Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard/Archive119

Gilbert Bukenya
His biography on wikipedia indicates that he attended st. Henry's College Kitovu. However information available indicates that he attended Old Kampala Secondary School instead if Kitovu. would please try to verify since that erroneous information is repeatedly quoted by media. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Obiang (talk • contribs) 08:06, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Lisa Popeil
I noticed this article in the New Pages backlog and decided that I'd fix it instead of slapping template tags on it. Because of my involvement in it I can't determine if there is significant notability to qualify for inclusion or if it qualifies for deletion. Any thoughts? Hasteur (talk) 19:08, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I only see self published entries on social media, and write your own resume sites. John lilburne (talk) 00:35, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Looking in the Proquest newspaper archive I found one 1000-word profile of her, which may be sufficient to assert notability in conjunction with lesser mentions. One article calls her a "celebrity voice coach". I'll add some citations to the article and cut down the poorly sourced promotional material.   Will Beback    talk    22:40, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche_and_the_LaRouche_movement
Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche_and_the_LaRouche_movement appears to have become a laundry list of views not help dby (despicable) LaRouche but a host of people who are connected only marginally to him. As such, I suggest it should be focussed on positions connected to the name of the article - primarily his own stated views and the stated official vuiews of his movement, rather than containing every sort of "view" connected to anyone connected to anyone connected to anyone connected to LaRouche. The article is clearly under WP:BLP rules, and I suggest the current state has gotten a tad out of hand. I posted in response to a comment:
 *  It's actually a much more rigorously written article then many other "views" articles. See Political positions of Mike Huckabee or other articles in Category:Political positions of American politicians.

As I found no comparable example in the example given of "three degrees of separation' , I would like to ask that others view the melange masquerading as an article. I know LaRouche is horrid etc. but WP:BLP applies to horid people as much as it does to saints. Cheers. Collect (talk) 23:18, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have proposed limiting the scope of the article's content. Outside opinions on the state of the article are welcome. Cla68 (talk) 23:26, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Any article or page that mentions living people falls under WP:BLP. But I don't see any specific violation alleged here. Which part of the policy at issue?   Will Beback    talk    00:27, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Possibly the part where stuff in a BLP should actually be related to the name of the article? Right now, the article includes stuff "three degrees of separation" from LaRouche.    Which is a tad much.   And I would say over 4K edits on the LaRouche related pages is a bit much for any single editor. Cheers. Collect (talk) 00:36, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The content is all about the "Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche_and_the_LaRouche_movement", and third party responses to those views. It's thoroughly sourced. There's no BLP violation. Is there some specific material that you're concerned about?    Will Beback    talk    00:50, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * All I ask is that others weigh in on whether material at "three degrees of separation" belongs in this clearly BLP article. We already know your position, but somehow I would hope that Wikipedia is not a home for every factoid and opinion within "three degrees of separation" of the person who is ostensibly the subject.   Wikipedia should not be the universal wastebasket of the encyclopedia world. Cheers. Collect (talk) 00:53, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't see any "three degrees of separation" material in the article, so your question seems to be a straw-man argument. Please give an example of the material you think violates BLP.    Will Beback    talk    00:59, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

OK:  21st Century Science & Technology has published papers by entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, including one that urged the return of the insecticide DDT because he said it has "saved more millions of lives than any other man-made chemical.   Dr. Edwards has no actual connection with LaRouche that I found, and the paper his not in any way a statement of Larouche. Not a statement of the LaRouche movement. Not a statement by any Larouche publication as any sort of position.  They published an article by an unrelated person, who is thus "connected" with LaRouche here, and reaching "three degrees of separation" or more from LaRouche.   Other articles compared environmentalist and anti-DDT campaigner Rachel Carson to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.  is not any exposition of views, but a simple invocation of Godwin in an article.  The book, by LaRouche followers Rogelio Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer, denied that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)...' is also reaching - the claim is not that LaRouche holds the view, that his organization holds the views, that there is any actual connection to LaRouche in any way, but only that two of his followers hold a view! Maduro's writings were the basis for the Arizona legislature's passage of a 1995 bill to allow the production of CFCs in the state despite federal and international prohibitions. is clearly not related either to LaRouche at all, and hence has three degrees of separation from him as well. The "Greenhouse effect" hoax: a world federalist plot, another book by Maduro, says that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a plot by the British royal family and communists to undermine the U.S.[137][138] It was cited by science writer David Bellamy.[139] Ditto. Three degrees removed from LaRouche at all and his "movement." LaRouche followers have promoted the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle -- "followers" (unnamed) is not exactly a strong connection to any sort of official "views" by Larouche or his "movement". Note 21st_Century_Science_and_Technology does not assert that it presents any sort of official view of LaRouche. Alas - I note the editor who has many edits on that article. Too many BLP violations to count - including accusations of criminality, homophobia, and non-politically correct taste in music pitch. In short - a misch-mosch, melange, and laundry list of every conceivable criticism of Larouche, his followers, the followers of follwers, and people who are quoted by followers of followers of followers . Cheers. Collect (talk) 10:52, 26 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Maduro was a follower of LaRouche, his books and articles were published in LaRouche publications, and other LaRouche writers made similar points. So there are zero degrees of separation between Maduro and the LaRouche movement.
 * Movements are known by their activities, not just their official position papers. If a movement repeatedly protests against climate change, then that's an indication of their interest on the matter.
 * Magazines are characterized by the writers they publish. While J. Gordon Edwards was not called a member of the movement, the movement published his works, effectively endorsing his views. That a LaRouche magazine carries articles by prominent climate change contrarians is further evidence of their position on the topic, a position so strong that they have been described as being at the  "forefront" of climate change denialism.
 * The movement engaged in wide variety of attacks on Rachel Carson, to the extent that they are covered in reliable secondary sources. The sources are all good. If sources say that the movement attacked Carson by comparing her to a Nazi then it is appropriate to include that in an article on the movement's views. LaRouche has personally called Carson's view of DDT a "fraud", so it isn't as if the people writing the material in his magazine have significantly different views.
 * As for the article in general, the material is all well-sourced and relevant. There aren't any clear BLP issues raised here.   Will Beback    talk    20:57, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * IOW if a person who is not directly affiliated with LaRouche is quoted in a publication associated with a person who has had an article published in a magazine which is reportedly run by people who were associated with any association or movement connected with the LaRouche "movement", then those comments are fair game?    As I said - "three degrees of separation."  Thanks. Collect (talk) 21:21, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Huh? Are you talking about Edwards? He wasn't just quoted, his papers were published, repeatedly, by a LaRouche magazine and his views were endorsed by LaRouche. For example, one 2002 article in LaRouche's flagship Executive Intelligence Review magazine is titled "LaRouche to Bush: Overturn DDT Ban". An editorial in 21st Century Science says, " If you want to save science—and human lives—the fight to bring back DDT, now being championed by that very electable candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., had better be at the top of your agenda." This is clearly a view of the LaRouche movement, not a third-degree of separation POV.   Will Beback    talk    21:53, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah -- so if the NYT (for example) endorses a candidate, then every editorial position of the NYT is associated with that candidate, and all positions held by people who are quoted in those articles are connected to the candidate?  To assert that a person speaks for the vague "movement" should at the very minimum require a direct association of the person with that undefined "movement."   Suppose the official  (not to suggest an unofficial one) newspaper of the CPUSA endorses a candidate for President - I take it that I could say "thus-and-such is associated with the CPUSA"?   Sorry -- I only believe two impossible things before breakfast - the third one is difficult. Cheers. Collect (talk) 22:04, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think most people would compare LaRouche movement publications with the New York Times. When I say "endorse" I did not mean it in the political sense. Surely you understand that. I meant it in the sense of "agree with". They published Edwards' attacks on Carson and the DDT ban, positions with which they agreed. No one is asserting that they agreed with him on anything else. Let's not waste time on straw man arguments.   Will Beback    talk    22:09, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * And the People's World example?   If a person were, for example, endorsed for political office, would that make tthem allied with the CPUSA?  This is not a straw argument - it is the idea of "guilt by association by association by association" which is at the heart here. Cheers. Collect (talk) 23:09, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * We're not talking about political candidates. We're talking about a specific policy position, one which the LaRouche movement clearly holds based on multiple primary and secondary sources. It's not a BLP violation to say that LaRouche and his movement oppose the ban on DDT when there are so many sources to support that assertion.   Will Beback    talk    23:28, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You might want to rephrase When I say "endorse" I did not mean ... because it sound like something a character out of Lewis Caroll might have said. John lilburne (talk) 23:36, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Life would be simpler if words only had one meaning each.  Will Beback    talk    23:55, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I think Collect has made his point. I've started a section on the article talk page to begin discussion which material may need to be removed or drastically altered. All are welcome to join the discussion, tyro or expert. Cla68 (talk) 23:48, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Collect didn't make any point. He claimed that some of the views listed in the article are not held by LaRouche or the movement, and are instead held by those at "three degrees of separation" from the movement. That's clearly untrue.   Will Beback    talk    23:55, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Ambika Soni
There has been a malicious attempt to keep changing Smt Ambika Soni's religion to Roman Catholic to which she is supposed to have converted from Hinduism. This is factually incorrect and she continues to be a practicing Hindu. I can confirm this as I am her Private Secretary. This malicious attempt is creating misinformation about a Public figure and a senior Minister of the Government of India. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Psministerib (talk • contribs) 07:06, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have added the BLP to my watchlist. The disruption seems t have been going on for a few months - if it is replaced again without citation and or discussion please request WP:semi protection at the WP:RFPP - Off2riorob (talk) 18:26, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

lauryn hill
her birthday is listed as may 26th on wiki page, but the source attached [1] says may 25th and every time I change it, someone reverts it back. How can wikipedia get an artists birthday wrong when the source says otherwise?! someone please intervene or maybe I am just going crazy... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.88.38.93 (talk) 11:09, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

David L. Epstein
Should we be including information about misdemeanors in an article about a professor (the charge involved in this diff is a misdemeanor)? --rgpk (comment) 15:11, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Ugh. In the ordinary course of things, I'd say not. Unfortunately, judging from the sources linked, this case has acquired an unfortunate political dimension. Since it seems confined to blogs for now, and the subject remains essentially a private person (see WP:NPF), I'd still say we should cut it, but with less conviction than previously. We had a discussion over a similarly ugly situation awhile back, involving a professor who'd written some emails expressing some rather inflammatory viewpoints which were unrelated to his reasons for notability - IIRC, we decided eventually to keep the information in the article, on the strength of the argument that this was a case people would be commentating about for years to come. Ray  Talk 15:18, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If it's true that he pleaded guilty, then it should stay. I don't think incest is a misdemeanor.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:22, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * In such sensitive matters we should be going by verifiable facts, rather than what we think, but in this case you are right - incest in the third degree is a class E felony in New York. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:42, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It appears that he pleaded guilty to "attempted incest" which is (according to the court document) "A misdemeanor, 1 count, not an arrest charge, Not an arraignment charge". I'm not sure if the original charge still stands though there are reliable sources only for the original charge. --rgpk (comment) 17:49, 26 May 2011 (UTC)


 * He plead guilty to attempted incest - a misdemeanor - It appears clearly to me the the headline charge was dropped on acceptance of the lesser charge which seems quite normal in America - you get charged with all sorts of extreme charges and then you are convicted usually of a minor offence. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bd4mr-W0TFs/Td1lbkoRKYI/AAAAAAAAIKo/8yIyCTnHnFk/s1600/DavidEpsteinGuiltyIncest.JPG - actually he is not really notable or if he was it was only just and has now become a blp problem because he has turned into a one event misdemeanor rap sheet low notable person which imo we would do well to delete. Off2riorob (talk) 17:56, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I see no reason to keep the details of the charges, especially if the felony charge has been dropped. The only part of the paragraph in question that relates to Epstein's claim of notability is the simple fact that he is on administrative leave. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:10, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree. - it is also assumable that as he was not convicted of the felony that there would be no legal ability to keep him on administrative leave. Off2riorob (talk) 18:19, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I removed that section, it took up a 3rd of his bio. That's way too much for a misdemeanor it seems to me. RxS (talk) 18:24, 26 May 2011 (UTC)


 * We should not be hosting this biography. There isn't enough independent, reliably sourced material to do anything much besides recapitulate his c.v. And pretty much all of the newspaper coverage - much of it sensationalistic - relates to his recent family and legal difficulties. That combination augurs very poorly for our ability to write a neutral, encyclopedic biography in this instance. It seems to me that deletion is the best approach in terms of harm reduction, and we're not really losing much encyclopedic information anyway. MastCell Talk 21:34, 26 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with MastCell - the article should be deleted. It was apparently created based only on the charges. The subject otherwise lacks sufficient notability to have generated much reliable biographical material. Yworo (talk) 21:41, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * No decision on deletion can be made here. Anyone who thinks that the whole article should be deleted rather than just the content about the charges should start a discussion at WP:AFD. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:03, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Bring it to AfD post haste - insufficient notability, and a misdemeanor conviction, IMO, is insufficiently relevant to a biography to make any difference. It should not be here. Collect (talk) 23:06, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I AFD'd it Articles_for_deletion/David_L._Epstein RxS (talk) 23:20, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Jason Carley
I am the subject of the article. Not sure why it is on here. Surely this is out of line with the general notability guideline? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kb123 (talk • contribs) 15:23, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sent to AfD. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:24, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Scientist (musician)
Hello, I received an e-mail from Hopeton Brown (also known as "Scientist"). In it, he notified me about false and misleading statements on the article that are negatively affecting his career. I cannot seem to find anything on there that is even negative, and everything appears sourced. (I am not certain about the reliability of some sources, however.) I have directed him here to continue this discussion and point out what is false in the Scientist (musician) article. Reaper Eternal (talk) 01:08, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

eric bolling
Eric Bolling's bio has been hacked and it was changed to say he is famous for a racist (or rascist as the fool spelled it) rant against President Obama. This is libelous information and must be changed immediately. Please return the bio back to it's original information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.27.35.17 (talk) 01:46, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Rolled back vandalism. Reaper Eternal (talk) 02:09, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Kelly Wearstler

 * Are breast and ass measurements relevant for female interior designers?

Kelly Wearstler is a prominent American interior designer. Her prominence can probably be indicated by links such as this, this orthis.

Wearstler's work as an interior designer is the only reason she is known, except, I guess, to a small group of collectors of decade-old issues of Playboy, who remember that she was a Playboy playmate back in 1994.

As these Playboy aficionados are more numerous on Wikipedia than people interested in interior design, they have managed for years to keep the article in a state where her brief appearance in Playboy completely dominates the article. This has been done through a playmate "infobox", with breast, waist and hip measurements, and a navigation box listing all playmates of a certain year, effectively emphasizing that particular context above any other. Kelly Wearstler and/or people working for her have actually tried to change the article to actually reflect her real fame, but they haven't done this with much skill and have promptly been reverted by more experienced Wikipedia users.

Wearstler's success as an interior designer is the only reason she deserves a Wikipedia page, not her appearing nude in a single issue of Playboy 17 years ago.

I recently removed the playmate infobox and navigation box from the article. that removal remained unchallenged until today when they were put back, first by an IP, later by User:Dismas.

This article needs some more attention. Her appearance in Playboy should certainly be mentioned in passing, as it is in her NYTimes profile, but I see no reason why it should dominate the page. --Hegvald (talk) 19:38, 7 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Looks like a case of undue weight.--Scott Mac 19:48, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * While you are correct that it probably shouldn't dominate the article, you are being dismissive and condescending with remarks like "a small group of collectors of decade-old issues of Playboy". The fact is, appearing as a Playmate of the month was essentially a free pass to notability until recently. It is a significant event in her life. I agree that the Playmate infobox probably isn't appropriate for this article, but I don't think looking down your nose at people adding it helps either. Niteshift36 (talk) 20:40, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I think you are going about this in the wrong direction. There's no reason to remove any of the material pertaining to her Playmate status. The problem is that the article says little to nothing about her status as an interior designer, and, judging from the fact that I get over 500000 Google hits on "Kelly Wearstler", there should be plenty of material to add. Whether she likes it or not, though, she will always be the interior designer that used to be a Playmate.&mdash;Kww(talk) 21:02, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it's just me, but I don't have any great regard for "interior designers" (even less than I have for Playmates); they strike me as an over-self-publicized, overpaid, socially useless breed of entrepreneurs. Their overall usefulness to society is something less than the folks who design hats for British royal weddings, and the entertainment value of their work is several quantum leaps lower. If I were running for office, and I could cover up a past as a Playmate or a past as an interior designer, I'd cover up being an interior designer. Being a Playmate says "I have no qualms about exploiting my appearance to make money off sexually frustrated adolescent males of all ages." Being an interior designer says "I have no socially valuable skills whatsoever." "Interior designer" is the profession undereducated rich women on soap operas who've been out of the work force for years (in the unlikely event they were ever in it) go into when they're peeved at, or dumped by, their spouses. Because it's the only job that's even remotely credible for them to hold. If most of Kristen Wiig's annoying characters were real people, they'd be interior designers. That weasel who sold your down-on-his-luck brother-in-law a second mortgage that quickly went underwater by getting him a phony appraisal and puffed-up income statement. He's married to an interior designer. Is your state legislator a real tool, a political hack in the pockets of special interests (and it doesn't matter whether they're business or labor interests, liberal or conservative PACs)? He or she will have been endorsed by the state's trade association of interior designers. And received a pile of campaign contributions from them.

Just push the damn infobox to the bottom of the article; that's where too many of them belong anyway. Most infoboxes are useless clutter anyway. They're the unholy spawn of USA Today's breed of superficial journalism. I've spent a couple weeks suffering my way through the complete set of Playmate articles and removing the trivial and the obsessive detail. A batch of the models have gone on to do real jobs and play constructive roles in society, and nobody's advocating subordinating their Playmate past. No reason for special treatment for the interior designers. Even the lawyer-Playmates aren't shameless enough to ask for it. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 21:06, 7 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll try to be quick about this.


 * 1) Instead of removing things from the article, why doesn't Hegvald add some evidence of this notability as an interior designer? Or add Infobox interior designer above the other infobox?
 * 2) Several peer reviewed scientific studies have been done using Playboy's data as their data set. So this data would be helpful in an encyclopedia entry for one of the Playmates.
 * 3) I'd appreciate it if editors could keep their personal morals and opinions of Playboy readers out of their editing and discussions. The maintainer of the WeKinglyPigs.com web site, which is a reliable source for the article, is female and not a "sexually frustrated adolescent male" of any age.  Dismas |(talk) 21:51, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I'd say "depends on what the measurements are", arf! arf! arf! Seriously though, Hullaballoo, is Wikipedia really the place to vent your spleen about how you consider interior designers to be the spawn of Satan and on a level with Bible-peddling life-insurance salespeople or anybody working in the advertising industry? Just asking.  Captain Screebo Parley! 22:06, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Generally, not really. But I was responding to the almost-explicit argument that "interior designers" are so much more reputable than Playmates because their work is so very very worthwhile. That and the fact that I remember the pompous, self-important self-promotion that Wearstler or one of her PR people tried to substitute for the article . Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 22:27, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, the argument you refer to is high quality HS but seriously there are so many targets for your wroth, i.e. interior designers and other such modern necessities as lifestyle coaches, that you will exhaust yourself by railing against them all. My cat is of more companionship, intelligence and pertinence to me than 95% of the human race, I do take a fairly Bhuddist POV in general and, I think, it helps to remain detached on WP where people will quite happily argue for hours, days, weeks, months, years about hooey.  Captain Screebo Parley! 22:56, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I note that both Dismas and Kww claim that I removed things. The only things I removed were the boxes.

