera to a local college professor who made excuses for this event.

I submit that the camera crew in question probably aided and abetted an arson by lending it worldwide publicity and (obviously) failed to contact the police in any way other than making the event public knowledge. All in service of a journalistic agenda which here in wikipedia would be called WP:SENSATION, but many editors were trying to get that sort of reporting into wikipedia cited to support a version of events which was later shown to be unreliable to support the idea that Officer Dennis Wilson (a living person ostensibly protected by WP:BLP) committed a murder or act of manslaughter. They might have succeeded. And consensus would have trumped truth.

Meanwhile, in a related incident elsewhere in St. Louis County, Missouri, Dornella Conner was sitting with her boyfriend in a car watching the night's events unfold. Suddenly, their car was surrounded by several cars driven by officers of the St. Louis County Police. Ms Conner's boyfriend accelerated his car from the parking lot of the gas station where they were parked, allegedly in the direction of one of the police officers, who fired a beanbag round at the car. The beanbag round struck a window on Ms Conner's side of the car, shattering it - and glass fragments hit her face and eyes; she later lost one eye and the vision in the other was damaged.

Coverage of this incident was instant. Too instant, as it turned out. Of eleven accounts I found on the Internet, including Yahoo News Senior Editor Dylan Stableford's by-lined report, the reports carried by firedoglake.com, Huffington Post, Vox, and Daily Kos, the wording was nearly identical with little or no attempt to paraphrase, and Ms Conner's name was identically misspelled in each account.

For those unacquainted with professional journalism (I've had a toe in the field now and then), this is a sure indication of wide-ranging plagiarism. At least ten of these outlets (perhaps every one of them) plagiarized this story from a central source. None of them fact-checked it as far as consulting the local metropolitan newspaper (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), which was my next move on finding that the grand echo chamber of activist journalism was at it again. None of them was even kind enough to attribute the story to its original source.

Of the accounts available on the Internet at the time of the incident, only that of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch`s reporter Samantha Liss had Ms Conner's name spelled correctly or mentioned the fact that the car in which she'd been riding had actually been heading toward the police officer who fired at it before he fired, or that the round fired had been a bean bag, not a bullet.

But our article on Fox News is the only one which mentions press bias although bias toward the current administration in reporting is rife and has been since the year before the current President of the United States took office - during which time, the press downplayed at least two scandals that would have killed anyone else's Presidential campaign. In television reporting, at least, this doesn't require a lot of conjecture to explain.

No "NBC-General Electric"-type disclaimers appear on CBS News's reporting on the Obama administration or Barack Obama himself, despite the fact that CBS Corporation's main holding company, National Amusements Company, contributed US$305,770 to the Democratic National Committee in 2012 and US$350,276 to the DNC in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics]. According to the same nonpartisan source, Barack Obama got a total of US$579,098 from National Amusements' corporate PAC during the 2008 Presidential election cycle, and $264,900 to the Obama Victory Fund in the 2012 Presidential election cycle.

I'd say this was a massive potential source of bias and journalistic conflict of interest which is entirely undisclosed by CBS's news and entertainment divisions - the owners (Shari Redstone and Sumner Redstone) and employees of National Amusements, which is the holding company not only of CBS, but Viacom, the corporate parent of Comedy Central network, home of The Daily Show cover political news in various products such as CBS News's news programming and Comedy Channel's The Daily Show while having undisclosed funding relationships with Democratic Party operations in general and the President, who is a member of the Democratic Party. It's also undisclosed by our article on CBS News. I think I'll place that information there, just to show the knee-jerk reaction of our more leftist editors in removing the edit.

Our article on CBS News has no discussion of its own political bias, despite the fact that there are significant allegations of such bias going back to their reporting on the Vietnam War, most notably The Uncounted Dead, which alleged Gen. William Westmoreland deliberately underestimated Viet Cong troop strength during 1967 to maintain troop morale; Gen. Westmoreland sued CBS News for libel, and settled out of court with them for an apology.

Former CBS News employees have come forth attesting to CBS's alleged liberal slant. Our article on CBS - but not, however, our article on CBS News - carries a very short reference to former CBS News journalist Bernard Goldberg`s book Bias. Neither article mentions that CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has published a book in 2014, Stonewalled, attesting to her difficulties in investigating various Obama administration-connected scandals while at CBS News. According to her, the difficulties included but were not limited to Obama officials pressuring CBS News to curtail Ms Attkisson's investigative reporting, various acts of harassment, and what she says were hacking of her home and office computers.

