User talk:Zsero/Fred Thompson

Much Ado About Little, or Fantasy v Reality (very long)
I've done some research here, wasting a lot of time, just because I got so annoyed at being called a liar, and so that people weighing in on this debate can have some facts at their disposal.

The first mention of Jeri Kehn's age was inserted on 3-Sep-2005 by User:63.164.145.85 (diff, diff); this simply described her as "a 35 year-old political media consultant", without drawing attention to the difference in their ages. This remained until 23-Feb-2007, when it was deleted without comment by User:128.42.152.130 (diff).

On 30-Mar-2007, User:70.60.164.214 inserted the biographical note "(born January, 1967,)" (diff).

On 1-Apr-2007, in the course of an edit war over some salacious gossip about the women Thompson dated while he was single, User:4.88.154.74 inserted the information that "Thompson first met the then 29 year old Jeri Kehn on the Fourth of July, 1996" (diff). At that point it was not connected to the paragraph about their marriage, it was just free-floating gossip, and it was removed and re-inserted several times, but somewhere in the middle it got moved to the paragraph about their marriage, and there it stayed, more or less, until 2-May-2007, when it was removed by User:4.68.248.136 (diff). Her birth month remained, purely as a biographical detail, so curious readers were still able to do the arithmetic.

From then on, as far as I can tell, no mention was made of her age, his age, or the gap between them, and certainly the phrase "x years his junior" did not appear, until 2-Jun-2007, when it was inserted without comment by User:67.127.98.18 (diff). That same day the phrase was removed by User:70.16.107.10 (diff) with the comment "Remove a unnecessarily pejorative part of the sentence". So this was not some long-standing language; it had been in the article for a whole 16 hours. Half an hour later User:Italiavivi restored it with the comment "Restored fact" (diff).
 * Note that this utterly refutes Italiavivi's claim here. If I were Italiavivi I'd be flinging the L-word here, but I'll AGF and assume that his memory played him false.

Soon afterward User:Dman727 deleted it, and User:Turtlescrubber restored it, and it stayed for 4 days until User:B deleted it on 6-Jun with the comment "age differential doesn't really matter once you get to 60 vs 40. If he were marrying a 20-year-old, it would be meaningful ... but mentioning it here doesn't serve any purpose" (diff).

As far as I can tell, the next mention of the phrase, or anything else about either of their ages, was 11 days later on 17-Jun, when it was re-inserted by guess who, none other than our friend User:Italiavivi, with the comment "Personal life - Restored junior note removed on frivolous WP:IDONTLIKEIT grounds" (diff). So a phrase that had existed in the article for a total of 4.5 days, and had been deleted with an explanation, was reinserted by Italiavivi with no other explanation than ILIKEIT. Note, though, that rather than admit that the entire sum of why he put it back in was because "I like it", he turned the question around, pretending that the onus had been on B to provide a reason for deleting it, and that absent such a reason it should stay in. This has been his modus operandi throughout, assuming that his own is the default position, and anyone who does anything different must justify themselves. Somehow IDONTLIKEIT is bad, but ILIKEIT is good. (Let's ignore the fact that both WP:IDONTLIKEIT and WP:ILIKEIT refer to arguments about the deletion of articles, not phrases within an article, something that seems to have escaped Italiavivi.)

A few hours later I noticed this change, and deleted it with the comment "still haven't seen anyone explain why it's relevant" (diff). The next day Italiavivi went to war, all guns blazing. He restored the phrase with the comment "Rv WP:IDONTLIKEIT removal. Take it to Talk instead of edit-warring, please" (diff). Once again he saw no need to justify the inclusion of this phrase, but instead demanded not just an explanation for its removal, but one that would satisfy him, and accused others of edit-warring, as if that didn't apply equally to him. And once more he falsely characterised the explanation that was given as IDONTLIKEIT. Soon User:Dman removed it with the explanation "this article is about thompson and besides, this edit is clearly stealth pov" (diff), and Italiavivi restored it, saying "I'm not familiar with the phrase "stealth POV." Restored age note" (diff).

I'm not going to go through the entire edit-war that ensued over the next 3 days. After a while I got sick of it and stepped out - I just couldn't cope with Italiavivi's stubbornness and refusal to explain why he insisted on having this phrase in, while demanding explanations from everyone who wanted it out, and accusing them of having hang-ups, of which he was naturally free. In any case, there were other, more important edit-wars happening on the page. At any rate, on 20-Jun the page was frozen for a week (diff), and the wording in place was "On 29 June 2002, Thompson, then aged 59 married Jeri Kehn, then 35". On 27-Jun the article was unfrozen, and on 8-Jul User:Ferrylodge changed it to "On June 29 2002, Thompson married Jeri Kehn", commenting "See article on Kehn for details about their ages" (diff). The Kehn article had been created the previous day, so this comment makes sense.

And so it remained and everything was peaceful (at least on this issue), until 21-Aug, when the war was revived by none other than our friend Italiavivi. First he was content to restore their ages (diff), commenting "I see someone deleted this without notice", but when I took it out again (diff), explaining "it's irrelevant, and now that she has her own article her date of birth is listed there", he went on the warpath, insisting not only on having their ages in there, but also his favourite "junior" phrase. Anyone can follow the edits from there on themselves.

It got nasty quickly, for one reason alone: Italiavivi got hysterical, calling people liars, psychologising once again about other people's hangups, editing other people's comments on the article's talk page, and in general behaving like a 5-year-old. Anyone who doubts this can follow the edits themselves, I haven't got the patience for it. But I have been called a liar, and I feel the need to defend myself, so I've done all this research over what amounts to a trivial matter. I think this record clearly demonstrates that I have at all times told the truth, and any distortion in the record has been the work of one person and one person alone. Not only was what Italiavivi called a lie not an intentional falsehood, it wasn't even an unintentional mistake; it was in fact the plain truth.

I will simply restate my position, in case it got lost. The Thompsons' ages at marriage, and the difference between them, is no more relevant than the colour of their hair, or whether they're right- or left-handed, or what they eat for breakfast. Anyone who's really curious can look up their birth dates in their respective articles, and do the arithmetic. That's what one has to do for almost all couples with bios on WP. I've gone through the last 5 presidents and their spouses, for instance, and none of their WP articles mention the difference between their ages (See George W. Bush, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Barbara Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Nancy Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter. (In the case of Barbrara Bush, her article mentions how old she was when she met George, but not when she married him.) Even in the case of first couples with large gaps, such as James Madison and Dolley Madison, it's not noted on either one's article.  In the case of Grover Cleveland, his article does mention the fact that he married a 21-year-old (which was indeed notable, and excited comment at the time), but his age at marriage is not given, let alone the gap between them.  The gap is noted in his wife's article; but the circumstances of that marriage do make this fact notable, which it isn't in the case of the Thompsons (or the Madisons).

Zsero 02:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)