Infoboxes, by their nature as graphic embellishment, draw attention and tell the reader (in this particular case): "this is the deal with Kelly Wearstler", "this is the most important information". In this case that included the (apparently) false name she used as a Playboy model, the bust/waist/hip measurements, her weight and the preceding and succeeding playmates, all things to do with a single minor episode of her life 17 years ago. Whatever anyone decides to do with the rest of the article, as long as that infobox remains on top, it will still continue to draw attention to itself and dominate the article. I don't think anyone who looks at her biography and thinks about this article objectively can seriously argue that this anatomical information and her status as a Playboy playmate back in 1994 are the most important pieces of information about her.

The main issue here is conforming with the BLP policy. No matter how short the article is, it still needs to do so. In this case, that means not giving undue weight to minor aspects of her life. I don't find Wearstler having been a Playboy model any more shameful than her being an interior designer, and it shouldn't be suppressed. But in the context of her entire biography, it isn't all that important and shouldn't be given undue weight. It should be mentioned in passing, nothing more and nothing less. --Hegvald (talk) 07:34, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Her status as a Playmate is notable. Look above in the discussion, and you will find precisely no one that agrees with you that it needs to be minimized. The problem is that the article is a three sentence stub. Add four or five paragraphs of well-sourced information about her career as an interior designer, and the infobox can be moved to a later paragraph about her career as a Playmate. Right now, the infobox is as late in the article as possible.&mdash;Kww(talk) 12:36, 8 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Assuming that I would be interested in writing about Kelly Wearstler, I would still have to ask myself why I would I want to invest time and effort in doing this when there is a greater-than-average possibility that the article will still end up looking as if it had been co-authored with Beavis and Butthead. --Hegvald (talk) 18:57, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

I have removed the infobox. It is quite unacceptable. That she was in playboy is notable, and is rightly recorded in the article. However, glorifying it with a big box and breast measurements is clearly a breach of WP:UNDUE and the spirit of "do no harm" encapsulated in the BLP policy. She's an interior designer. She doesn't highlight here past appearance and neither should we. Especially not on the nonsense that of infobox conformity. Anyway, how is her breast size in 1994 relevant to anything? Can you verify that's here size now - 17 years later? Is this an important part of understanding her? There's no justification for this. We don't define someone who has a notable career by their appearance in some magazine 17 years ago - and their breast size then. Horrible, sexist and unfair to the subject.--Scott Mac 12:46, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * In most cases, I would agree with you: I routinely remove mentions and links of things like "Maxim's 100 Hottest Women": those lists are not particularly notable, and not particularly relevant to the careers of the women involved. Being a Playmate is a quite different thing: a conscious choice of the woman involved, done with her cooperation, in an effort to seek money and fame. Most articles about her as an interior designer still discuss the Playmate stint. As I say above: if you don't want the weight to be undue, weight the scale on the other side: find some material in this notable career as an interior designer that will fill the article. I looked for a bit, and couldn't find anything I thought was worth adding. That says a lot to me about its actual notability. The fact that her cup size in 1994 can be reliably sourced also says a lot of 'that'' fact's notability.&mdash;Kww(talk) 12:54, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not suggesting it isn't notable, or reference to it should be removed. But it will not do to breach WP:WEIGHT and then say "well someone else should re-ballance it". The problem is risking an unbalanced article for the sake of a silly box. Her breast size 17 years ago would not be considered notable enough to include in prose, so it is hardly justified in highlighting it in a box.--Scott Mac 13:00, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

In all likelihood Kww is right - she'll be known more for her Playmate status than her interior design work. Look at Yvette Vickers - a Google News search on her death shows about the most common headlines for the stories usually referred to her Playmate status, with the next most common element being her B-movie status then specifically her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. In that light I say have the inforbox in Kelly's article reflect that. If for some reason the crowd doesn't feel comfortable with that, then do what's done for the articles for Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson and have Infobox people at the top with a focused Playmate infobox down below. Tabercil (talk) 20:18, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

WP:UNDUE should be the guide here. Her New York Times profile is nine paragraphs, with only one paragraph about her Playboy appearance. That sounds about right to me for our biographical article. If editors want to increase our coverage of her Playboy appearance, they can expand the entire article and then make their case to include the various Playboy widgets and boxes. If a compromise is necessary, I would suggest that the prominent top infobox be left out but the bottom collapsible Playmate box could stay. Is there a way to make those boxes default to collapsed? Gamaliel (talk) 01:04, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think I know how to do that and I will try now, I do it sometimes when they are so big as to be obtrusive in the article or when there is only a tangentially connection or as in this case where less obtrusive makes them less undue. Off2riorob (talk) 11:16, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * done but not yet added as its unclear if there is consensus support for it - to anyone wanting to make a template default to collapse on a single article in future you add this to the template and "state=collapsed" to the template on the article. - Off2riorob (talk) 11:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Navigation boxes such as this one and "specialized" infoboxes, such as the one for Playboy "playmates", both serve the same function: to push a non-neutral POV and give undue weight to a particular aspect of a subject. There is nothing in the articles about those other "playmates" from that year that is important for a reading of Kelly Wearstler's biography. Even within the Playboy playmate context, there is nothing specifically about the other "playmates" from 1994 that make them more significant for Kelly Wearstler than tose from 1993 or 1995. And the people who want to find "playmates" from that or any other year can find them through lists and categories in any case. --Hegvald (talk) 04:52, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

The more I think about this issue, the more bothered I am that WP:UNDUE somehow requires that material be suppressed or scaled back because more "consequential" claims are treated skimpily. There hasn't been any claim here that Wearstler/Gallagher has been treated differently than any other Playmate has been. The disputed information has been given the same weight that it has in articles on other Playmates. The argument here is that because her second claim to notability is treated rather skimpily, the treatment of her first (chronologically) claim must be scaled back. This doesn't make any sense to me. If her career as an interior designer (not the world's most respected "profession," see here ) can be expanded, it should be. If the article can't be significantly expanded in this regard due to lack of significant coverage, then under the Wikipedia definition of notability it's just not so notable, and its low relative weight in comparison to her Playmate coverage is appropriate, whatever value judgments Wikipedia editors may otherwise hold about the merits of her various careers.

Lately I've been adding book review excerpts to book and author articles, something which Wikipedia has rather embarrassingly neglected in favor of overdetailed plot summaries. I've been doing this using review archives, sometimes online, sometimes by trudging down into Wolfowitz's Big Basement Full Of Old Books And Magazines and rummaging through packing crates. Every so often, I come across a scathing review that is certainly noteworthy enough to include in the article, but does not represent critical consensus. (See Stranger in a Strange Land for an example, the NYT review.) You could reasonably make an "undue weight" criticism in such cases. But the way to deal with it is not to remove noteworthy content, but for editors to continue to add further relevant content.Wikipedia is a work-in-progress. There's a big difference between, say, detailed exposition of a celebrity's DUI or publicly-revealed-drug-use, out of proportion to the way such matters are treated generally, and an article that is imbalanced because certain matters are treated at the length that has been treated as appropriate, in the general case, by consensus, while others are treated more sketchily than they could be. This discussion has lost sight of that important difference. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 15:09, 14 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Hullaballoo, you have already shown your bias against interior design and its practitioners in your previous rant. It is no more interesting or relevant now than it was then. If other former "playmates" with later successful careers in other fields are treated in a similar way, with the Wikipedia bio giving the size of their breasts more prominence than their professional accomplishments, it is something that should be looked into, not held up as a standard. --Hegvald (talk) 12:16, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
 * "Bias" against interior designers? Oh, the horribleness. Are they forced to sit at the back of the limo or something? You want to give more weight to her professional accomplishments, whatever they may be, nobody's stopping you -- in fact, everybody's been encouraging you. But she doesn't get special treatment and the right to edit out well-known parts of her past that she might want to downplay. And let's be frank, her physical characteristics are certainly relevant to her main reason for prominence, her Playmate career. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 01:57, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * People might take your opinions more seriously if you based them on real life and not on inane pop culture like soap operas. You do realize that soap operas show interior designers as rich pampered socialites because all women in soap operas are rich pampered socialites? In the real world - the one that this encyclopedia is about - interior design is a building trade and hard physical work, and you don't get into it if you're a pampered, spoiled socialite. You get into it because you can make more money at it than at general construction - many interior designers these days started out as journeyman carpenters. Do you think they just stood there in six-inch heels and half a pound of makeup, tee-heeing at a display of paint chips? LOL they're tearing down the wall with a crowbar! --NellieBly (talk) 05:51, 23 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I know "bias" was putting it politely. "Irrational vitriol" is probably a more adequate description of your attitude towards interior designers. "[Systemic] bias" is a good description of the situation in Wikipedia in general, where a strong contingent of nerdish Playboy and porn fans keep track of who posed nude in which magazine decades ago (do most normal Playboy readers even remember who was the playmate of last month?), but no strong group of interior design fans exist to even it out.


 * Your claim that "her main reason for prominence" is her "Playmate career" is silly. She never had a "playmate career". She spent a few hours posing for a Playboy photographer. That's it. She has spent two decades building an actual career as an interior designer (including the time she spent in design college before her interlude in Playboyland). And that is her main claim to fame, as her coverage in the NYT and other current publications clearly show.


 * As for writing about her, I am not really interested in doing that. Does that mean that I have no right to argue against including a blatantly sexist infobox as the most prominent part of her article? That is the real issue here, and it may well apply to other biographies. --Hegvald (talk) 07:13, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Let's change the focus for a moment
Indulge me for a moment by putting this debate in the context of the other gender.

Consider the case of Steve Largent. He was a well-known American football player in the late 1980s. He went on to serve in the US congress. His page contains a US congress infobox, of course... but immediately below it, a *larger* infobox summarizes his career in the NFL. Mr. Largent's height and weight are included most prominently. Mr. Largent is most likely better known nationally for playing football than for serving in congress.

Are we giving undue weight to Mr. Largent's less-useful-to-society career as a football player over his laudable political career? Are we objectifying him by including his body statistics from his playing days? (He's probably not 187 pounds of lean muscle nowadays.) And, what about the vast number of football players who have moved on to less-glamorous careers, but who would prefer to minimize their sports background in favor of coverage of their car salesmanship? Should we collapse their NFL infoboxes and reduce coverage of their football career if we can't find articles about their motivational speaking tours?

I hear and acknowledge reasonable points on both sides of this Kelly Wearstler discussion. I'm worried, though, that people's feelings on this specific article might not be separated from their opinions with regard to gender politics.Moishe Rosenbaum (talk) 20:57, 22 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, one thing I do agree with Hullaballoo Wolfowitz about is that "most infoboxes are useless clutter". Most tend to give undue weight to figures, facts or factoids of ultimately dubious relevance or accuracy, because these are the kind of things that fit into a box. But as far as the BLP issue is concerned, I don't find a case such as the one you mention quite as egregious, and the general discussion about infoboxes probably belongs elsewhere. --Hegvald (talk) 08:47, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Jessi Colter
According to the article, she was born in 1947, which would have made her 15 years old when she married Duane Eddy. I know this is wrong, but I'm not certain as to the actual year of her birth. I THINK it was 1943. Do you think someone could verify this info? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.208.80.108 (talk) 10:06, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Interesting, there are some Google hits for 1943 but no RS from what I've searched. Connormah (talk) 04:52, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Vinnie Vincent
A series of editors is adding information about an arrest to the article. At this point the information is just that he was arrested, there are sources that confirm this. It does not appear to me to be appropriate since it is just an arrest. Opinions? GB fan (talk) 02:00, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Jaye P. Morgan biography
My Name is Michael Baiano,I was Jaye's first husband, Iwas Jaye P. Morgan's first husband,at that time she was band leader Frank DeVol's vocalist.Her manager Bullets Durgom got her a job as a singer on the Robert Q Lewis show,which was simal cast from New York. She flew back to Los Angeles where we were married on April 15 1954. I returned with her to New York after a brief honeymoon at the Raquet Club in Palm springs (Charley Farrellthe owner,had attended our wedding) we flew back to New York,as she had been given only four days leave from the Robert Q Lewis show,and a contract to appear on the Johnnie Carson that weekend. Our marriage ended in 1960. And I returned to Los Angeles. She's a terrific lady, we are still friends,speak on the phone occaisionally and took her to dinner a few times.

Kindest regards, Michael Baiano — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.129.27.43 (talk) 08:39, 27 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Michael. To add a marriage we need a WP:RS a reliable source for the claim. I had a look round the internet but didn't find anything, do you know of any reliable locations these claims can be verified, without independent reliable verification we would be unable to add the details. Off2riorob (talk) 09:40, 27 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I found a news article that confirms some of this; if anybody's got access to the LATimes archives, GNews searching the husband's name turns up a likely useful article behind their paywall Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 23:00, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Nina Burleigh
Hello, I am writing again to alert you to the politically/racially motivated attack on me in your wikipedia page. Someone keeps inserting "Assyrian-American" into the entry. While my mother is of Assyrian origin, my father is American of Swedish/English/Irish origin. It would be therefore, equally accurate, under the standards this "editor" is using, to label me "Swedish-American author" or "English-American". Clearly, this is being done to associate me with some "other" ethnicity. I insist it be removed and kept OFF the first line of the entry. If the wiki editors deem it crucial to include my ethnic heritage, you MUST add the other part of the genetic pedigree, but I do feel this is racist. Thanks Nina Burleigh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.239.128.182 (talk) 11:04, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Further, to my previous comments. In wikipedia, You do not see Cornel West, for example, identified in line one as "an African-American" writer. You do not see David Remnick identified as a "Jewish American editor." This is simply not done, even when writers take their ethnicity as a subject. Remove it from mine, and stop ethnic/racial labelling immediately! Nina Burleigh — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.239.128.182 (talk) 11:40, 27 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It's incorrect to say Assyrian-American in the lead. You were born and raised in the U.S., which makes you American. There is no reason to emphasize any part of your ethnic background unless it is relevant to your notability. See WP:OPENPARA. I've corrected the article.--Bbb23 (talk) 12:15, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Bob_Newton_(footballer)
User claims to be Bob Newton and is removing negatively, but sourced, content from the article. Article is not necessarily "well" sourced on the negative information. I opened an SPI as the user has been using multiple accounts. User claims to have emailed the foundation over the issue. I have no vested interest either way, but I am not strong on BLP policy. Should the negative information be removed, as requested by the user, as there is only one source? Should more or better sources be found if available? Or should content stay as it is per WP:CENSOR?--v/r - TP 15:46, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have copy edited the entire article for NPOV.-- — Keithbob • Talk  • 18:48, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks a bunch!--v/r - TP 18:52, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Bobby Unser
Wasn't Bobby Unser born in Albuquerque, NM? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 170.215.147.160 (talk) 18:13, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You may be thinking of his brother Al. Bobby was born in Colorado Springs; a few years later the family moved to Albuquerque, where Al was born. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 00:27, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Jordan Malone
Article appears to be of living person (Olympic medalist), and while it includes a single reference at the bottom and used with footnote reference near start of article, most of the article appears to be largely unreferenced. I'm not sure what to do. 24.155.88.186 (talk) 21:49, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have added a refimprove tag to the article. The article needs to be cleaned up for tone also.  It sounds like it was written by someone close to him.  GB fan (talk) 22:10, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Brittany York
I'm coming here as opposed to edit warring: one or several accounts have loaded this with trivia, including every tv and promotional appearance made by Ms. York; even her affinity for her dog is chronicled and edit-warred over. I'm asking for help--I'm happy to go in and clean this, but I am sure that whatever I remove will just be restored. It's a fanzine article. Any thoughts? 76.248.149.168 (talk) 22:05, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * My contention is that a contributor is assuming ownership of the article, which includes the repeated removal of maintenance templates and retention of trivial information. Isn't there a Wiki guideline that reminds us that just because it's sourced doesn't mean it belongs? if I'm wrong on this I'd love to hear it from an admin. Thanks, 76.248.149.168 (talk) 22:29, 27 May 2011 (UTC)


 * WP:INDISCRIMINATE.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:35, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the link, Bbb23, and for restoring the maintenance template to the article. My disclosure is that of having engaged in this issue under two accounts, not out of deception, but because my internet connection gets cut too frequently, and upon restoration I'm always gifted with a new IP. As for the article, there's a lot of sourced cruft, including specious interviews, that serve no purpose. My impression is that copyediting will meet with strong resistance from those who promote these contestants, or are just really dedicated fans of the pageants. 76.248.149.168 (talk) 00:47, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I've trimmed a lot of stuff, but there's still too much trivial and promotional information. I've also added tags. As for your connection and varying IPs, why don't you register on Wikipedia? :-) --Bbb23 (talk) 00:55, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Dull story: I have, but rarely use my illustrious account anymore, feigning retirement and preferring to be an anonymous pain in the ass rather than creating articles and running them through the FA mill, etc. My I got tired of checking a watchlist that ran over 1,200 articles. Thank you for the help, and please keep an eye on this--don't be surprised if your improvements are overturned. Cheers, 76.248.149.168 (talk) 01:08, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Just being a registered user doesn't mean you have to have an extensive watchlist or do any more than you do as an IP. It just makes things more consistent, makes you more identifiable, etc. 1,200 pages seems excessive - maybe you should try Wikirehab. :-) As for reversion of my edits, it wouldn't be the first time.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:17, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Correct on all counts. But a return to respectability would mean being recognized by my Wikifriends, with the inevitable expectation to re-engage within my field of primary interest. 76.248.149.168 (talk) 01:33, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

ケーキ姫
-no real name is mentioned in the article -false name is mentioned in thearticle "yuumi" -the person says in the article "being an youtube celebrity and net idol and niconico douga celebrity" -which is not true, because on youtube it has only 3270 subscribers at the moment - this was reached since 11 February 2010. -the person mentions only a youtube name -only one video reached 100.000 views, this is mentioned in the article but the video is titled Pray for Japan, where the person is reading japanese text from the monitor about the earthquake in Japan in March 2011 -also the person is not a youtube partner and the videos are full of foreign content and dont have a lot of views (or not enough to call itself a celebrity) - it looks like advertising for its "importancy" and it's twitter account to get follower —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.154.160.232 (talk) 17:45, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Hello. Please could you tell us which article you're referring to? The header of this section renders on my machine as four neat boxes. --Dweller (talk) 12:54, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * If your question is about the article on Japanese Wikipedia, please ask on ja:Wikipedia:利用案内.


 * ウィキペディア日本語版のヘルプは「ja:Wikipedia:利用案内」を参照してください.