Home Box Office and Cable News Network, both of which carry journalistic programming which is at times very openly partisan in its slant (such as HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and much of CNN's morning show commentary) are both owned by Time Warner, which donated US$554,920 to all of Obama's 2014 Presidential cycle campaign committees through PACs and was the top corporate contributor to the Democratic National Committee in 2012, giving them US$650,673, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Neither HBO nor CNN divulges this corporate/PAC funding relationship with the President's campaigns or with the Democratic National Committee in its news programming. And, again, neither do our articles on CNN or HBO.

Nor is any mention made in our articles on Home Box Office or Cable News Network of allegations of political bias in either network's journalistic product, even though John Oliver takes what are arguably very strong partisan positions in his news show (before that, he was a writer for Jon Stewart's The Daily Show). Any political bias passes without comment in those articles.

So, Fox News is indeed being singled out among comparable news networks in our article Fox News for significant mention of alleged or actual bias. I can't think of a rationale in Wikipedia why this ought to be so - just the practical fact that there are more editors willing to suppress the mention of political bias in articles on other comparable networks than not.

We have an NPOV ethic that goes by the side when a preponderance of editors (or just a few who know how and when to invoke our rules on article protection and against reversion of article changes) decide it should be so. I don't know what to do about that except to say that it's happening.loupgarous (talk) 15:44, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Kenneth Mahood (November 11)
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Timtrent was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Kenneth Mahood and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Timtrent&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Kenneth_Mahood reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also get Wikipedia's Live Help real-time chat help from experienced editors.

Fiddle  Faddle  11:52, 11 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I've supplied sources which comply with WP:NOTABLE to the best of my knowledge time and time again, only to be declined time and time again.
 * I seriously doubt sources exist which will convince the reviewers who've looked at my draft of Kenneth Mahood's notability. Since compliance with the guidelines in WP:NOTABLE isn't working, I have to conclude that this entire project has been a waste of my time.  I've formally requested the draft article be deleted, because I'm uninterested in putting more of my time into this project.  If anyone else wants this article, they're welcome to it. loupgarous (talk) 03:20, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Miscellaneous
Hi. In this edit, while answering a question, you seem to have inadvertently reverted the page back to some old version, wiping out lots of subsequent changes in the process. I've undone your edit. Ideally I'd then manually reinstate your addition, but the change is so complex that I'm having difficulty figuring out what you added. Was it the comment about wiring beginning "Whatcha need" ? -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 21:05, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, my bad. Thanks for catching my mistake, and yes, it was the comment you thought it was.  loupgarous (talk) 02:37, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Draft:Kenneth Mahood
Draft:Kenneth Mahood, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Kenneth Mahood and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of Draft:Kenneth Mahood during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Safiel (talk) 04:06, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment I removed your Proposed deletion tag from the above draft. Unfortunately, PROD is only applicable to articles in the main article space, not to articles in the Draft space or User space. In lieu thereof, I have nominated the draft for deletion under the Miscellaneous for deletion process, as described in the automatically generated message above. Safiel (talk) 04:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment Thanks, Safiel. I appreciate your correction of my error and placement of the appropriate request for deletion.  While I realize this looks like drama, I stated a while back that I wished to end my involvement with this particular draft article, but I'm still receiving notices, some of them templated, asking me to make changes to an article I'd walked away from.


 * No sources I located and cited to support the non-controversial statements made about the subject have satisfied the reviewers who've examined it, so I don't believe that it's worth my limited time to continue trying to convince reviewers that the secondary sources (newspaper articles and critical commentary, mostly, although at one point i linked to the same image libraries of the subject's work another editor subsequently recommended I use - only to have other editors remove them) establish the subject's notability or meet reliable source standards. There doesn't seem to be any point in citing these articles or other substantially identical to them in support of this article, it'll just be declined again.  I reviewed each one under WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE and didn't find the deficiencies which are supposed to be in the sources, so there's no point in doing any further work on this project. loupgarous (talk) 06:35, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