 * ケーキ姫 is the Japanese name "Keekihime", and from the context I assume the user was referring to an article on Japanese Wikipedia about a sort of 'internet celebrity' (a Net idol), which is at ja:ケーキ姫. As far as I can tell, there has never been an article on English Wikipedia about that person.  Chzz  ►  12:02, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Mary Cunningham Agee
User:Omnibus170 17:56, 26 May 2011 (UTC)It seems to me that someone who doesn't like Mrs. Agee has claimed POV issues with her article and that the objections aren't valid. Knowing Mrs. Agee just received a new doctoral degree, I checked her article for inclusion of this award and suggested a few other minor edits. Even though the POW banner doesn't necessarily mean an infringement of policy, it inherently casts a negative light. Would a Senior Editor please review this article for NPOV? The warning seems inappropriate and misleading. I blelieve it should be removed. Thank you.User:Omnibus170) 17:56, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * After a little look it does look a bit over gushing. - THe NPOV template is not such a big issue just a pointer - try just copy editing and removing the excess flattery, especially any that is cited only to the subjects primary reports, and remove any WP:PEACOCK phraseology and you will have a more neutral article. Off2riorob (talk) 18:16, 26 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have gone through and removed the worst included offences and the NPOV tag, however, from a little glance at the talk page there may be serious offences of missing/excluded content that might warrant the tag return until a full picture of the subject as covered by reliable sources is presented. I dont have time to look into that now though. Active Banana    (bananaphone  18:35, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

The user has requested that someone review the article now that new sourcing has been provided to see if the tags are still appropriate. I would request a third party rather than me make that review. Thanks! Active Banana    (bananaphone  23:06, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Jona Lendering

 * Jona Lendering - accusations of racism(de-archived)

persists in adding this edit based on a web petition signed by 1400 people and a web magazine. Note that the so-called 'academic criticism' is an article by "Saam Safavi-Zadeh is from Tabriz, Iran and is pursuing his graduate studies in the study of ancient Iran in France. Anna Djakashvili-Bloehm lives in France with a keen interest in studying ancient Babylon and Persia." There's been an ongoing web-based attack on Lendering and Wikipedia which may be the background to this. I'm not convinced it has a place in Lendering's article. 1400 seems extremely small. Dougweller (talk) 08:20, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Rozanehmagazine.com is an unreliable source by default. It is obviously home-made. Iranian patriots have their say on ancient history. They promote the notorious Cyrus Cylinder fringe theory. Since Jona Lendering has written an unfavourable review of a book by Kaveh Farrokh, one of the theory’s main proponents, they attack Lendering. This is cyber-bullying. - Konstock (talk) 07:18, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Didn't notice this and added a new section, merging. For several years that has been a web-based campaign against Jona Lendering which occasionally is taken to his Wikipedia article. An IP has recently been adding material about a petition signed by apparently 1400 people accusing Lendering of racism (the IP doesn't link to it, perhaps because the site is blacklisted, but it is at www.gopetition.com/petitions/jona-lendering-anti-iran.html. The last couple of todays I and another editor have reverted it. The IP has also been adding a link to an article in a web based magazine which the IP describes as academic criticism although it isn't in anything resembling an academic publication and the authors are described in the article as "Saam Safavi-Zadeh is from Tabriz, Iran and is pursuing his graduate studies in the study of ancient Iran in France. Anna Djakashvili-Bloehm lives in France with a keen interest in studying ancient Babylon and Persia." A new bit is the addition to a link on Kaveh Farrokh's page (thus self-published) which says "More recently Dr. Kaveh Farrokh,a historian with the University of British Columbia, has prepared a critique that details Jona Lendering’s activities as a purported online historian,". Farrokh is actually a student counsellor at Langara College of Higher Learning and although he has published books on the history of Iran his PhD is related to his professional career as a counsellor.  Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 07:34, 27 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Rozanehmagazine.com is not a WP:RS for anything contentious or controversial or disputed - it is only used on five other BLP articles. The www go petition is not notable unless reported in an independent reliable source, and even if it is, such an online petition is still of dubious value. Off2riorob (talk) 09:11, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

The changes just got put in the article again - I noticed them while doing WP:RCP with huggle and reverted them before I noticed this discussion. Kevin (talk) 05:57, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * A whoooooooole bunch more stuff about this has popped up on my talk page -- User_talk:Kgorman-ucb. Kevin (talk) 07:31, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Where I've written a bit about another BLP violation: Ironically, when the IP writes "Dr. Kaveh Farrokh,a historian with the University of British Columbia, this is also a BLP violation as it's making claims about a living person that aren't true. As I've said on Lendering's talk page and BLPN, he is a student counselor at Langara College of Higher Learning - see . He has no degree in history or a related field. His PhD was in the field "Research, Educational and Counselling Psychology" which he received from the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology - his specific subject was "The relationships among cognitive processes, language experience and errors in Farsi speaking ESL adults."  His 1988 MA Thesis was on "Patterns of adjustment of international students to the University of British Columbia".. Dougweller (talk) 08:13, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * IP blocked (not by me) as a sock of Rjbronn Sockpuppet investigations/Rjbronn/Archive is the old case. Dougweller (talk) 12:33, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Carrie Savage
The user (apparently the article subject) removed unreferenced bio information (which can be seen in e.g. ), but also added 'commentry' to the article such as Whomever posted the previous information that was posted about me on this page should be ashamed, It is a travesty that sites like this exist where any body can just go around posting whatever they feel like and suchlike; consequently their edits were reverted.

The unreferenced bio info has now been removed; however, the article still has no inline citations to reliable sources.

The user further raised their concerns on our helpdesk, Help_desk - and as stated there, I thought this best raised on BLPN to get more attention. Best,  Chzz  ► 00:05, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Update: The user has just been blocked for making legal threats.  Chzz  ► 00:07, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

The IP user who introduced the problematic stuff to the carrie savage article has a decent number of other BLP edits that should be checked for quality, here. I'll look over some of them myself shortly. Kevin (talk) 03:07, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

The article was taken to afd and no reliable sources were found, so I speedy closed the article as delete, and had the article history suppressed per the oversight policy because of private and negative content. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 21:41, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

sayuki
Sayuki is a geisha in Japan in a very strict environment where geisha are not supposed to reveal their real names or ages. Sayuki has asked many times in the media that Western media do not treat her differently to other geisha by breaking geisha tradition. Please stop editing the Sayuki article to reveal her real name and age. It is not fair to her and it is harmful to her career. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.11.87.75 (talk) 14:02, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Fiona Graham has posted her birthname on her official Sayuki website. That pretty much renders your argument invalid. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 17:06, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Sayuki's name has rarely been reported in the Japanese press as they are generally responsible but got out in the Western Press. Her age is not mentioned anywhere but here. Please remove it. This kind of transgression of geisha rules has an impact on the career of a living person. It is irresponsible to publish it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.22.75.199 (talk) 00:06, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It being irresponsible to publish it is not necessarily a great argument for removing it. However, since it's completely unsourced, I have removed the birth year for the time being. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 04:33, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Michael Bruggink
Would anyone have time to check this article? I noticed the writer of the article adding non-reliable sources elsewhere, but I don't have the time to see if this BLP is up to snuff. Thanks! Sandy Georgia (Talk) 17:07, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * PS, in the event problems are found, the same editor has written several other BLPs. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 17:09, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I took the article to Afd, Articles for deletion/Michael Bruggink, as he seems to be know for only mentions in the media for hunting for Osama bin Laden in the weeks prior to his death. FloNight&#9829;&#9829;&#9829;&#9829; 19:51, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Manny Pacquiao
Would this fall into a BLP violation? Neohertz wants to add acussations that Manny consumes drugs with reliable sources (according to him), but those are just allegations made by people who fought with him. Further information at Pacquiao talkpage. ۞  Tb hotch ™ &  (ↄ),  Problems with my English?  05:52, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I'm having trouble locating the source(s) that the editor wants to put in the article. I looked through the Talk page section and the recent article history and don't see what exactly he's trying to add and support. Maybe I missed it.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:18, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Allegations done by his ring enemies only. Kinda gossip. ۞   Tb hotch ™ &  (ↄ),  Problems with my English?  01:58, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If he doesn't have a source, it's kind of a no-brainer. He hasn't tried to add anything to the article, either. I wouldn't carry on a conversation with him, as you are doing, on the Pacquiao Talk page unless he comes up with something or attempts to change the article in an inappropriate way.--Bbb23 (talk) 07:04, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Water fuelled car
Two references from peer reviewed journals were added to the Aquygen section. In this section a theory was called "discredited"on the basis of one reference against the theory. Two reference in favor of the theory were added and the word was changed to "controversial" This is a theory proposed by a living scientist and I believe the BLP policy has to be respected by including references against and in favor. In the past these references were removed in other articles as well on the basis that they were proposed by a "sock puppet". ISTAT (talk)ISTATISTAT (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:02, 29 May 2011 (UTC).

Oxyhydrogen
Not allowing references to be added to a definition of a person as 'fringe scientists" and fraud and scam because they are in favor of that person  while allowing one negative citation  only  is a violation of the BLP policy. This happened several times in the section "Fraud and Scam" Protection from this vandalism is needed. ISTAT (talk)ISTATISTAT (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 15:32, 29 May 2011 (UTC).
 * Which fringe scientist or fraudster did you have in mind? Your comment here is not sufficiently specific to identify the person.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 18:31, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Stephen C. Meyer
There's a discussion on WP:RSN that also concerns issues related to WP:BLP. Editors from this board are invited to join the discussion here. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:41, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Jeremy Taylor (writer)
I am sorry, but this guy is in no way notable. Wiki bios of living person should be of notable public figures. I nominate this article for deletion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RadRo (talk • contribs) 12:28, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Nominated the article for deletion, as it fails WP:GNG and WP:AUTHOR. See WP:Articles for deletion/Jeremy Taylor (writer). // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 16:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Amol Palekar
His date of birth is listed as April 1, 1944; however, his birthday is actually November 23, 1944. He is my mother's only brother, and my birthday is November 19 and we have jointly celebrated our birthdays together on a number of occasions in Mumbai. Should you require any other personal clarifications on his personal side please contact me at — Preceding unsigned comment added by 8.26.115.166 (talk • contribs)


 * Hi, at wikipedia all content requires reliable verification, personal knowledge included. As you have this http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi-times/Amol-Palekar-Baaton-Baaton-Mein/articleshow/240783.cms - WP:RS currently supporting the April 1 date, which appears to be Amol talking about himself .. to change the birth date you will need some WP:RS that support your claim. Off2riorob (talk) 16:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Information about his spouse and children is also inaccurate - Sandhya Gokhale is his second spouse, and Samiha is her daughter from her first marriage. Shalmalee Palekar is my first cousin, and is from his first marriage to Chitra. Advait Mantri — Preceding unsigned comment added by 8.26.115.166 (talk) 16:26, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I made a small edit to correct this mistaken assertion. Off2riorob (talk) 16:37, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

C. Sankaran Nair
This article is poorly written and poorly sourced. It has been tagged as lacking sources since March 2010. It has very few watchers (fewer than 30 - why can't we just give a number?). I removed some trivial, unsourced material about Nair's family from the article today. I mistakenly thought I was removing old information, but it turns out I was removing information that was recently added. The IP then put in a source for the information (a book without a page number). It's not clear if the source supports part or all of the information, particularly based on the way the reference is placed. I reverted because the information is so tangential to the subject, some of it is trivial, and it's poorly worded. The IP added it back in. Unfortunately, I can't make any more reversions, or even edit it.

Could others please look at the article and do whatever you think is appropriate? Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:48, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Annie Jacobsen
User:Olafgate is repeatedly removing cited material and replacing it with uncited claims. This author has a new and controversial book out so it would be good to have more eyes here in any case. Gamaliel (talk) 17:27, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I've restored the material and done some clean-up. I will continue to watch the article.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:51, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature

 * BEST study

User:Drrll insists on removing the explicitly attributed opinion of Joe Romm from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, with the explanation WP:IRS: "For information about academic topics, scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports"; WP:BLP: "be very firm about the use of high quality sources"

what's being removed is the rather innocuous "Climate-change activist Joe Romm has strongly criticized the BEST project in Grist magazine and in his Center for American Progress blog." See also Talk:Berkeley_Earth_Surface_Temperature. Any comments, etc. Rd232 talk 19:22, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * And opinions that the study is not biassed also should be fully represented.  One problem, however, is the WP:BLP implication from the criticism - to the extent that an opinion makes BLP-sensitive sensational or contentious claims about people, the opinion should be disallowed per WP:BLP.
 * "opinions that the study is not biassed also should be fully represented." - WP:SOFIXIT. Rd232 talk 20:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The edit in question makes no BLP claims. Waving the BLP flag any time there are edits one disagrees with trivializes Wikipedia's very real and ongoing BLP problems. That being said, I don't see why Romm's opinion is noteworthy given that (like Muller) he has no apparent expertise in atmospheric data analysis. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 20:04, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * "he has no apparent expertise in atmospheric data analysis" - irrelevant, we're not talking about an academic peer review. It's a critique of how the study was organised and the key people involved. Rd232 talk 20:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with Short Brigade, both on the BLP issue and the noteworthiness of the inclusion. The BLP issue is, at best, very attenuated. This is really just a content dispute.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:11, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Doe Exee
Doe Exee (born Orlando Kamiran Exee; December 31, 1979) is an American actor, director, writer. Exee wrote, directed and acted in his first play, Tha Bamalamashubang!, in 2006. After that he did three more original plays; Combination, Hotblooded and Valley Of Death. Exee was also briefly a professional athlete in his early 20's.

Exee is the creator of an acting method called the Construction Technique. A technique that relies on an acting performer creating an extensive background history of a character's life prior to portrayal.

Exee spent his earliest years in New Orleans and moved to Los Angeles as a child. As a teen he trained to become an Olympic boxer, and was nicknamed "The Blur" due to his astonishing speed. But he suffered a spinal injury from a truck accident at age 19. He recovered from the accident, and attempted a comeback as a professional, but the damage done to his neck never fully healed and he eventually retired at age 24. After that he attended Los Angeles Film School, where he began acting and directing in several short films. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.222.235.92 (talk) 20:17, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Assuming you think an article about this man should be created, a quick google search comes up with pretty much nothing other than a boxer named Doe Exee, which I assume isn't the person you're talking about. So, an article would be unlikely to satisfy Wikipedia's notability requirements.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC


 * Hi, this is not the correct location to request article creation. - I suggest you consider Bbb23's advice that the subject may well not be notablle enough for a wikipedia BLP or you can either WP:BEBOLD and click on the redlink Doe Exee and start the article or request assistance via WP:Article creation - Off2riorob (talk) 01:47, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Adam Hollioake
I'd welcome someone taking a look at the article - there seem to have been a whole pile of POV reverts to push a variety of issues. There may or may not be legal issues associated with some of the content, particularly the final section and the link with Du'aine Ladejo (where POV pushing has also been going on), Quiet Storm Production and Australia's Greatest Athlete - but I can't find very much at all in reliable sources to suggest that there are legal proceedings other than those which are referenced and mentioned on the talk page. I could use someone more experienced with BLP issues to take a look and check that what we have on there is OK or not. Thanks Blue Square Thing (talk) 20:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Ion Iliescu
This page contains many unsourced allegations in the Controversies part of the article, it allocates disproportionate space to particular viewpoints and makes claims that rely on guilt by association.––Luciandrei (talk) 21:14, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Trimmed a third of the articles contentious uncited content. Please feel fee to cite to WP:RS and replace. Off2riorob (talk) 22:24, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Jerome Corsi
I have objected, as have other editors, under the provisions of WP:BLP, to the pejorative and objective labeling of Jerome Corsi as a "Conspiracy Theorist". Perhaps there's a case to be made for this inclusion, perhaps not...but it certainly should at least require the establishment of a strong consensus for this edit in talk. Editors are now engaged in reverting edits removing this pejorative characterization despite WP:BLP objections raised. JakeInJoisey (talk) 12:56, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Please see ongoing discussion of the sub-section below in the article talk section. Discussion as to the merit of the edit in question is irrelevant to the purposes of this WP:BLP notice. JakeInJoisey (talk) 15:22, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Removal of relliable academic sources
When someone publishes in an academic journal that an individual is prominently known as a conspiracy theorist, we can use that as a lreliabe source for this fact. See the last diff http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jerome_Corsi&action=historysubmit&diff=430675099&oldid=430673364 for the source which is to an expert in conspiracy theorists.

Please do not remove this fact unless you have a reliable source which disputes it. I have found none in researching this individual. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.59.169.46 (talk) 14:01, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Please. WP:RS "facts not in evidence". While the cited source may be academic, Mr. Berlet is no "academic". From Wikipedia (emphasis mine)...
 * "John Foster 'Chip' Berlet (born November 22, 1949) is an American investigative journalist, and photojournalist activist  specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the United States, particularly the religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, and paramilitary organizations. He also studies the spread of conspiracy theories in the media and on the Internet, and political cults on both the right and left of the political spectrum."
 * "He is the senior analyst at Political Research Associates (PRA), a non-profit group that tracks right-wing networks,..."
 * I'll leave it to other editors as to whether a cite from an apparently hyper-biased "investigative journalist" satisifes WP:BLP, WP:RS criteria for objectively maligning Mr. Corsi as a "conspiracy theorist". — Preceding unsigned comment added by JakeInJoisey (talk • contribs) 15:06, 24 May 2011


 * Given the content of the article, I don't think we need a citation in the lead to call him a conspiracy theorist. The article makes clear that he writes about conspiracy theories (using some form of the word conspiracy 19 times), news media (eg Newsweek in 2007 and others this month) things such as "The main purveyor of this broad conspiracy theory is Jerome Corsi, ", see also and I could go on. Saying " Corsi has discussed topics that are considered conspiracy theories in most circles," seems pretty weasely to me. Dougweller (talk) 15:41, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Given the content of the article, I don't think we need a citation in the lead to call him a conspiracy theorist.
 * Perhaps so, perhaps not...but that's an issue to be resolved by consensus in talk, not here. I am soliciting administrative intervention as to the propriety of inserting content currently disputed under a WP:BLP objection. JakeInJoisey (talk) 15:57, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It meets rs, so what other objections have you got? TFD (talk) 16:18, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Your observation is irrelevant to the purpose of this notice. Please consider commenting in the article talk for consideration by all interested editors. JakeInJoisey (talk) 16:34, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The source is Chip Berlet's article in Race in the age of Obama, published by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. When evaluating the reliablity of sources, we must look at the type of publication.  Articles published in academic books are high quality reliable sources, and this article passes.  Berlet in fact has written many articles and books for the academic press.  Although Berlet also writes journalism and activist writing, this article is scholarly writing.TFD (talk) 15:56, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Clear opinions, as always, no matter who holds them, are only valid as claims of "opinion." The current standards for WP:BLP tend to make exceedingly good and strong sourcing a minimum for any such claim,  I seem to recall a statement ''You would need a good source that called his view a conspiracy theory. It is a very strong term, and means more than a theory that a conspiracy existed which would imply a strong standard for calling any view a "conspiracy theory" and, by extension, anyone would need fully as strong a source'' for calling anyone a "conspiracy theorist" under the current BLP rules. I would suggest that a single source would not meet that requirement, and likely three independent sources would be a good idea. Collect (talk) 16:30, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Please consider posting your observations in the article talk. I'm experiencing some difficulty here with editors  arguing the validity of the content as opposed to the propriety of its inclusion prior to consensus being attained after a WP:BLP objection has been raised by several editors. JakeInJoisey (talk) 16:50, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I added two additional sources that directly describe Corsi as a conspiracy theorist to the article as per suggested by Collect. 128.59.169.46 (talk) 15:16, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Letitia Libman
See my AfD of the article: Articles for deletion/Letitia Libman. The page is so filled with BLP violations (mostly the slant of coverage toward the negative) that it probably deserves deletion, despite having quite a few sources. Raymie (t • c) 00:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * FYI, I've WP:SNOW closed that delete as of a few minutes ago. --joe deckertalk to me 16:10, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Mel Gibson DUI incident