AfC notification: Draft:Kenneth Mahood has a new comment
 I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Kenneth Mahood. Thanks! Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 19:29, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I read it, thanks for your interest and your work on that project. I by no means meant to imply you or other editors could not work on it - in fact, I hoped that would be the case.  And your sources were good and met WP:RS.  So did mine, and the article was declined, regardless.  There just doesn't seem to be a way for work to continue on that article in its present form without my receiving notices on my user page about an article I have since recognized as having been a waste of my time.  That is why I'm requesting its deletion.  "No time limit" implies no time limit to the notices on my user page regarding that article, an unwelcome reminder of an odd attitude toward Kenneth Mahood's notability and the nature of the sources we've found to establish that. loupgarous (talk) 19:51, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi there!
I've just seen your comments related to the Draft:Kenneth Mahood. I'm sorry it seems to have been a frustrating experience. The issue, currently, as of the 11 November review, is the reliability of sources. He's clearly notable! It can be hard for non-experts to understand a topic right away, and in my experience, getting an article up to Wikipedia's now-high standards can take a lot of time (I've written a scientific article about this, even!).

Even though I've written many articles, I still have to go through several rounds of revision (here are some of the articles I have in progress).

There's no need to delete a draft just because you are fed up with working on it! In fact, the entire point of the draft space is to have a place where people can leave unfinished articles that others might work on! This is the idea of incubation.

If I can answer other questions, let me know -- I'm most likely to see messages fastest on my talk page. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Jodi, the purported WP:RS issue's no more sound than the WP:NOTABLE issue. Assuming good faith like a good wikipedia editor, I'm officially at a loss as to why sources which include the very publications Mahood drew for are suddenly "not reliable sources."  In any case, I have no more time for these reviewers.  Have fun with the article, and I mean that in the best sense. loupgarous (talk) 14:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * And I'd like to revisit the issue of "wikipedia's now-high standards."
 * As we've seen, not one, but three reviewers for wikipedia can look right at a secondary source (assuming that this good faith effort was, indeed, made) documenting that Kenneth Mahood did indeed have his first cartoon accepted by Punch, another secondary source documenting that he was hired at the same magazine on their art staff, still another documenting that he was The London Times`s first editorial cartoonist, another whole set of secondary sources documenting publication of several books in which his art and his prose appeared, several catalogue listings of his exhibited art, both from museum collections and auctions, other artists' assessments of his artwork, still more auction and art dealers' online exhibits of his work for the New Yorker, and the send-off article by his employers of thirty years, the Daily Mail which ought to be a definitive secondary source on Kenneth Mahood, the notable British editorial and sports cartoonist, and not be happy that the man was indeed a notable cartoonist (at least). I wonder about their reading comprehension skills, because my reading of WP:RS also differs from theirs.  Doubtless another good faith difference of opinion.
 * While WP:AGF forbids me to speculate further on the reason for this odd lacuna in the ability to discern notability from (at one point) over twenty-seven sources, and the reviewers failed to indicate how, precisely, the sources I supplied failed to establish Kenneth Mahood's notability or failed to be reliable sources under pretty clear guidelines in WP:RS, I'm leaving this wikigame particular article to those who don't mind being sent back several times to satisfy those who don't seem capable of being satisfied.
 * Eventually, like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, wikipedia may be perfectly reliable for any subject which doesn't have an editor or reviewer whose personal experience set may not be complete (I cheerfully acknowledge I'm ignorant of a wide swath of human knowledge and unqualified to judge, say, who is a "notable" rap singer). Wikipedia effectively already has at least two definitions of "notability" - WP:NOTABLE and the definition applied in this case to Kenneth Mahood. A consensus of bureaucratically adept editors and reviewers can define truth simply by declaring sources "unreliable" or denying that they fit one of our large arsenal of guidelines. At the end of that road, wikipedia won't be much more reliable on some issues than it started off being.
 * While we have a formal stricture against wikilawyering, WP:WL, wikibureaucracy is alive, well, and unregulated. It's arguable that in this case, it encompasses three things mentioned in WP:WL:
 * "*Abiding by the letter of a policy or guideline while violating its spirit or underlying principles, asserting that the technical interpretation of the policies and guidelines should override the underlying principles they express, and misinterpreting policy or relying on technicalities to justify inappropriate actions'".
 * New standards, certainly. "High," only in the sense that game used to be called that after it'd hung long enough in the larder to stink. loupgarous (talk) 15:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
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