 * There are also BLP-violating POV-forks, such as this one about Mel Gibson, an article that belongs more to an Entertainment Weekly wiki than a real encyclopedia. Mindbunny (talk) 00:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I would support getting rid of that, its undue coverage resulting in what is basically an attack page - redirect and merge back trimming all the bloat resulting in the possibility that there would be nothing worthy of merging. Off2riorob (talk) 00:50, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I boldly redirected the article but my edit has been reverted by User:Chzz. We should revisit getting rid of that article sometime it is imo bloated to an undue exaggeration of a minor charge against a living person. Thoughts? Off2riorob (talk) 13:44, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Again I iterate my position that minor offenses which get blown up in the media remain minor offenses. We have articles which stress that a person owed $500 in back taxes, articles which list "expense account scandal" charges of under %.25,  articles which list various minor items which were covered in "reliable sources" but which are not actually encyclopedic in the slightest.   I realize my position is heretical to some, but I have this odd feeling that if such stuff were known about most dead people, we could have a "Triviapedia" under our wings.   And where a person is not convicted of a felony, we should be wary of saying much about the charge at all.   We have articles today which say "alleged" and then neglect to follow up on the charges being dropped or unfounded.  Collect (talk) 13:56, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The article itself notes in the lede there was a press frenzy, but just because all press outlets cover and report the same story doesn't imo demand we give it massive coverage. There is a massive section that reports what all and sundry in hollwood celebs though about it,Mel Gibson DUI incident this seems a bit excessive to me. I suggest that section could be condensed to a single paragraph. Off2riorob (talk) 14:09, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * While it looks like this article may be a good candidate for merger I would point out to Collect that a DUI is not a "minor" offense. The cost to the offender in money, loss of driving privileges, time lost going to classes, jail time etc is anything but minor. The cost to victims of a drunk driver can be even heavier. I do hope that you never have to experience any of the consequences of either side of these Collect. I would just ask that you please be careful in how you characterize this. I know that I probably wont change your mind but I thought that this needed to be on the record. On another point I would say kudos to Off2riorob for the work that you have done on the article since this thread was started. MarnetteD | Talk 18:30, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Legally a "misdemeanor" is a "minor offense" as opposed to the "major offense" of a felony. It is punishable by less than a year in jail as opposed to more than a year in a prison.    The effect on people is not how the law defines "major" and "minor".  Even a apeeding ticket for going 1 mph too fast can result in lost time and having to go to classes.   That is not, moreover, the issue at hand. Collect (talk) 18:54, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you MarnetteD. - Off2riorob (talk) 19:03, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The legal issues are minor in comparison to the effect that the subject's comments during the arrest had on his reputation. Even if all charges were dropped it would still be a major event in his biography. I'm not sure we really need a standalone article on it, but that's a decision to be made on the article talk page.   Will Beback    talk    19:14, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It's more minor than, say, murder. That didn't get a separate page in Phil Spector's BLP. Regardless of the different treatments in different articles, the fact that Gibson's DUI is a big part of biography is a reason not to POV-fork it out of his biography. Mindbunny (talk) 19:28, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Robert Graysmith
I dispute the NPOV, Verifiability, and NOR claim of this Wikipedia entry for “Robert Graysmith,” specifically as evidenced by the following sentence: “He was also disciplined for plagiarism at the Chronicle and has been speculated to be the author of the fake 1978 Zodiac letter.” - “has been speculated to be ...” Oh, please! Let me ask you: Is Wikipedia in the business of promoting such “speculation” statements that a good teacher wouldn’t even pass in a research paper from one of her seventh-graders? I mean, just look at the weak verbal tense in addition to word choice – you don’t have to be an editor of an encyclopedia to see that this statement is blatantly agenda-biased. Observe how the editors have speciously combined the two clauses so that the Chronicle disciplining charge (No Source for Verifiability!) lends credence to the second (NOR violation!). A reader is easily led to believe that the authority of the Chronicle editorial board is the same authority “speculating” that Graysmith committed Federal fraud and terroristic threats by devising, then mailing a serial killer’s letter (or one purporting to be such) through the United States Postal Service in 1978. Reminder to Wikipedia: That’s a very serious charge, folks. »» Pillar #2 (Wikipedia has a neutral point of view) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars - ''“Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page. Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity, and must adhere strictly to all applicable laws in the United States, to this policy, and to Wikipedia’s three core content policies:''

- Neutral Point of View (NPOV) - Verifiability (V) - No Original Research (NOR)”

»» “Wikipedia: Biographies of living persons” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons

As one who has studied the online amateur Zodiac research community for years, I can tell you who is forcing this disparaging agenda into the “Robert Graysmith” bio: Michael Butterfield. One only has to click the View history and Discussion tabs to see that he has acted for years as a perpetual vandal upon the Graysmith entry in Wikipedia. “has been speculated to be the author of the fake 1978 Zodiac letter.” This egregious claim is source referenced to Jake Wark’s personal monologue from TruTV.com (high quality source? NOR violation!). Has the TruTV article been peer-reviewed by anyone other than Michael Butterfield and cronies? Wark and Butterfield have glad-handed and endorsed each other’s online Web sites and theories for years since collaborating on the now utterly debunked Zodiac Killer “Radian” theory (originated by Gareth Penn). See this following quote as just one example: “Not to diminish the reputation of Jake Wark in any way (because I have the upmost [sic] respect for Jake and always have since we first ‘met’ back in the late 1990s), but Jake and I did much of this work years ago, and if MikeM is willing to accept Jake as an authority on such matters, I find it odd that MikeM won’t extend me the same courtesy when my credentials are as good as his, and my research far exceeds Jake’s (as I’m sure Jake himself would tell you).” »» BUTTERFIELD, wearing his sockpuppet “zodiac” Administrator hat [11/15/2009 at 01:09 AM] http://www.zodiackillerfacts.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=293 Please read about Michael Butterfield in the following linked article (mostly in his own directly quoted Web site edicts to demonstrate his blatant hypocrisy), then “speculate” whether that poor excuse of an ad hominem statement still belongs in the “Robert Graysmith” bio for a Wikipedia aiming to uphold its “Five Pillars” and fundamental principles. http://zodiacevidence.co.uk/default.aspx?g=posts&m=85 - Jake Wark and Michael Butterfield are frustrated amateur writer/detectives, acting out their leveled aspirations and professional jealousies via libelous accusation directed toward Robert Graysmith, his talents, and his hard-earned success.

With regard to the statement in dispute, Wikipedia tacitly promotes a “battleground playpen” and thus diminishes its own credibility for disseminating living person biographies worthy of a quality encyclopedic source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.40.181.161 (talk) 05:27, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * note - I have removed the speculation of what I assume would have been an illegal act. If anyone wishes to replace please discuss here. I also remove the allegation of employer discipline for plagarism - without more details and perhaps a more quality reliable external this unexplained factoid is also imo unworthy of inclusion. Off2riorob (talk) 11:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Barbara Schwarz
This page redirects to an article that no longer mentions her. It would be nice if the talk page of that article was also archived. Thanks. Steve Dufour (talk) 14:21, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Do you mean this one Talk:Barbara_Schwarz - it seems to have been deleted...I anyway "tidied" this one Talk:Freedom of Information Act (United States) - Off2riorob (talk) 14:47, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I was looking at the second one, which you just took care of. The redirect page makes no sense, but I guess it does no harm. Steve Dufour (talk) 15:00, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I see your point now, lots of bla di bla about a living person on the talkpage of an article without any content about her in the article. As for the redirect if it is not a plausible search term any longer to the location you could request speedy deletion or list it at RFD - note - I nominated it for a speedy WP:G8 - Off2riorob (talk) 15:08, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Ash Bettridge
An editor claiming to be the article subject has been blanking sourced content at Ash Bettridge. After several requests to discuss their concerns on the talk page, they have now posted there stating that information is harming their career. It's really just a stub of an article and the information appears both neutral and sourced. Ashbar attempting to list it at AfD but the process was not completed; at this point, given the borderline notability and the subject's obvious discontent with the article, perhaps it would be best if the article was deleted. Any outside input would be appreciated. --Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 15:20, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I think we should format the users Ashbars AFD and let the community decide.✅ He is not a very notable person really. Off2riorob (talk) 15:36, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks Rob; as notability is weak and the stub article is obviously causing some degree of stress to the subject, I would lean towards deleting it. --Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 15:50, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Marty Pieratt & Bobby Plump
I would like to report a possible violation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.174.146.39 (talk) 22:05, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Can you explain your concern in more detail? Wikipedia does not appear to have an article about Marty Pieratt.  There is an article about Bobby Plump, but it's quite short and I'm not sure what about it might be a violation of Wikipedia's biographies of living persons rules, unless I'm missing something. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 22:15, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I do see that you made one change, to add some puzzling personal commentary to the citation of a book. I removed the commentary, which doesn't belong in the article,  and adjusted the listed authors to read the same way they do at amazon.com.  I hope that was helpful. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 22:18, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Reviewing negative BLPs of questionable notability
There appear to be nearly 4,000 BLPs which have been tagged as being of questionable notability. See here.

Now, before anyone jumps on me, many of these will have been wrongly tagged, or would be generally considered notable. But many won't be. Many would not survive AFD.

Among those BLPs I'm finding quite a number that are largely negative, or contain negative negative information. Now, most of it is certainly referenced. But it would seem uncontentious that we should be diligent in removing any any BLP that is largely negative and does not meet our consensus notability requirements. (Indeed, I'd argue that if something is very borderline, negative impact might be a consideration that would push to delete.)

I've been going through the 4,000 articles, hunting for negative BLPs and if I think the article genuinely does not meet our notability guidelines, I've been prodding. I've not prodded many yet, but the fact that few have been de-prodded tells me that this might not be very contentious at all.

I'm looking for others to join in (or indeed come up with better ways of identifying article for review). What I've been doing is googling the site for "Living person" "may not meet the notability" and then adding a keyword which might lead me to negative articles "criminal" "accused" allegations" "indicted" "charges" etc.. See for example. And then I've been manually reviewing each article. It does throw up a lot of suspect coatracks - e.g. a high number of hits are minor US politicians and US army personnel (political motivations in creation?), also crime reports posing as BLPs and BLP1E problems.

More people helping out would be appreciated. It would be good to identify remove all the negative BLPs which (by consensus) fail notability. Please, this isn't a call for a deletion spree - I'm talking about using prod and afd, so that no article which is viewed as notable gets removed. Any people of an inclusionist bent would be very welcome to help. --Scott Mac 21:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Do the above-mentioned BLPs output to a category? That would be helpful during the cleanup process. -- Cirt (talk) 22:05, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I think it would be the intersection of Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability with Category:Living Persons. Does that help?--Scott Mac 23:18, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this search technique/result Scott, very useful. I clicked on one and sent it direct for AFD discussion. Off2riorob (talk) 22:08, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll try to help out as time demands allows. Cla68 (talk) 23:24, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Me too, though I think that both negative and positive biographies of unclear notability should be addressed. Many of the latter are promotional in nature.   Will Beback    talk    21:40, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

I know there is a way to view the intersection of two categories. Something to do with DynamicPageList coding. Can that be done here? -- Cirt (talk) 00:08, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

I get that there are 11,000 or so with this query:  I'm glad that folks are considering doing this work, I add references to a lot of unref'd bios, and try and kill the worst BLP vios when I see them, but there's a lot of promotional stuff that gets through. At this point the nearly two-year unreferenced BLP triage spree has not left much time to deal with anything but the most problematic cases. --joe deckertalk to me 02:18, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Wow, that toolserver app is a useful link - thanks for it. I'd been pulling up category intersects where I needed them using a much more primitive method, that thing makes it so much easier.  Kevin (talk) 03:04, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Glad to pass it along! It's sure been a help for me.  --joe deckertalk to me 04:24, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Fritz Springmeier
Fritz Springmeier's article has been messed about recently, one editor being an IP claiming to be the subject and clearly not happy about the article. This messed up some formatting and references and I've restored that, removed one clearly unreliable source and some pov unsourced text. A number of the citations dealing with his court cases and imprisonment are to docket entries (without links) and I seem to recall we shouldn't be using those. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 14:18, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I remove those legal dockets on sight. I would delete it as an attack article. It is still not ok to write rubbish articles about people on the fringe.note - I did some work to tidy it up. Off2riorob (talk) 19:02, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Tom Corbett
Apparently there are 40 watchers of Tom Corbett. They specialize in removal & erasure of any information that is critical of Tom Corbett or his policies however controversial to the citizenry of Pennsylvania. This is especially true concerning his policies on Gas Drilling, energy exploration, conservation & water pollution. Entries containing this information are always just completely removed. This is done repeatedly by a small cast of the same characters. This is wholesale vandalism.

I am curious if these edits - which are more than censures - are being preformed by his staff members while on duty of the State Payroll under his direction? That would open a really good Federal investigation. Just because one can erase the words - it does not erase the truth or his actions, which is sometimes good & bad & ugly.

If there is some part of this posting that is not germane to Tom Corbett's office and his actions in that office, or overly critical, I would gladly revise & re-edit this myself.

This has been constantly removed:

Conflict of Interest & Controversy over Natural gas policy
Governor Tom Corbett is also a member of the Delaware River Basin Commission. Because of the million plus dollars donated by the natural gas lobby for the purpose of having Corbett elected, his acceptance of that money has been called a "payoff."

The DRBC is a federal-interstate compact government agency that was formed by concurrent legislation enacted in 1961 by the United States and the four basin states (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware). Its five members include the basin state governors and the Division Engineer, North Atlantic Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who serves as the federal representative. The commission has legal authority over both water quality and water quantity-related issues throughout the basin, and are therefore responsible for allowing or approving the drilling of exploratory gas wells & Hydrofracking that may cause environmental damage.

According to the Delaware River Basin Commission, between 15,000 and 18,000 wells could be drilled in as many as 2,200 locations within the basin. Each well requires between 3 and 5 million gallons of water for gas extraction. Some of the water has gone for treatment to municipal sewage treatment plants that some experts say are not capable of removing the radioactive isotopes, nor the chemicals and dissolved solids found in the fluid.

The Delaware River Basin Commission, until recently operating far below the radar screen of public notice, got a big jolt of attention when 18 environmental and citizens organizations descended upon its Trenton offices to deliver boxes containing 35,000 public comments urging it to continue its moratorium on gas drilling until it is proven safe. It was the day before the DRBC’s deadline for public comments on its draft regulations for drilling in the basin.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman threatened a lawsuit against several federal oversight agencies if they do not commit to an in-depth environmental review — one he argues is required under the National Environmental Policy Act — of regulations in the Delaware River Basin that could allow high-volume fracking in the environmentally sensitive region. The Delaware River Basin Commission anticipates up to 18,000 (Natural Gas) wells could be established in an area that serves as a water source to many New Yorkers.

On May 31, 2011, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman did in fact file a lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to commit to a full environmental review of proposed regulations that would allow natural gas drilling – including the potentially harmful "fracking" technique – in the Delaware River Basin. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK -x
 * STATE OF NEW YORK,
 * Plaintiff,
 * v.
 * UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS;
 * BRIGADIER GENERAL PETER A. DELUCA, in his official
 * capacity as Division Engineer, North Atlantic Division of the
 * United States Army Corps of Engineers;
 * UNITED STATES FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE;
 * ROWAN W. GOULD, in his official capacity as Acting Director
 * of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service; UNITED STATES
 * NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; JONATHAN B. JARVIS,
 * in his official capacity as Director of the United States National Park
 * Service; UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR;
 * KENNETH SALAZAR, in his official capacity as Secretary of the
 * United States Department of the Interior; UNITED STATES
 * ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY;
 * and LISA JACKSON, in her official capacity as Administrator of the
 * United States Environmental Protection Agency,


 * Defendants, . ..

Because Tom Corbett is a voting member of the DRBC; many opponents to water pollution fear he will always vote in favor of the natural gas industry; akin to the fox watching the hen house. Many citizens of Pennsylvania believe there may exist a conflict of interest reminiscent of the Teapot Dome Scandal, but the aforementioned allegations of cronyism have not yet led to any federal investigation into corruption or an Infraction of the public trust.

New York State's federal lawsuit filed by Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman appears to be the first federal action of this century protecting the Delaware River; the Public's source for clean potable water.

Tom Corbett and the DRBC were not named as defendants in this action because the federal approval statute exempts the Commission from the Administrative Procedure Act.

Bigjoe5216 (talk) 03:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I would suggest you take this matter to the article's talk page, the section appears very much undue weight in a BLP. I'd remove it also. Dayewalker (talk) 03:33, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Ravel Morrison

 * Ravel Morrison - criminal convictions

To give a bit of background, this is an immensely talented youth football/soccer player who's always been regarded as a bit of a "problem child" and has had a few run-ins with the law. He is frequently written about in reliable sources, but only really due to his off-the-field activities. He was found guilty of witness intimidation at the start of the year and recently admitted criminal damage, in addition to various times he was cautioned/charges were dropped etc (including one for assaulting his mother). My question is, how much of this is relevant enough to be included in his article? As I understand it, only his convictions should be mentioned (witness intimidation and criminal damage). Or is the second too minor? Any advice appreciated. doom gaze  (talk)  15:17, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I'd agree, anything that's not a conviction shouldn't be in there, and the criminal damage conviction (girlfriend threw his phone around, so he threw hers rather further...) is too minor to be worth mentioning. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 15:38, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That's what I thought, thanks. doom gaze   (talk)  23:34, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Helen Thomas
Background: Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive117.

isn't getting the message. The business of her adding material to BLP articles and citing her blogs as sources persists at Helen Thomas. (I've undone her changes.) For whatever reason, chose not to leave her an additional warning on her Talk page the last time. That's the very least that should be done now.—Biosketch (talk) 02:41, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi. A few users, including myself did try to get this through to the user last year but to little success. She is only editing rarely perhaps for what its worth its just easier to revert any future additions and leave a note then. It is a bit annoying I understand but only minimally disruptive - imo. Off2riorob (talk) 10:54, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Meaning of "high quality sources" in BLP policy language
I hope this is the right forum to ask a more general question about BLP policy language interpretation. WP:BLP admonishes editors to "be very firm about the use of high quality sources." What exactly is a "high quality source"? Does it simply mean that the source has met the somewhat difficult-to-determine standard of having a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy?

For opinion-type sources, is a "high quality source" one in which you can be merely reasonably assured that the opinion is that of the purported author, or does it require inclusion in a prominent publication or a relatively neutral publication? Is any opinion piece, regardless of publication, not a "high quality source" for BLP purposes if not referenced by a third-party non-opinion source? Drrll (talk) 06:08, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * While this is an interesting general question, it shouldn't go unremarked that it arises in the santorum discussion, above. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 07:37, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * We have to distinguish two separate issues when it comes to reporting facts about opinions.


 * 1. First, is this opinion worth reporting? On controversial subjects, we should give our readers a fair presentation of the major points of view.  Lunatic fringes can be ignored.  Even among the major viewpoints, we don't need to include every adherent as long as we give a fair summary of that side.


 * In particular instances, an opinion may be significant simply because of who expresses it. For example, the discussion above about Santorum (neologism) concerns a project undertaken by columnist Dan Savage in response to the anti-LGBT views of Senator Rick Santorum.  There, opinions of Savage and Santorum are significant even if not shared by anyone else.


 * 2. Second, is this a good source for the opinion? I've been in some discussions where editors got confused and thought that a reliable source meant one that validated the opinion (confirming that the opinion is correct or well founded).  That's wrong.  In this context, the reliability of a source depends on how likely it is that the source has accurately quoted or paraphrased the opinion we're reporting -- in other words, that the identified individual actually expressed that opinion.  A source may be of higher or lower quality for different facts.  (Of course, this applies beyond the context of reporting opinions.)


 * Confusion arises because the nature of the source (question two) may play a role in assessing the notability of the opinion (question one). Opinions that receive widespread play in the mainstream media are, ipso facto, significant (even if, as often happens, the opinion is utterly without merit and is receiving that much attention only because someone is putting a lot of money behind it).  Nevertheless, coverage in the mainstream media is not the be-all and end-all of the significance of an opinion.  An opinion is usually worth reporting if it's from a prominent spokesperson or from a person with particular expertise on that subject, even if the mainstream media don't bother to pick it up because they're too busy recounting celebrity divorces.


 * In the Santorum example above, Drrll wrote: "I don't see how opinion sources that don't get coverage in third-party news sources can be considered high quality, nor sources like alternative newspapers. That would exclude most of Savage's own highly-opinionated articles for example." I disagree on several counts.  First, there's no requirement of third-party reportage.  If a prominent politician writes an op-ed column for some newspaper, we can report that, even if there's no other newspaper that carries a story about the op-ed column.  Second, I don't share Drrll's derision for alternative newspapers.  They are much less likely to act as stenographers for government lies, the way the mainstream media do (see, for example, Judith Miller (journalist)).  Third, in this particular case, the article's citations to Savage's own opinion columns were to columns that he wrote and that appeared in a newspaper (The Stranger) of which he was editor-in-chief.  I can't imagine a higher-quality source.  We can be extremely confident that our statement (Dan Savage said X) is accurate.  If The New York Times reports on what Senator Snerd said in an interview yesterday, the paper might have garbled or misunderstood Snerd's meaning, so it's possible that our statement (Snerd said Y) is inaccurate.  This is an instance where The Stranger is more reliable than The New York Times. JamesMLane t c 18:14, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Mark Lui
Are we done defaming this guy yet? I can't remember if it's supposed to be 5 years or 6 years? Kevin (talk) 07:22, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Not sure exactly what you mean - please be a little more specific - looking at it he is not actually imo very notable and I would redirect to the low notable band article.Dry (group)- when you write articles about low notable people that no one knows about you get uncited content like that. - Are there actually any reliable sources that can be added. - stubbed back - replace and cite to reliable quality sources at your leisure. Off2riorob (talk) 10:58, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Christie Whelan
This page Christie Whelan has been the recent target of a particular user updating the page with and also obvious personal views on the popularity of the subject. All negative\abusive changes are being made by 86.51.199.237 - two warnings have already been placed on their talk page with little result. This article has been repeatedly modified over the last two days. Please assist in stopping this user from making such updates.

CBNW (talk) 10:19, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi, sorry to hear that. I've semiprotected the page for three months so that only registered accounts that have been here long enough to get autoconfirmed can edit it. Also I've marked part of your comment as redacted because there are some sorts of accusations that we don't repeat on wiki. Hope that helps  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  10:48, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Matt Yglesias
Don't believe this meets the notoriety standard. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davestroup (talk • contribs) 19:25, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, a few years ago, a bunch of Wikipedians disagreed with you. You could try nominating it for a new AfD, but you'll have to argue why the sources provided are insufficient to demonstrate notability. --Dweller (talk) 20:17, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Keenan Cahill
There is a racist and anti homosexual comment on the Keenan Cahill page. Use of the N-word and references to sodomy are questionable and also contentious material to say the least — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.203.126.246 (talk) 22:10, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The vandalism has already been reverted.--Cube lurker (talk) 22:14, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Joseph Farah
This is a very longstanding problem article, partially because due to vandalism in the past the subject (who is a conservative media personality) went on a campaign against Wikipedia for a time. Now there is an IP editor who has added in a self-referential mention of the campaign, including a direct quote of the vandalism that inspired Farah's anger in the first place. While normally it's fine to make well-cited self-references to Wikipedia controversies, in this case the content repeats slander needlessly and is only going to inspire further negative attention about our inability to police BLPs. There is discussion on the talk page, but the IP continues to revert it back in despite objections. Rather than get in an edit war over it further, I'd like to invite people with more experience with BLPs to take a look at the latest batch of contributions by the anon. I think some of them are just fine, but others have been reverted several times as BLP and/or NPOV violations. Steven Walling 23:23, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't really think that "inspiring further negative attention about our inability to police BLPs" is a reason not to include material in an article. We should be doing that better, anyway. However, I'm not certain about how notable the controversy is, or how much it should be quoted in reference to our BLP policy. I'm heading out, I'll come back later and voice my opinion more fully. For now, I've removed the questionable material as per BLP while the discussion is going on. Dayewalker (talk) 23:43, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * This isn't merely a matter of self-referential material -- it has been covered in other sources, including Slate. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 18:51, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for jumping in on the talk page. I didn't mean the sources are self-referential. I meant that it's needlessly self-referential to quote vandalism that happened in an article in the past. Steven Walling  23:59, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * IMO, there is no BLP issue here, as the material meets WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOR. I reject outright the position that decisions about the inclusion of controversial material in an article about an individual should be made based on the individual's likely reaction, as SW is asking us to do. I also reject the position that our collective "inability to police BLPs" is relevant; there is only one BLP currently under discussion. Finally, please keep in mind that "the latest batch of contributions by [this] anon" are not all at issue here; just those related to the Joseph Farah article. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 22:32, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * As far as I can see, the logical structure of this sentence is "JF campaigned against publication W because they said bad thing 'BT' about him." The question is, (1) should this be included in a BLP  and (2) if so, should we quote 'BT' explicitly or just say something descriptive like "disparaging comments"?  The fact that W=Wikipedia here is irrelevant, the answer should be the same if it were Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Daily Star.  Sergeant Cribb (talk) 07:03, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That the article about Joseph Farah was vandalized with a suggestion of homosexuality is fact; that it is "disparaging" to be characterized as a homosexual is Farah's own POV. Wikipedia should not present that as objective fact. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 07:29, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Then replace "disparaging" by "unwelcome" if you wish. The logic remains the same.  Sergeant Cribb (talk) 09:11, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * As an uninvolved user I don't see any benefit to the en project or the living subject or the reader either from repeating the insults that we failed to keep out in the first place that upset the living subject just because slate have commented on it. Of the four alleged reliable external supports for this content, one is self published by the subject two are not wikipedia reliable sources and the other is a twenty seven month old slate article that is not wholly about Farah but is about defamation in general with only a couple of mentions of his dispute with wikipedia. Off2riorob (talk) 13:13, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Asserting that someone is a homosexual might well be inaccurate -- but an "insult"? Really, O2RR??  The longer this discussion goes on, the more it becomes apparent that relating what actually happened is not inappropriate.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 14:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

(OD) Let's not get bogged down in whether or not calling someone a homosexual is an insult, please. It's not, but it was certainly seen as one by the subject of the article, and it was clearly vandalism. Dayewalker (talk) 15:45, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I think we need to be more precise with language. The original edit was vandalism. Subsequently relating that that vandalism was quoted by both the article's subject in an ongoing campaign against Wikipedia, and by reliable secondary sources discussing the primary's campaign, the issues Wikipedia has with BLPs generally, and whether or not inaccurate information regarding ones sexuality actually constitues defamation is not, itself, vandalism. It is, in fact, entirely compliant with Wikipedia's core policies of WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:V. I think characterizing the vandalism as "insulting" or "defamatory" is inherently POV, and we should avoid the issue with a reliable, uncontested quote. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 18:05, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, O2RR - for whatever reason, longstanding consensus seems to hold that both WND itself, and ConWebWatch, are reliable sources for otherwise verifiable facts in articles about WND, despite the former being a more-or-less primary SPS, and the latter being biased against the subject. I'm not saying that's a consistent or even defensible position, but I don't think that it's a can of worms we want to re-open at the moment. Besides, it's a moot point-- even if you strike the three POV-pushing sources, the Slate reference remains, and its age doesn't diminish its reliability. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 18:15, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * (ec)Yes, - of course I did not assert it is insulting to be called a homosexual if you are one but it did clearly upset the subject. Anyways,two of the citations are not reliable and one is self published and as it attacks someone else (wikipedia) it is also not usable so you are left here insisting on including a twenty seven moth old slate article that is mostly not about the subject. We don't speculate about subjects sexuality and including it this way is a back door inclusion of content the subject found insulting or upsetting and with such weak externals and such dated low notability content there is nothing that demands its inclusion at all - in fact there is much more reason in regard to WP:BLP policy to not insert it. - As for my interpretation of the externals - I stand by my investigations of them irrespective of any so called existing consensus. Actually its not even worthy of inclusion - his article was vandalized and he complained and it was corrected - what is notable about that? We could add that to a million BLP articles. There was no legal action, no court case, nothing at all. Off2riorob (talk) 18:17, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * This isn't the appropriate forum for debating the reliability of these sources. If you'd like to, please take it to WP:RSN. Your opinion notwithstanding, the consensus that at least two of the three biased sources can be judiciously used predates this discussion, and aren't at issue here. Also not at issue here is "notability"-- WP:N is binding on whether an article should exist, not whether content should be present in it. My edit does not speculate on the subjects sexuality-- it mentions, in a NPOV fashion, that his sexuality was the subject of pernicious vandalism. Whether or not the subject finds the matter to be "insulting" or "upsetting" has no bearing on whether the material should be included, although I'd certainly support a NPOV description of his reaction to it as well. Finally, your argument that many other BLPs have been vandalized comes very close to WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but, even if that were a valid point, it's still imprecise. In five seconds of googling, I can find 8 separate occasions where Farah quotes the vandalism directly, spanning more than a two-year period since the occurrence. For how many other BLPs can you say that? 24.177.120.138 (talk) 18:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, consider your sentence ending "one is self published and as it attacks someone else (wikipedia) it is also not usable so you are left here insisting on including a twenty seven moth old slate article that is mostly not about the subject." Granted, WND constantly flirts with being SPS, but, to date, has not been considered as such. But Wikipedia is not a "someone," and the verbiage in the rest of that sentence both presupposes the outright dismissal of 3 sources previously considered somewhat reliable, implies that a source becomes less reliable with age, and attempts to alienate others from agreeing with my position by employing imagery implying that I am the only one who supports inclusion of the material. I respectfully submit that there was a better way you could have made your argument, and I would ask that you please be more judicious in your choice of words in the future. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 18:58, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * (ec) Lastly (I promise), consider the statement "I did not assert it is insulting to be called a homosexual if you are one" (emphasis mine). I'll grant you its technical accuracy, but it's misleading; Mr. Farah's sexuality isn't at issue here. You implied that it's insulting to be called a homosexual, full stop, and I find that bigoted. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 19:07, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks but attacking me will not help you at all and neither will your miss-representing my position. I do not see anyone else here supporting the inclusion of this content and as such large discussion of it is in itself undue. Organizations can still be assumed to be a collection of individuals that BLP also applies to. As for word - splitting - I am actually only commenting on the broader issues and not the pin point detail. Off2riorob (talk) 18:59, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * [ Please note: The above comment was altered by User:Off2riorob subsequent to the following response. Had it included the attack/misrepresentation accusation at the time, the following response would have been phrased in a much more hostile manner. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 03:23, 1 June 2011 (UTC) ]
 * Please see WP:BLPGROUP-- BLP policy explicitly does not apply to a collection of individuals. I'd also ask that you not attempt to prematurely terminate this discussion, and refrain from attempting to alienate me from it. It's inappropriate. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 19:07, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, WP:BLPGROUP does not explicitly reject my position but it does clearly encourage such editorial consideration and makes it clear that high quality reliable sources are mandatory. Off2riorob (talk) 19:19, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You have yet to articulate a clear rationale for your belief that there is a BLP issue with sourced, reliable, verifiable, NPOV content. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 03:23, 1 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Despite Rob and I hardly ever agreeing on BLP policy, or any other remotely political issue, generally, IP24x, I have to say that I agree with him on this matter. We should not enshrine or repeat original vandalism for posterity. If some random vandal inserted an allegation into my biography that I subscribed to a belief system or lifestyle that I found abhorrent ( say, that I worshiped Rush Limbaugh ;-) and it might be taken seriously, were it repeated, then it would be my opinion that it should not again be mentioned in any subsequent discussion of the issue. It seems enough, to me, to provide a ref to the Slate article, and other relevant sources on the controversy, and let the reader review them if he's interested enough to pursue it. Otherwise we do keep the rumor on life-support, by giving a permanent home to the vandalism; I consider that improper, myself. –  OhioStandard  (talk) 12:39, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah ha - Ohio, its not so bad, I think we agree on quite a bit - in regards to the bigger picture, regards. Off2riorob (talk) 21:17, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, perhaps not so bad, Rob, yes. But I'm afraid we disagree on the consensus that was achieved here. You posted a "resolved" template at the top of this thread ( I assume it was you, although it was unsigned ) saying, "consensus for not reporting the vandalism in the article - article semi protected." That wasn't my own intention, actually, although I understand how it could have seemed so.


 * My intention was that the controversy should be mentioned, and cited to Slate and any other sources that legitimately document it, but without the explicit disclosure in the article as to the exact nature of the slur. The issue appears to me to be significant enough for inclusion, but we don't need to give the slur "legs" by repeating what was said. Let readers go to the refs for that, if they feel the urge. Accordingly, I've put up a different "resolved" message at the top of this thread. Remove it if you disagree, and we can all discuss this further. Best, –  OhioStandard  (talk) 09:09, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Noticeboard for Bios?
Is there a noticeboard for Bios of non-living people? thanks, -- — Keithbob • Talk  • 21:44, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Not specifically. Any of the other noticeboards can be used, depending on the issue.   Will Beback    talk    23:09, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Note further than any article which refers to or impacts living people may be brought up here with regard to any information impacting living people. Collect (talk) 10:57, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Peter Stickles
In this edit, an editor blanks a section of the article claiming that (a) he is the subject of the article and that (b) the interview which is quoted "does not exist". I have just verified that the interview does exist, and that there is a valid link to it. I see also from the editor's talkpage that in 2008 he made some edits also at the time claiming to be Stickles, but I don't know if this was ever verified by OTRS. Can someone with experience talking to people who may in fact be the article subjects look at this please? Lady of  Shalott  01:57, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Are there any other reliable citations that support and confirm the details? "He has spoken at length about the impact of his decision to be openly gay from the beginning of his career". - if this comment that has been removed is true then is should easily be citable at multiple reliable externals. Off2riorob (talk) 19:36, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Cleanup may be needed at Talk:Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge
I don't know whether this requires action or not, but I will bring it here just in case. This edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Catherine,_Duchess_of_Cambridge&oldid=431927658 by an IP user. While the edit was reverted by another user, the BLP violation is still visible in the edit summary. The user is User talk:85.210.84.236, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/85.210.84.236. Not sure whether it rises to the level of requiring deletion of the edit, but I thought I should at least bring it up here. Thanks. Safiel (talk) 06:07, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Done. Dougweller (talk) 10:06, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Ted Sundquist
I came across this article in my usual, boredom related, search for articles which need cleaned up for various reasons. I had no idea until I reverted some changes which had been "move this paragraph over here, and this paragraph over here" that I'd stumbled upon an article that has been rather emphatically owned by at least one person who admits to knowing Mr. Sundquist, and claims it his "his" wiki. See my talk page and Jillian.Ricard's talk page for that exchange. And then when I decided to put a COI tag on the article, was reverted by a second user, Lauramparsons. This is not a huge issue, but it probably needs more eyes as the changes they insist on putting back are also not exactly neutral. But I don't want to get into edit warring, so I am leaving this to other people to handle. Raven1977 Talk to me My edits 19:11, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Experiment suggests you are correct. I made four different changes for four different reasons and they were immediately reverted in one fell swoop with a bafflingly irrelvant comment by User:Lauramparsons.  Sergeant Cribb (talk) 19:41, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Juice Plus/John A. Wise
I'm having trouble with an editor (an admin alas) on the Juice Plus article who is insisting on incorporating a section about living people based on OR from a self-published POV source. I originally took it to RS/N but not much input there yet. That discussion here, he is insisting that WP:BLP only applies to articles about people, not people mentioned in articles.--Icerat (talk) 03:28, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * The text is also supported by the NEJM.-- Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:33, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You're seriously claiming a 1986 NEJM paper supports a claim about an association with authors of a paper published in 199&. The NEJM article was published in 1986 and the "association" you claim that paper supports was with a paper published in 1996. Care to explain exactly how that works?--Icerat (talk) 03:43, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll not comment on the substantive issue (not really looked into it as yet), but I think Icerat's user page may be relevant here. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:36, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * And that would be relevant how? --Icerat (talk) 03:43, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * When you write about 'POV sources', your own POV is clearly also of interest. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:53, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * As is yours and everyone elses. Care to note why you haven't pointed out Doc James' clear POV on these kind of topics? In any case attacking the man and not the case is very poor form. It's a BLP issue based on a SPS source. Do you dispute that? --Icerat (talk) 04:02, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Please spell out the problem. Yes, the edit you mentioned added text about a living person, but does that text fail WP:BLP? How? Is the text wrong? Does it fail verification? Is it undue? Johnuniq (talk) 05:00, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It fails WP:BLP, specifically WP:BLPSPS - Never use self-published sources—including but not limited to books, zines, websites, blogs, and tweets—as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject. --Icerat (talk) 13:01, 28 May 2011 (UTC)


 * This is starting to look like the same arguments we got from User:Ronz who was using WP:BLP to try and squelch debate on the quality of and use of Stephen Barrett in the Weston Price article (see Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive97 and Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents/Problem_on_BLP_noticeboard) If you look at the disputed text and Barrett's The Rise and Fall of United Sciences of America paper as well as Therese Walsh's "Juicing for fun and profit: taking a good thing too far" article (reprinted in) Gale Group's 1997 Nutrition forum: Volume 14 Prometheus Books pg 36-39 (which says and I quote "Juice Plus capsules and many other dehydrated juice capsule products, including those from AIM and Juice For Life, are promoted as having enzymes that aid in digestion. These claims are just as false for juice capsules as for whole juice. Even the claim that juice capsules contain much the same nutritional value as the actual juice is unsubstantiated.") there doesn't seem to be a WP:BLP issue here.
 * Furtheremore, Nutrition forum: Volume 14 pg 36 has a sidebar which references quackwatch another of Stephen Barrett's sites which has Unconventional Cancer Treatments which has some more on United Sciences of America.--BruceGrubb (talk) 03:04, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Bruce, what on earth are you talking about? Barrett is being used here for BLP stuff, not about the juice. That's why this is on the BLP noticeboard. Please read what an issue is about before commenting. -Icerat (talk) 17:51, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

BUMP! This is still an issue. A self-published source (mlmwatch.org) is being used to support the following clearly BLP section implying wrongdoing -
 * John Wise, NAI, and Juice Plus Research
 * In a critique of Juice Plus,[1] Stephen Barrett of MLMWatch remarked upon the previous association between two authors of a 1996 Juice Plus research study [11] and United Sciences of America, Inc. (USAI), a multilevel marketing company that sold vitamin supplements with illegal claims that they could prevent many diseases.[56][57][58][59][60][61] In 1986, lead author John A. Wise, who later co-authored several other Juice Plus research studies,[28][29][30][31][36] was USAI's Executive Vice-President of Research and Development; and second author Robert J. Morin was a scientific advisor who helped design the products. State and federal enforcement actions[56][57][58][59][60][61] drove USAI out of business in 1987.[56][58][61] Wise became a consultant to Natural Alternatives International (NAI) in 1987 and a company executive (Vice-President of Research and Development) in 1992. Barrett noted that Wise was also an NAI shareholder and that production of Juice Plus for National Safety Associates (NSA) was responsible for 16% of NAIs sales in 1999.

The other references used are straight from the Barrett piece and nowhere remark on this association, this is a clear use of a self-published source being used for controversial BLP information, contrary to WP:BLPSPS. --Icerat (talk) 21:58, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * John A. Wise's own biography says much the same thing and it presents Forbes (2006), Journal of the American College of Cardiology (2003), Journal of the American College of Nutrition (2004), The Skeptic (2000), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (2010) as supporting sources. All Barrett really does is connect the dots preventing WP:SYN.--BruceGrubb (talk) 03:15, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That's not his "own biography", it's a wikipedia biography and many of the same authors as on Juice Plus were involved in writing it. There's a reason WP:SYN exists. You can't get around it by using a SPS. If any of these sources "say much the same thing" then rewrite it using them. Well ... I just went to the Wise artice and discovered most of these sources don't even exist any more, and Barrett is used as a source there as well - again, an SPS being used for BLP. --Icerat (talk) 07:17, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * FYI, the John A. Wise article has now been listed for Afd --Icerat (talk) 12:26, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * BUMP - still no comments from uninvolved editors. BLP policy says instant delete, but need 3rd party to prevent edit warring.
 * Above is a poor interpretation of BLP. BLP refers to contentious material. There is nothing contentious at all about what's written in the article. 18:36, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

It's a reliable source according to the recent and past discussions on RSN and elsewhere, so WP:BLPSPS doesn't apply. Are there specific BLP concerns with using certain information from the source? If so, please make those concerns clear. --Ronz (talk) 01:07, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * These constant "BUMPS" IMHO show a disregard for the Wikipedia is not a forum guideline. The last time something like this came up the editors agreed that WP:BLP is NOT a magical censorship hammer.  If there are factual errors in Barrett's piece (as shown quite clearly regarding his comments regarding the work of a man long dead) then yes the source should not be used but in this case no such evidence has been presented.--BruceGrubb (talk) 01:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The bumps were partly a result from a post from another user pointing out that they often missed contributing because they assumed other uninvolved editors were discussing it when in fact it was almost primarily involved editors. There's currently no mechanism for dealing with that. Looking through older posts including the link your provide shows that, contrary to claims, Barrett is not an automagical reliable source, and that mlmwatch does not have the same advisory board process as the main quackwatch site and has not been tested in any measure for reliability on WP. The Barrett article is self-published and clearly being used to disparage the man and push a particular POV. Apart from the rote repetition that Barrett is not a self-published source, which you apparently agree with me is not the case, how does WP:BLPSPS not apply? Is instead the standard that, for any given article, Barrett is considered a non-self-published reliable source unless proven otherwise, despite clearly fitting into WP:SPS? How and why does this broad exemption apply? --Icerat (talk) 01:56, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Aside from the source being a reliable one, the material in question is not contentious or factually disputable. How many times does Icerat need to be told this? Rhode Island Red (talk) 02:52, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Again WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A FORUM so there is no reason for "bumps"--we have little things like bold and italics to draw attention to points missed by other editors. This is looking more and more like a less extreme version of the WP:BLP as the magical censorship hammer nonsense we saw about a year ago.--BruceGrubb (talk) 03:03, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Trying to attract 3rd party independent commentary does not count as WP:FORUM in my book. --Icerat (talk) 03:18, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * There other ways to attract 3rd party independent commentary then to throw up Bump (Internet) as a topic goes into archive only after five DAYS worth of inactivity. Both BUMPS were within hours.  THERE IS NO FREAKING REASON FOR THAT--BruceGrubb (talk) 08:08, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment: Although WP:SPS/WP:BLP concerns are valid, they don't apply here.  Quackwatch is only used in the following BLP context:  "In 1986, lead author John A. Wise, who later co-authored several other Juice Plus research studies,[28][29][30][31][36] was USAI's Executive Vice-President of Research and Development; and second author Robert J. Morin was a scientific advisor who helped design the products. State and federal enforcement actions[56][57][58][59][60][61] drove USAI out of business in 1987.[56][58][61] Wise became a consultant to Natural Alternatives International (NAI) in 1987 and a company executive (Vice-President of Research and Development) in 1992. Barrett noted that Wise was also an NAI shareholder and that production of Juice Plus for National Safety Associates (NSA) was responsible for 16% of NAIs sales in 1999."  I presume those facts are public knowledge and not in dispute  Also, Barrett is not the only source for them.  So, that Barrett is used in this context does not raise BLP concerns for me.
 * The other use of Barrett in the article is about the organization not the individual:" The University of California Berkeley Wellness Letter and Stephen Barrett of MLM Watch questioned the survey's scientific value, and claimed that the Foundation is being used mainly as a marketing gimmick to get families to buy Juice Plus products.[21][65] Barrett's organization Quackwatch includes the JPCRF among its list of questionable research organizations (organizations formed by promoters of health products which Quackwatch says exaggerate their effectiveness).[66]"
 * Even if there were BLP issues, Barrett's website while self-published is recognized as authoritative for consumer health advocacy (I don't like Barrett's approach but that's neither here nor there). And John Wise is not just an individual but the head of a corporation--a public figure involved in making health claims and selling products that thousands or millions purchase.  The level of scrutiny for negative claims about living people in such a position is not dismissed, but it is lower.  In this perhaps borderline case, the tree falls in Barrett's direction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ocaasi (talk • contribs) 03:31, 31 May 2011
 * Ocaasi - (1) quackwatch.org is not the source under discussion. It has (ostensibly) some level of editorial advisory board. mlmwatch.org has no such advisory board. (2) The BLP information, if not sourced to Barrett but instead the other sources, would clearly be OR and SYNTH pushing. So we're using a self-published source for BLP information that would otherwise not be allowed. (3) WP:BLP and WP:V make no exception for public figures and poor sourcing that I'm aware of. Indeed if they're not a public figure they wouldn't even be on wikipedia, would they? Again though, we're not talking about quackwatch.org as a source. --Icerat (talk) 22:27, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * WP:CRYBLP has some good pointers and really should be woven into the main WP:BLP article.--BruceGrubb (talk) 03:38, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jewish categories
In the body of this article, it says that Gordon-Levitt's "family is Jewish." Other than a quote about a character he played in a movie, that's the sum total of what the article says about Gordon-Levitt and Jewish. Nonetheless, the article had two Jewish categories in it, American Jews and Jewish actors. I removed them, but All Hallow's Wraith, reverted referring in his edit summary to a previous "conversation". My assumption is he means this discussion on BLPN. That discussion also had to do with WP:BLPCAT, but the actor in question was Mila Kunis. For those brave souls among you, feel free to read the discussion. A threshold question was whether BLPCAT applies to Jewish because Jewish, according to many, can be an ethnicity, not a religion. I don't think that issue was resolved. Some editors suggested that the issue be further explored to try to reach a policy resolution. Will Beback asked Jayen466 to look into it. I don't know what came of it.

Here we are again, but there is a key difference. Without rehashing the arguments in the previous discussion, there is almost nothing in the Gordon-Levitt article to even indicate he's Jewish. By contrast, the Kunis article had much more. Thus, even if we put BLPCAT aside, there's no support for the categories, a relatively standard reason for removing categories. But I don't have the stomach to edit-war or even discuss this with AHW, so I'm bypassing the Gordon-Levitt Talk page - something admittedly I often tell other editors not to do - and coming directly here to try to stimulate some broader discussion.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:52, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Are there reliable sources that describes him as Jewish? If so, the categories are fine.  If not, not.  Simples  Sergeant Cribb (talk) 07:05, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * As I said, there's nothing in the article that describes him as Jewish, just the one phrase about his birth family. I have no wish to look for sources, assumning they exist, as I'm generally opposed to these kinds of categories as generally irrelevant. Without any sources in the article at present, the categories, like any unsupported categories, should be removed. But I'm faily certain AHW will add them back. Unless maybe I get some consensus here.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:13, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * There is a source cited in the article. All Hallow&#39;s Wraith (talk) 13:32, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * "Gordon-Levitt, the younger of two sons, was born in Los Angeles, California. He is Jewish. His father, Dennis Levitt…" Bus stop (talk) 13:40, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Nowhere in that source does Gordon-Levitt describe himself as Jewish or even allude to himself being Jewish. I referred to this in my first post above. This is what the author of the article says: "Then, in 1996, he took the role of Tommy Solomon on the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, and suddenly the whole country knew who he was: a Jewish kid playing an extraterrestrial pretending to be a Jewish kid." That hardly supports the categories.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:43, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * As for Bus stop's source, first, AFAIK, it is not cited in the article (at least not for that proposition), and, second, I can't really read it because it sends Firefox into a tizzy with pop-ups and pop-unders. Nonetheless, I looked at in IE, and after some difficulty was able to read it. The interviewer says Gordon-Levitt is Jewish and describes his parents' involvement in the Jewish community. Gordon-Levitt says nothing.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:49, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sergeant Cribb asked for a reliable source that describes him as Jewish, not one where he describes himself as Jewish. All Hallow&#39;s Wraith (talk) 13:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I think Bbb23 makes an excellent point when he says, "A threshold question was whether BLPCAT applies to Jewish because Jewish, according to many, can be an ethnicity, not a religion. I don't think that issue was resolved". I agree that this is an important question. Bus stop (talk) 14:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a schizophrenic attitude to these categories. On the one hand, attempts to delete them typically fail. On the other hand, when one tries to apply them some editors insist that no sourcing is required, while others insist on sourcing far exceeding any policy or guideline-based requirements. In this case, Gordon-Levitt is obviously Jewish, and the sourcing is fine - self-identification is not a requirement. Wikipedia would be better off if these categories didn't exist; but until they can be deleted, they don't have any sourcing requirements beyond standard policy. Jayjg <small style="color:darkgreen;">(talk) 01:03, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * One might wish that editors maintained a consistent stance on this sort of crap. John lilburne (talk) 14:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with you about the schizoid attitude and the point about deleting the categories from the database, but I don't think the sourcing here even meets "standard policy". Coming from a Jewish family doesn't make someone Jewish. An interviewer's offhand comment that the interviewee is Jewish is weak at best. I realize that the self-identification requirement seems inextricably intertwined with WP:BLPCAT, which is perhaps why you believe that my saying that there must be self-identification for Jewish categories is wrong. However, forget BLPCAT For a moment and just consider the differences between kinds of categories. For example, if someone is sourced as born in New York, a category of "people born in New York" is a no-brainer. The inclusion in the category is obvious on its face. There are many categories like that. However, the Jewish categories require multiple, logical steps for inclusion because they are not obvious on their face. Thus, to say someone is in a category "American Jew" you have to determine whether they are a Jew, and I submit the only way to do that is something stronger than is present here, even to satisfy standard policy. Part of the problem too is in the slipshod (in my view) way in which categories are created. In the vast majority, there is no definition of the category. This leads to confusion (except for the obvious ones) as to whether they apply. My preference would be to have a category definition in every category, even if it seems obvious to some. Then, the only argument would be over the interpretation of the definition. Sorry for the dissertation, but if Wikipedia deleted all categories (something that wouldn't bother me a bit), our work as editors would significantly decline.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:28, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The most important part of an article, in my opinion, is the body of the article. Thankfully none of the illogic plaguing Categories and Infoboxes has thus far crept into the body of the article. Bus stop (talk) 02:01, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Well said, Bbb23. Ping me on my talk if you ever propose that all non-obvious categories must have an unequivocal definition that an intelligent child of eight could correctly apply, some bright-line critera for what's inclded in them. Best, –  OhioStandard  (talk) 13:35, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yup. A very important point. I'm not sure that deleting all categories would necessarily improve Wikipedia, but almost all the contentious BLP ones are based on subjective opinion rather than verifiable fact. Since you can't have an 'unequivocal defininition' of opinions, they should go... AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ohio and Andy, the big question is how would we go about removing certain categories and defining any that aren't removed but need clarity? Sounds like a relatively major change to the encyclopedia, no?--Bbb23 (talk) 15:19, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Santorum
I thought for sure this would already be mentioned here. It's not. See Santorum (neologism).

Summary: There's an Internet campaign to associate a living person with shit via Googlebomb. The Wikipedia article on this campaign, because it's long and full of links, is the #2 link on Google for his name, above the page on the person himself. People argue that this article is not a violation of NPOV or BLP because it neutrally describes the event (the campaign) and doesn't claim that Santorum himself did any bad things.

My opinion is that 1) Wikipedia is in effect participating in the campaign, not just reporting on it, and 2) an article can be negative about a person without literally saying anything bad about the person himself--excessively reporting a smear, particularly one that isn't fact-based to begin with, tends to reinforce the association of the person with the smear in the reader's mind. Ken Arromdee (talk) 15:18, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I would tend to agree with you. However, this has already been discussed extensively here, on the article's talk page, and at WP:AFD, numerous times over the years, so I see little likelihood that the community is close to changing its viewpoint on the inclusion of the article. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 15:49, 29 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I, too, agree with you in principle, but the established consensus is regrettably clear. It's unfortunate that the article fails to characterize a deliberate campaign to vilify anyone for their political views as anything but that, however successful and widespread the campaign may be. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 17:43, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, if you can suggest secondary sources that put forth that opinion &mdash; I will gladly incorporate them into the article. Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 17:53, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, the characterization of Savage's behavior as "revenge" in what's currently note 14 would be a start. But of more concern is the curiously sanitized set of sources for Savage's actions: rather than, so far as I can tell, citing the writings/columns where the "project" (to use a more neutral term) began, the article cites much later ones, where Savage uses more neutral phrasing to describe his activity. It's rather hard to believe, in the construction of an article this extensive and detailed, that no one ever came across those sources. When Vidal did something similar in Myron (with much more wit and logic) he wasn't exactly coy about his intent to ridicule. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 18:19, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Just checked, I did not see the word "revenge" in that source. Please note that the particular source you mention, is already given prominent weight &mdash; in the lede/intro of the article. -- Cirt (talk) 18:22, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I answered too quickly and got my cites crossed up. The reference to "revenge" is in the Mother Jones piece currently listed as note 6. The note 14 source described Savage as a columnist "who does not hide his hatred for Mr. Santorum," a point I don't see noted in the article. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 18:43, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, I have added all of the information you suggested, all of the quotes you suggested, from all of the sources you suggested &mdash; into the body text of the article, and all of them into the lede/intro of the article, as well. -- Cirt (talk) 19:13, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Please see Talk:Santorum_(neologism). -- Cirt (talk) 19:22, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * @Hulabaloo - Well yes but its still an egregious BLP violation. If there's consensus to add a clause to WP:BLP to the effect "does not apply to persons who are unpopular here", that'd be one thing. Absent that, I would say that application of the BLP rule would be justified regardless. Herostratus (talk) 18:01, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Archives, anyone? It's not as if this hasn't been discussed recently -- see here. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 18:21, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The article has been expanded greatly since that discussion. While I believe that the formation and spread of this neologism is notable and should be covered somewhere in Wikipedia, I find the size and detail of this article to be concerning, just on a personal level. I suspect that any attempts to change the status quo will be unsuccessful because it violates no specific rules or guidelines. That said, I think a number of people are having difficulty reconciling the principles of WP:BLP with this article. Seeing how "the community" applies those principles in cases where the person in question is unpopular may be an eye-opener for some people. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:50, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I would not call this public figure unpopular, simply because of the number and breadth of his surrogate white knights on Wikipedia. But that's what it boils down to, really. This makes me feel uncomfortable, so I want to erase it. Well, even if you erase the term from Wikipedia, you will not erase it from the internet, much less peoples' mouths and minds. Better to work to ensure that the article stays neutral and continues using high-quality sources (which is what the spirit of BLP is) than to tear it down in a futile attempt to control the terminology of peoples' sex lives. Quigley (talk) 19:09, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem not to have noticed that what I actually said was that coverage of this topic belongs on Wikipedia, which is pretty much the opposite of wanting to have it deleted because I don't like it. Your suggestion that anyone is attempting to in any way control any aspect of people's sex lives through discussing this article is ridiculous and inflammatory. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:14, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

This article's subject is not a person, not a campaign against person, and not a "Googlebomb". The article's subject is a sexual slang term for a common byproduct of a sex act (not what Hullaballoo Wolfowitz described) that has not had a widely recognized name before. It has been popularized through print media, slang websites, and the columnist's own website before Wikipedia even had an article. It has been used and documented, without reference to any person, in multiple reliable sources, ranging from erotic fiction to sociological books to medical journals. It has an eponymous person, but so do many now-common words like "dunce", "lynch", "draconian", "tawdry", and "chauvinism". The namesake, who is a public figure, has welcomed the incidental search results (which we don't control; we are Wikipedia not Google) as helpful to his conspiratorial cause. This neutral and impeccably-sourced article, which is about a term, does not even fall within the purview of BLP. Let's not be hysterical, let's not forum shop, and let's do more research before we write a complaint. Thanks. Quigley (talk) 19:09, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree about the subject of the article, this article is obviously about a person and falls squarely under WP:BLP; this cannot be Coatracked as an article about a 'term'. Dreadstar  ☥  19:20, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your assessment. I don't know even how it could be a "coatrack", if the only coverage of the person is about the one capital S Santorum controversy. If you think there is too much coverage of the term's origins and namesake, (which I think there is, and it gives an excuse for the political friends of the Senator to say it is about him) then we could talk about shifting the emphasis more towards the term's adoption and its usage. Quigley (talk) 19:25, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree that there are plenty of reliable sources about this, but really, let's face facts, this term is obviously a political commentary on Santorum, as well as being a commentary on sexual socio-political issues, so it's a coatrack subject from the start. Sure, we can probably have the article under our current policies, but we need to be very cautious about WP:BLP, that's all I'm saying.  You can't take the BLP out of the neologism.  I totally agree with you that there's too much coverage of the term's origins and namesake, and we should shift the emphasis more towards the term's adoption and usage.  But even then..it's stil going to have WP:BLP concerns.  Dreadstar  ☥  19:41, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Although, I'm concerned that I might be too lax on this, and that it is indeed a WP:BLP violation as it has elements that attack the subject (Santorum), and is apparently part of a smear campaign. So I wouldn't object to the article's deletion or redirect to one of the existing articles on the circumstances of the neologism such as Rick Santorum or Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality.  That makes BLP sense.  Dreadstar  ☥  19:47, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The subject of the article is, once again, not Rick Santorum. Proposals to merge the article about the term have been denied, repeatedly, on the article's talk page within the week. Articles that document real smear campaigns have been kept (examples one and two). The term's rise started in 2003, and the man's political career ended in 2007, for reasons that had nothing to do with the neologism. If he has a serious chance at running for some national office again, he will have raised more than enough money to legally and illegally suppress unfavorable search results on all the major search engines. He has indicated a desire not to do this, because he is successful at framing the term's existence to make him into a martyr against those to whom he has voted to deny civil rights through legislation. The politics are over. The term's primary meaning and associations are sexual. The term's origins in the politics of the past are trivial. That Wikipedia even thinks it has so much influence over peoples' perceptions is an exercise in egotism. I feel like a broken record. Archiving is overdue. Quigley (talk) 20:26, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The subject of the article is, as one of the academic sources in the article puts it, "Dan Savage's internet media campaign to transform former Senator Rick Santorum's name into a new sexualized word, to retaliate against and increase awareness about the senator's issue stances." If it were just about the "term," it would hardly be notable at all; its googlerank would mean little more than the ridiculous number of GHits that Pat Pornstar gets from promotional linking. Arguing otherwise doesn't strike me as intellectually legitimate, and playing down the highly relevant "campaign" aspects impairs the encyclopedic value of the article and raises NPOV problems. Arguing that "the politics are over," frankly, doesn't reflect reality (or a few thousand current GNews hits); he may rack up Fred Thompson level votes, but Stassen he's not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk • contribs) 22:55, 29 May 2011
 * Dan Savage's media campaign may be the most notable part of the article, but it is not the focus and the scope of the article, which is about the term. Information about the term's origins, which happened to be in politics, is probably disproportional; but that is because reliable sources, not politics, dictate what we write. Any accomodation to Rick Santorum's future possible political ambitions is submission to a crystal ball; such is as intellectually dishonest as applying BLP protections to a person who is dead. Quigley (talk) 23:11, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid you can't split BLP hairs that fine; BLP states very clearly, "Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page"; equally clear is that the article's subject is about how Santorum's name became and is being used as a neologism. The "most notable, focus and scope" of the article may be the neologism, but it's all based on a Living Person and includes a large amount of content about Santorum - you cannot separate the neologism from the Person it is based on. And there's no need to keep repeating yourself for my benefit, I've read all the comments on this and am already aware of what you're saying.  Thanks for the info, tho... :) Dreadstar  ☥  01:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Let me add that BLP not only applies to Santorum in that article, but to every living person mentioned in it, including Savage. Dreadstar  ☥  02:31, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * '"Real" smear campaigns'? Are you suggesting that this one is fake?  Just because it doesn't make negative factual claims about Santorum doesn't mean it's not a real smear campaign.
 * And the difference between this and the Obama ones is that the Obama ones are not the number two Google results for "Obama"--those articles have much less of an effect than this one. Ken Arromdee (talk) 02:45, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia doesn't control Google, and to change a Wikipedia article to try to increase or decrease its pagerank is an unsure and dangerous enterprise beyond our mandate. To explore the Obama analogy further and with finality, Savage's political actions are most akin to Barack Obama's Fight the Smears website, because he is raising awareness of and refuting Santorum's comments that equate gay and lesbian people with child molesters. If there's any smear campaign against living persons here, it's Santorum's smear campaign against millions of gay and lesbian Americans. If Wikipedia erases its own neutral and balanced content so that Rick Santorum's personal website—full of malicious screeds against different social groups—comes first on Google, then it has sacrificed millions of people on the altar of one. That's the logical result of stretching BLP policy beyond biographies to "information about living persons [on] any Wikipedia page". Quigley (talk) 03:14, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * We're not 'stretching BLP policy' to 'information about living persons on any page,' that's the way it actually works...no stretching necessary. For instance, your accusation that Santorum is engaging in a smear campaign falls under WP:BLP, even on a noticeboard.  Any page.  Dreadstar  ☥  03:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If that is the case, then where is the outcry against User:Ken Arromdee's and others' accusations that Savage is engaging in a smear campaign? Does that not fall under BLP? Is Dan Savage not a living person? I'm afraid to conclude that what Herostratus said about BLP not applying to "persons who are unpopular here" is true—only, that unpopular person in this case is Savage, not Santorum. Quigley (talk) 03:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * That's exactly what I said, content and comments about both Santorum and Savage fall under BLP. We must be careful about critical comments and content on everyone who's alive. Dreadstar  ☥  03:58, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I wonder, if we were writing 80 years ago, whether there would be some argument for moving Hooverville to Charles Michelson neologism for shanty towns. Sam Blacketer (talk) 20:54, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sam Blacketer, a very, very good point. -- Cirt (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * This seems like an excellent opportunity to point out that Hooverville has a wordcount of 941 words. Santorum (neologism) has a word count of 10,518 words. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:37, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Delicious carbuncle, no one is stopping you from going and improving the article Hooverville by expanding it with additional secondary sources. ;) Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 21:39, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia's coverage is biased towards recent subjects because of the accessibility of reliable sources, among other things. Perhaps a better forum for your concerns is the WikiProject on countering systemic bias? Quigley (talk) 21:52, 29 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Cirt: The point is that "improving" the article with more secondary sources is bad, and that the Hooverville article is better than the Santorum one because it has not been "improved" in that way. Increasing the article's length and the number of links helps the Googlebombing.
 * Of course, Google didn't exist 80 years ago. Asking "what would Wikipedia do to Hooverville if it was 80 years ago" postulates that not only Wikipedia existed 80 years ago, but Google and Googlebombing as well, at which point the hypothetical Hooverville campaign would no longer be much like the real one. Ken Arromdee (talk) 02:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Nope, the Hooverville article is not "better", as it contains large chunks of wholly unreferenced info. -- Cirt (talk) 02:42, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It's better in that one aspect (it's shorter and therefore has less effect on its subject). It can still be worse in other aspects. Ken Arromdee (talk) 02:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Ken Arromdee, glad that we can at least partially agree on that. :) -- Cirt (talk) 02:49, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If we were writing 80 years ago, we probably would be covering the subject in an article about the upcoming presidential election and the Democrats' campaign rhetoric. There were lots of such phrases, and "Hoover Depression" was probably pushed the hardest, but Hoovervilles is probably the only one that stuck. (GNews shows more than 3 times as many hits for "Hoover Depression" than for "Hooverville" in the 1930s, although it's hardly a complete archive and the "Hoover Depression" hits are more likely to be spurious.) Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 23:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

This one is old, old, old news. We can no more justify its removal now on BLP grounds than we can any other term that has made its way into the popular vocabulary, however fair or unfair or accurate or inaccurate, from Mesmerism to Stalinist to McCarthyism to Sandinista. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orangemike (talk • contribs)
 * If it were indeed 'old, old, old news', then it wouldn't be a neologism. :) I actually see some questions in this discussion about whether or not this is indeed a term in the 'popular vocabulary' and not just a Googlebomb or internet term that isn't really used much in real life. I've never heard it said anywhere, but then maybe my horizons are limited....  As for the comparisons, I'd like to see something closer to what this one purports to be.  For instance, in the Hooverville comments above, the real comparison would be (at the time!) Hoover (neologism)  which means "'The dried feces and vomit tracked into the shanty homes built by the homeless in unsanitary conditions."  Something like that.     Dreadstar  ☥  04:14, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Mesmerism, Stalinist, McCarthyism, and Sandinista are named after people who aren't alive and therefore don't fall under BLP. They're not negative in the same way; their association with their subjects is only negative to the degree that they make negative claims about the subject--this one harms its subject in a different way.  None of those are part of Internet-based campaigns and any harm that Wikipedia does by popularizing the term is far less directly related to any group's goals.  And they are all widely used terms.  Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:37, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * This is clearly a BLP violation, in my view. There's an attempt to create a meme associating a person's name—not a common name—with anal discharge, and that includes the name of his wife, children, and other relatives. Wikipedia is helping to create it by hosting a stand-alone article. Just because reliable sources have written about something doesn't mean we're forced to give it its own page. SlimVirgin  TALK |  CONTRIBS 05:28, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * We're not forced to give santorum its own page, but we're not forced to delete it, either. By covering the subject neutrally and with the most reliable sources, we are filling a gap that would otherwise be filled by unreliable or biased websites that do nothing for the former Senator. And he (and Savage) are the only people connected to this article; if we take the extreme position that his "other relatives" are implicated, then everyone with the given name Peg should be offended by and protected against the sexual term pegging, coined by the same sex columnist. If a person's name causes them emotional distress, then they have the legal means by which to change it. Quigley (talk) 06:06, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) People with the name "Peg" won't have the term turn up as the top Google hit for their name, and nobody will search for "pegging" when they want the name.
 * 2) The idea that someone should change their name to avoid a Googlebomb that is assisted by Wikipedia is absurd and contradicted by BLP.
 * 3) "Covering the subject neutrally" is taking advantage of a loophole in Wikipedia's rules in which only the article's claims are treated as harming the subject. In this case, the article doesn't harm Santorum because it makes statements about Santorum that aren't neutral, it harms Santorum because its nature as an article harms him.  Associating a living person with sexual shit is inherently harmful, even if the association is only done by putting them together in the same article.
 * 4) Likewise, claiming that we're "filling a gap" that would otherwise be filled by biased websites assumes that harm is only caused by biased text. In fact, harm is caused to him by having a large, well-linked, article at all, whether the text in it contains biased claims or not.  Removing biased claims from the article doesn't prevent it from doing harm to him. Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:26, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * "There's an attempt to create a meme associating a person's name..." - the attempt has succeeded, as the article documents. The term is established enough, and the creation of the term well documented enough, to be outside of the zone of discretion where we can reasonably take BLP into account whether to have an article or not. It is now encyclopedic, and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. We wouldn't be having this conversation if the term had been associated with fluffy pink bunnies, say; so the only difference is that the term describes something disgusting. Therefore WP:NOTCENSORED applies. It may be a conclusion as unpalatable as the topic, but there it is. Rd232 talk 05:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * NOTCENSORED is not an excuse to ignore BLP considerations. The fact that the term describes something disgusting affects how it harms the subject, and therefore how to apply BLP. Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:42, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Its use is limited and forced. Most of the sources are about the campaign, not examples of the word being used. And in any event, the point is that we don't host stand-alone articles on every word that exists, and on every topic a reliable source might mention. SlimVirgin  TALK |  CONTRIBS 05:49, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have no reason to believe that the broad range of sources that use the term—from erotic novels to sociological books to medical journals—were "forced" to use the term. If you have sources that say this, please quote them. Yes, most of the sources are about the campaign, but that is because what we write is dictated by the availability of reliable sources, and not politics. Recently, a reader brought a quote mentioning santorum in a medical journal to the article's talk page for inclusion. Cirt did not have access to that journal, so he could not cite it before: such collaborative editing is all the more reason for santorum to have its own article. As its breathtakingly thorough reference list shows, the term is not simply what "a reliable source might mention", but has generated hundreds of pages of writing and discussion for almost a decade. It is definitely important, notable, and worthy of its own article. The correct venue to challenge this status would be AfD. Quigley (talk) 06:06, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * While the concept of this word is literally execrable in and of itself, I can't say I see any grounds under WP:BLP to support its removal.


 * 1) The article is written with a NPOV, it is verifiable, and it does not contain original research.
 * 2) It does not give disproportionate space to particular viewpoints. (The word clearly exists, and its use is exceptionally well documented; it is disingenuous to claim that the subject itself is disproportionate. The extensive sourcing makes it clear that the neologism exists and has been the subject of wide-ranging discussion.)
 * 3) It does not meet the definition of an "attack page"—unsourced and negative in tone—as it is well sourced and neutral in tone.
 * 4) I don't see that the sources are being challenged, or are likely to be challenged, to a degree that would eviscerate the article.
 * 5) While much of the material is contentious, as evidenced by this discussion, it is not unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material, so that part of BLP doesn't apply.
 * 6) It's not gossip: it's a well-documented phenomenon.
 * 7) It doesn't misuse primary sources.
 * 8) It isn't about "a person notable for only one or two events", so the "Avoid victimization" clause doesn't apply.
 * 9) Rick Santorum is a public figure, but the article is compliant with WP:WELLKNOWN.
 * 10) It doesn't use personal information.
 * The remainder of the BLP clauses simply aren't applicable. In short, there's nothing under WP:BLP that creates grounds for deleting or substantially rewriting this article.  Sure, it's a despicable thing that someone created this neologism, and it's terrible that it caught on to the extent that there are one hundred and twenty-eight citations in a well-written article about the subject. But claiming that it runs afoul of BLP is unsupportable, and ultimately a case of "I don't like it". The word, and the phenomenon of the word, exists.  The etymology of the word is noteworthy. The case where a neologism was coined to make a negative association with a prominent politician, based on and related to his public statements regarding sexual matters—and the word stuck—is likely to be of historical significance.  The article should remain. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 16:36, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Very well stated, Macwhiz. Binksternet (talk) 16:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Seconded. Rd232 talk 16:52, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Very well said. -- Cirt (talk) 16:52, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Also agreed. A definitive statement. –  OhioStandard  (talk) 13:41, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * While MacWhiz states the technical BLP arguments well, he doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which can accurately be said to involve the principles underlying BLP more than the letter of the policy. SlimVirgin hit the nail on the head when she described the central matter as "an attempt to create a meme associating a person's name—not a common name—with anal discharge." The claims that the article is really about "the term" are flimsy and often serve a political agenda rather than an encyclopedic one. What this article ought to do is to treat its subject the way Wikipedia treats an even more prominent example of the same general phenomenon, the attempt to use online search engines and such to associate George W. Bush with the phrase "miserable failure." That's the model we ought to be following here.
 * And it's certainly not the case that the article is well-sourced. For example, the article asserts "Santorum has received utilization in fiction works," citing four examples. But these cites are mostly contrived if not inaccurate. The first, Hard by one Jack R. Dunn, is a self-published, free-distributed E-book. The fourth, Hate Starve Curse by Austen James, is another self-published book by a non-notable reader, more easily searched because it was published and offered for sale through Amazon's self-publishing operation. The third, Men On the Edge, represents only the use in a single short story story by an unidentified writer. The second cite, The Stepdaughters by Rod Waleman, is phony; whoever inserted it into the article simply found a book with a typo in the hokey old Latin phrase "sanctum sanctorum" (know these days mostly as Dr. Strange's house in Marvel Comics) and listed it even though anyone reading the relevant excerpt would easily know that it has zero relationship to the Savage coinage. So we have, after nearly a decade, exactly one documented use in legitimately published fiction. That hardly supports the claim that the term itself is notable.
 * Similarly, the claim that "The word appeared as a humorous aside in college newspapers" is overstated at best. While four examples are cited, two use the term in discussions of Savage and his activities, not independently, one uses it as a general reference to sexual activity, not in the sense described in the article; only the "music review" actually supports the claim. The New York Times reference is overstated; the relevant text is actually "Other recent Google bombs have sought to associate President Bush, Senator Clinton and Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, with various unprintable phrases." The source for the claim "The term's popularity as a political epithet has extended to bumper stickers and t-shirts" seems pretty weak; apparently the principal outlet for such merchandise is a blog operated by Savage and the items are manufactured on demand. Until I objected to it this morning, one citation describing the "santorum" coinage as an "important linguistic development" was attributed without qualification to a humor piece that is (by design) not exactly rigorously factual -- it also described Savage's motive as being "to honor" Sen. Santorum.
 * The article fundamentally violates WP:NPOV. Wikipedia articles are supposed to describe subjects in the way they are described in reliable, independent/nonpartisan sources. As reported -- but seriously underplayed -- in the article, the "santorum" phenomenon -- or however one wishes to encapsulate it -- is the result of, and inextricably associated with -- a campaign organized by a partisan media figure who disapproves of Santorum's views on sexuality; its purpose is not to "memorialize" Santorum's comments, as the article has it, but to make him a subject of derision/ridicule, to emarass him or damage his public image. This is not seriously disputed, even by Dan Savage himself. (In contrast, the use of the name "lewinsky" as a synonym for a sexual act, although pressed by some partisans, is generally seen as a more spontaneous development.) And while Savage's actions may be enjoyed by many who are amused by seeing a figure like Santorum discomfited, there appears to be a wide sense of unease (example here, in the comments at a fairly liberal site on a similar proposal ) about the appropriateness of Savage's campaign, another point avoided in the article.
 * And the article fundamentally violates principles underlying BLP, even if a case can be made that it evades the specific elements expressly barred by the policy. The Wikimedia Foundation resolution requires to make "taking human dignity" into account one of our most important concerns in constructing articles relating to living persons. Dan Savage apparently believes that Santorum's views are so repugnant that he does not deserve to be treated with any minimum of decency or respect. The article, as currently framed and written, comes closer to Savage's view than to Wikipedia's. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 19:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * These are points that have been repeated ad nauseum by a few people here, and yet I don't see signs that minds are being swayed, and I'm no longer clear on the purpose of continuing this discussion at BLPN. I don't see any prospect for a different AfD outcome in particular.  If the point is that the article needs to be edited in particular ways, then that should be argued at the article talk page.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 19:40, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * WP:NAUSEUM. -- JN 466  23:34, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Hullaballoo, I don't doubt the article has issues. I just don't see that they rise to the point of deleting the article using BLP as a justification.  I think part of the problem here is that some people see the Wikipedia article as "an attempt to create a meme"; that would obviously be wrong under any number of policies.  I see it as documenting the apparently-successful creation of a meme.  I don't think the existence of the Wikipedia article helped in that success, increased that success, or legitimized the term.  The story of the word is rooted in a political agenda.  That's not the same thing as the article being rooted in a political agenda.  Were we to conflate the two, it would be impossible to write about any political subject.
 * Personally, I don't like the word. Removing my personal tastes from the issue and going by the text of the BLP, which I am presuming accurately reflects the consensus of the Wikipedia community, I can't find justification to remove the article.  If I felt sufficiently strongly about removing the article, I'd either look for other grounds, or I would work to first change the BLP to cover this case.  If this case truly runs contrary to "the principles underlying the BLP" but does not actually violate the BLP as written, then it indicates the BLP has a gap that needs to be closed... after the appropriate discussion and procedure, to ensure that the BLP continues to reflect the consensus opinion.  But that should be a separate discussion on a different talk page. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 20:00, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not arguing for deletion of the article. I'm arguing for substantial changes in the article, making clear that it's notable primarily as a political meme and discussing the way the meme originated and was propagated as well as its political consequences. That's way it's significant enough to be discussed in an encyclopedic article. Much of the article content right now isn't related to this -- there's a lot of stuff on Santorum's personal reputation/reception that's not relevant to the meme, and is presented at excessive length -- and a lot of material that hasn't been scrutinized carefully enough -- for example, a point just mentioned on the article talk page, that one of the supposed "popular culture" examples of the meme turns out to have been published in 1971, and can't possible be relevant here. (It also involves misspelling of the key word, as I mention above).
 * The article discussing the attempt to Googlebomb George W. Bush as a "miserable failure" doesn't go on at length discussing the merits or lack of merits of the characterization; it's not relevant to the meme. That's a model I think we should use in reconstructing this badly flawed article. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 20:17, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have gone ahead and taken the initiative myself to voluntarily remove Dunn 2005 diff and James 2008 diff. I have also made some edits to the article in response to above comments by, see diff, diff, diff. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 22:03, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you for removing Dunn and James. But I see you have now added them back – ? -- JN 466  10:38, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It is an attempt at compromise through talk page discussion, diff. -- Cirt (talk) 03:28, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Excellent comments, Hullabaloo, both you and SlimVirgin have squarely identifed the problems with this article, and you have outlined a good way to move forward by making substantial changes in the article. The article clearly is not about the neologism (if it is indeed a legitimate neologism), it is about a much larger set of events that many sources refer to as a “campaign”.    If it’s just about the neologism, then 95% of the article should be removed and what’s left over can be placed in subsections in the other articles on Santorum and Savage.   On the other hand, if the ‘campaign’ is significant enough for its own article, then it needs to be renamed, the current naming is clearly misleading.


 * Reading through the sources, I find comments like:
 * ''"as far as malicious internet pranks go, Savage's was a pretty effective one. What's not discussed is that its overall cultural importance peaked years ago"
 * "Dan Savage sought to mock Santorum’s comments on homosexuality."
 * "Hate content"(regarding the circumstances of the neologism)''


 * What we’ve apparently done here is a forced elevation of what is basically an insult and internet prank to the level of an encyclopedic article; something which is normally limited to the purview of tabloid sensationalistic journalism.


 * I only checked the first 30 references and found 7 sources that don’t even mention the purported topic of the article, the neologism: Those sources violate WP:OR in this article, because they are not “directly related to the topic of the article”, which purportedly is the term.  I'm sure there are more references in the 95 remaining sources I didn't check that violate OR, and probably in the other sources in in the first 30 that aren't immediately available online, as well.


 * If we truly want to make this article an encyclopedic entry, then the best course of action is to rename and refocus the article on the actual campaign waged by Savage to refute Santorum’s comments, and not attempt to use the sensationalistic neologism as a basis for the article, when it’s clearly not about the term. It’s disingenuous to suggest the article is about the term.


 * So, yes, I think the article in its current state is indeed a violation of WP:BLP and needs to be modified as soon as possible. Dreadstar ☥  05:20, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree. The neologism is far less notable than the campaign that spawned it, which is what the sources are about. This should be an article on the campaign, and the title and lead should reflect that. If it's an article on the neologism, it should be a lot shorter (and not padded out with self-published sources). -- JN 466  10:38, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * It is extremely easy to construct a Google bomb, a campaigner back in 2003 would have been able to create a Google bomb with very few links indeed. What raises this Google bomb up is that it occurred at about the same time as the media became interested in the phenomena. John lilburne (talk) 21:49, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Relevance of "harms the subject"
I'm troubled by the frequency with which the critics of this article (and others) invoke the specter of "harm to the subject" as a reason for deletion or other adverse action. Wikipedia's mission isn't to aid or impair the political career of Rick Santorum. Our mission is to inform our readers about the world. That's why BLP doesn't say that we can't report unflattering facts about a bio subject; it says that negative or contentious information must be properly sourced. I'm sure Rick Santorum is harmed to some extent because his Wikipedia bio reports on his residency controversy. As that section of the bio notes, his supporters charge "that the controversy is politically motivated" -- but so what? The rest of the world doesn't follow Wikipedia policies, and we report on things that go on off-wiki that wouldn't be allowed here.

Furthermore, Wikipedia isn't joining in an attack by reporting on it. Many people have the ability to influence the public conversation. Some of them use that influence to spread personal attacks, some of which are meritorious and some of which are garbage. If scurrilous political attackers succeed in getting a lot of attention for a garbage attack, then they've made it significant and we'll report it. Yes, our article will in turn contribute, to at least some degree, to making the attack even more significant, but that's a consequence of the original attackers' success in getting noticed. NPOV doesn't allow us to start picking and choosing which facts we'll include based on which politicians might be helped or harmed by a truthful report. JamesMLane t c 17:16, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * JamesMLane, I agree with what you say here (and with what macwhiz says above). This really is not an issue for the BLP noticeboard, since there is no overt violation of WP:BLP, but since we are discussing it here, I will pose a question. Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality, the article which seems like it should naturally include coverage of the "santorum" formation, clocks in at 1,264 words. Santorum (neologism) runs to over 10,000 words (10,574 at the moment). It seems to me that regardless of the legitimacy of covering this information in Wikipedia, whether as part of an existing article or as a separate article, this amount of coverage is excessive given the real world importance of the event and the amount of in-depth media coverage it has received. While Wikipedia has staggering amounts of information on video games, etc, this particular article is possibly unique in that it the term is necessarily and inextricably linked with a living person and, regardless of how balanced our coverage may be, the term itself has negative connotations for most people. Given all of that, I feel that by having such an unnecessarily large and detailed article, we are violating what I feel to be the spirit of BLP and going beyond the role of a neutral party in all of this . I will not ask anyone to agree with me, but I will ask if you can see why I might feel that way - do you? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:27, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I get what you're saying, but consider this: Considering the neologism "santorum", which would give that term and its history more undue emphasis in the context of Rick Santorum: being part of an article about Rick, or being a unique article that is not directly related to Rick?  I understand the normal thing is to merge less-notable articles into main articles, but I think it would ultimately work against the goals of the BLP here: as an article on its own, I think "santorum" puts less emphasis on the relationship to the man than it would if it were a section of the man's biography or a page about a controversy directly relating to the man's political career.  The current article is about the word; a merge would make it about the man. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 20:00, 30 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't accept the basic premise that article length must represent an informed judgment about the subjects' relative importance. In a volunteer project, there'll be more coverage of whatever interests the volunteers.  Our article on Britney Spears is longer than our article on Martin Van Buren.  That doesn't mean that the Spears article must be shortened unless and until people add more information to the Van Buren article.  In general, we shouldn't try to achieve some spurious "balance" by removing well-sourced and properly encyclopedic information.  Also, I agree with Macwhiz that segregating stuff like this in its own article is often the right way to preserve information without overwhelming a more general article.  For that reason, in fact, Macwhiz's statement that "the normal thing is to merge less-notable articles into main articles" seems dubious to me.  Summary style encourages the spinoff of less-notable subjects into separate articles, with a summary and wikilink left behind in the more general article. JamesMLane t c 22:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

There may be no overt violation of BLP, but it violates the principles underlying BLP. BLP is based on avoiding harm to the BLP subject. If an article causes harm in a very unusual way that is not covered by the letter of the BLP policy, it still falls under BLP. Ken Arromdee (talk) 21:21, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If you want the BLP policy to say that, you should propose an amendment. Trying to word it would be interesting.  I don't know how on earth you could define "very unusual way" in any form that would hold water.  The "usual way" is, I suppose, that a Wikipedia article includes a properly sourced report of real-world facts that some living person would prefer be suppressed.  That's what's going on here.  What's the proposal?  "Wikipedia may not include a properly sourced report of negative facts if the inclusion in Wikipedia would affect Google rankings or would otherwise serve to bring the facts to the attention of more people"?  (Having written an example that I intended as satire, I find myself fearing that some editors would support it as a serious proposal.) JamesMLane t c 21:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * If you actually want a suggested change to BLP we can start here (additional material in italics):
 * Avoid victimization
 * When writing about a person notable only for one or two events, or writing about a person who is independently notable but where the biographical material is so prominent that it can significantly affect the subject, including every detail can lead to problems, even when the material is well-sourced. When in doubt, biographies should be pared back to a version that is completely sourced, neutral, and on-topic. This is of particular importance when dealing with individuals whose notability stems largely or entirely from being victims of another's actions, or writing about a topic that is largely or entirely about the person being a victim of another's actions. Wikipedia editors must not act, intentionally or otherwise, in a way that amounts to participating in or prolonging the victimization.
 * If you are worried that we can't define harm, there's no problem--we already have a rule which is perfectly fine. We don't need to add a new definition of harm to it.  We just need to extend the existing rule to cover more people. Ken Arromdee (talk) 04:26, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * If we're going to be talking about squishy matters like the "spirit of BLP," then it seems fairly clear to me that one of the core things about that "spirit" is this: BLP guidelines exist to prevent readers from believing certain damaging facts about the subjects of articles. (I'd write "certain damaging false information," but I accept grudgingly that there are legal contexts/jurisdictions when even saying something true can be considered legally actionable.) In light of that spirit, it seems to me that there's no way you can use BLP as an excuse to excise this article, as nothing in it would lead you to believe anything about Rick Santorum that is false or damaging.  The core of the original controversy is that, as a sitting senator, Santorum gave a well-documented interview in which compared consensual gay sex to bestiality, a comparison which as far as I know he has not recanted; everything else in the article is about other people's reactions to that statement (primarily Dan Savage's).  There's no way any reasonable person would read this article and come away thinking that santorum (the substance) or the "spreading santorum" campaign was in any way affiliated with Rick Santorum or anything other than an attack on his political views.


 * Please note that, in the larger discussion about the fate of this article, I actually have the gut feeling that santorum is very rarely used "in the field" as a neutral term for the frothy mix etc., and is almost always used in the context of Savage's campaign, and thus the content here would be best merged with the "Santorum controversy on homosexuality" article. But statements like "BLP is based on avoiding harm to the BLP subject" really raise my hackles, as they imply that we literally could not post anything even vaguely negative about a living individual. --Jfruh (talk) 04:38, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * This is so not true. Remember the controversy over including the name of the Star_Wars_Kid?  There wasn't anything factually inaccurate about his name.  It was taken out because it amounted to participating in his victimization.  Remember Brian Peppers?   The spirit of BLP is to avoid causing unnecessary harm to living people.  Limiting it to damaging facts and not to other damaging things is the same loophole as before.  And the rule I propose extending clearly allows deleting material that is factually accurate.  It's just that the current version doesn't apply to Santorum because it's written to apply to people notable for one event.  I propose extending the rule to cover people like Santorum.  But I don't propose adding a new principle that BLP can cover things that aren't about false information.  we already have such a principle.   Ken Arromdee (talk) 13:48, 31 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Forget "factually accurate" vs. "factually inaccurate" for a minute -- like I said, I accept that there are reasons why we might want to not report factual information about someone. My point is that the "santorum" business does not actually revolve around information about Rick Santorum, in the main. One would not come away from the Santorum (neologism) article with any new information about Santorum himself (other than his comments about homosexuality, which were quite high profile, would be found by almost anyone looking up things about Santorum in any case, and which as far as I know Rick Santorum is not particularly ashamed of). They'd learn about a campaign that was launched to mock Rick Santorum as a result of those remarks. But I don't see anyone thinking worse of Rick Santorum than they would have otherwise.
 * The factuality of the article is irrelevant to whether it's harming him. And yes, people will think worse of him.  He's associated with sexual shit in their minds.  Just because they won't end up believing negative claims about him doesn't mean they won't "think worse" of him; "thinking worse" includes impressions and associations, not just facts. Ken Arromdee (talk) 18:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * And you say "the current version [of BLP] doesn't apply to Santorum because it's written to apply to people notable for one event. I propose extending the rule to cover people like Santorum." There's a name for people like Rick Santorum: "public figure." And our threshhold for suppressing negative information is therefore much, much higher. Do you honestly think there's a comparison between a hapless kid who unwittingly became a source YouTube mockery with a two-term senator who's launching a serious candidacy for the US presidency? Doesn't really speak well of Santorum's chances if so. There's a reason the BLP explicitly mentions "people notable for one event," and that's becuase Wikipedia needs leeway to discuss public figures. --Jfruh (talk) 16:08, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I was proposing a change in the rules, and more to the point, I was proposing a change in the rules that gets around the objection "how do we define it?" (by being based on an existing rule that already defines it acceptably).  Ad yes, there's a comparison between Star Wars Kid and him.  We need a higher threshhold for public figures, but that's only a higher threshhold, not an unlimited one--at some point things will exceed even the higher threshhold. Ken Arromdee (talk) 18:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Rick Santorum was a US senator and might someday end up as president. I'm struggling to absorb the notion that he is somehow a "victim".  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:20, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * His being a victim is not the issue here. The issue is that the article is not neutral and seeks to victimize Santorum, using phony and misrepresented sources (see Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 19:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC) above) to push the point of view that this is a notable neologism, rather than a notable campaign. -- JN 466  17:36, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I would argue that he is a victim in the sense being contemplated by the rule. He's being victimized both by the article (as you point out) and by the campaign. Ken Arromdee (talk) 18:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Putting the niceties of BLP policy language aside, isn't the real question whether we should have an article that can be summarized as "Rick Santorum is synonymous with human excrement"? Or should we have one that can be summarized "Rick Santorum holds social/political views that many people find offensive, and some of his detractors are campaigning to associate his name with human excrement"? Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 19:22, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Or even one that says nothing at all about this deeply unencyclopedic topic? Sergeant Cribb (talk) 19:29, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, H Wolofowitz boils it down nicely. A couple of lines in his BLP article section about the related campaign in which this has occurred is more than plenty about this drivel, never ming creating a bloated article as publicity for the words entry to the English language - awful violation of the projects ambitions to be Neutral and Encyclopedic. Off2riorob (talk) 19:33, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's it in a nutshell. -- JN 466  21:29, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You're basically correct, but the literal-minded people endemic to the Internet will jump on you if you phrase it that way. They'll interpret "summarized as" to mean "explicitly states". Ken Arromdee (talk) 21:41, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

BLP Victimization extension proposal
I've looked at Ken's proposal to extend the BLP by modifying the "Avoid victimization" clause. I have issues with this proposal. The BLP policy is supposed to protect subjects from harm from inaccurate or poorly sourced information: libels that are legally actionable. I'm concerned that there's an appetite to change it into a whitewash policy that justifies the removal of anything negative, or that someone perceives as negative. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 01:31, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * First, I don't think it's consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation's resolution establishing the BLP.
 * Second, I think as worded it would rule out far too many articles: Rosa Parks comes to mind, because her primary claim to fame is her victimization as a black woman. One could then use this rephrased BLP as grounds to suggest deleting the Parks article as it would be "writing about a topic that is largely or entirely about the person being a victim of another's actions".  What about Monica Lewinsky scandal?  If this change goes in, expect a speedy delete request for that article before you can blink!
 * Third, it doesn't take into account what I will call, for want of a better term, the "what did you expect" factor: Any claim that Rick Santorum was "victimized" by someone using his name to create a neologism is unavoidably tempered by the fact that he is a major public figure in the field of United States politics, where such things are not terribly unusual. While this is an extreme case to be sure, it's hard to argue that Rick Santorum experienced as much psychological damage from this event as a thirteen-year-old shy kid of no particular fame might have experienced if it had happened to him.  This is not a kind thing, but it is a realistic thing: any person running for political office can expect to be vilified to one extent or another, and almost certainly falsely so.  The fact that an event might be considered "victimization" of a private citizen does not necessarily mean it's true of a political figure. And where do we draw the line of "victimization"?  Troopergate? Watergate? Obamacare?  Name a political figure, and you can find something in their article that someone will call victimization.  Others will call it political satire.
 * I have not seen the suggestion but I do dispute your claims about the appetite for a whitewash of negativity. This discussion is about the over-egging of a minor issue not the removal of its mention altogether. User from America should also remember this so called neologism existists only in politically minded American peoples minds. A re we not supported to consider a worldview - just because it seems super notable to you - outside of your bubble it does not even exist.Off2riorob (talk) 10:47, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Consider your Rosa Parks example (pretending that she's still alive). Rosa Parks already falls under the original clause--she's primarily notable for one event and for being the victim of another person's actions. By your reasoning, not only does the proposed rule demand that we delete the Rosa Parks article--so does the existing rule. Yet it doesn't. The reason is that the rule doesn't say that all such articles/material must be deleted, it says to delete it when Wikipedia would be participating in the victimization. Writing about Rosa Parks doesn't participate in her victimization; the article doesn't help exclude her from the front of the bus. The santorum article does help associate Santorum with sexual shit.
 * "where such things are not terribly unusual. While this is an extreme case to be sure..."

"This is an extreme case" is another way of saying that it's unusual. There really aren't that many political figures who are the target of this kind of campaign in a way that is substantially helped by our article. Yeah, Bush was linked to "miserable failure", but our article on this meme is not the #3 hit for searches for "George Bush" or the #2 hit for searches for Bush. And "Obamacare" doesn't call Obama names, it calls his policies names. Ken Arromdee (talk) 19:13, 1 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with Macwhiz that this proposal would call for many clearly improper deletions. Let's consider just two actual current Wikipedia articles: John Kerry military service controversy and O. J. Simpson murder case.


 * An aside for non-Americans who may not be familiar with these subjects: When John Kerry ran for President in 2004, some of his political opponents mounted a campaign to disparage his service in the Vietnam War by lying about his record, making accusations that were refuted by official records and, in some instances, by their own prior statements. O. J. Simpson was a football star who was tried on two counts of murder, but was acquitted.  Both of these matters received widespread media attention in the United States.


 * Is each of these articles "about a person who is independently notable"? Yes.  Is "the biographical material ... so prominent that it can significantly affect the subject"?  Yes.  Is each of them "largely or entirely about the person being a victim of another's actions"?  Yes.  (Of course, if this proposal were implemented, it would open the door to numerous heated disputes about interpretation.  Is someone who's tried for a crime, but acquitted, a "victim" of a prosecutor's actions?  Would the article be subject to deletion or significant paring back, but then reinstatement or expansion after Simpson loses the subsequent civil trial, with its lower standard of proof?  Is former U.S. Senator John Ensign a "victim" of the Senate Ethics Committee report that concluded he had probably broken federal laws in connection with the John Ensign scandal?) Finally, in each case Wikipedia is arguably participating in the victimization, by spreading and bringing to the attention of more readers an attack on the individual.


 * The fact is that, if we follow our mission of informing readers about the world, that will include informing them about political attacks (as with Santorum and Kerry) and other negative events (as with Simpson and Ensign). If our following of our mission affects Google rankings, so be it.


 * Of course, we shouldn't include so much about an attack that it's given undue weight in the bio article. We also shouldn't suppress valid information.  The solution is the one we actually use: Summary style.  If Kerry's bio included all the information about the attacks on him, that section would overwhelm the rest of the article.  Accordingly, the description of this aspect of his life was spun off into a daughter article, leaving only a summary in the main bio.  The Simpson murder trial also has its own article.  In each case, the main bio puts the event in context, and any reader who wants more detail can follow the wikilink.


 * With Santorum, the same is true. His bio mentions the attack in one sentence, including a wikilink, with a second sentence devoted to the notable fact that it's the top search result on Google.  His bio doesn't even give the definition that some people find offensive.  That level of detail is available only in the article about the neologism.


 * In response to Off2riorob, I'll add that there is no requirement that "notability" mean "notability throughout the English-speaking world" or the like. If it did, we could delete many, many articles about British footballers not named Beckham. JamesMLane t c 21:25, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * David Beckham is a global phenomenon - Santorium is not, its a extremely localized partisan political and activist slur completely unheard of and will never be used outside of those circles' Off2riorob (talk) 00:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I didn't make my argument clear. Yes, Beckham is a global phenomenon.  Most other footballers are not.  Category:English footballers has more than 12,000 articles, and I'd guess that many of those blokes arouse even less interest in the States than Santorum or santorum do in England.  My point is that there is such a thing as being notable in only one country (or even in only one part of one country). JamesMLane t c 03:18, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Your argument was perfectly clear... Nomoskedasticity (talk) 08:33, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The answers are:
 * You're suggesting that it may be hard to determine who's a victim. Yet I'm just proposing extending an existing rule, and the existing rule doesn't cause problems determining who was a victim.  As I pointed out, the existing rule applies to Rosa Parks.  She could be considered a victim of the legal system just like you suggest for OJ.  Yet, in fact, we have no trouble deciding whether the rule applies to her.
 * The rule doesn't necessarily say that the whole thing needs to be deleted. It says that the article should be pared down.  (And that's part of the existing rule too.)  So it's a strawman to say that we can't be "informing readers about political attacks".  We can tell the reader that there was an attack, while at the same time shortening the article, renaming the article, and/or making it a paragraph in another article rather than standalone.
 * You seem to agree that we shouldn't give the attack undue weight. In a way, this is still an undue weight issue.  Just because the article is separate from the one on Santorum himself doesn't mean it's not being given undue weight.  It's the #3/#2 Google search for Santorum's name, and seems to have been deliberately engineered to be so; claiming that it's okay because it's not actually part of the same article privileges form over substance.
 * Ken Arromdee (talk) 16:37, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Re Rosa Parks, if the existing rule hasn't caused a problem it's because nobody's taken it seriously in this instance. First, she's notable for only one event, but that criterion is sensibly interpreted to apply to the flash-in-the-pan 15-minutes-of-fame person, not Rosa Parks or Lee Harvey Oswald or the like (notable for only one event but that one being so huge that notability is utterly beyond dispute).  Second, few people would see her as a victim; she was in a sense victimized but so were many other blacks affected by Jim Crow, and she's notable because of her heroic response to the victimization.  In most people's eyes, the widespread reporting of facts about the matter redounds to Parks's credit, not her detriment.  That's why Kerry is a better example.  Our detailed reporting about smears against him doesn't bolster his reputation, the way the Parks article bolsters hers.


 * I understand that the issue isn't confined to deletion. In my first comment I referred to "reason for deletion or other adverse action" but thereafter I sometimes used shorthand.  Let's not quibble.  My statement was that "if we follow our mission of informing readers about the world, that will include informing them about political attacks...."  By that I meant fully informing them -- which doesn't mean every detail, any more than it does in any other article, but it means all the significant information.  That decision frequently involves editorial judgment.  My point is that the judgment shouldn't be influenced by whether we're reporting, for example, praise or condemnation.  Keeping the nice, happy, cheerful, positive stuff fully detailed, while "paring down" (in some unspecified degree) anything that might upset someone, would be a profoundly unencyclopedic approach.


 * We can see this with the Kerry example I gave. My recollection (which I don't feel like wading through the history to confirm) is that, at one point, Kerry's bio article pretty much followed one of your suggestions -- "We can tell the reader that there was an attack...."  Something like "Some people have criticized Kerry's service in Vietnam" got expanded with more detail, then more, then still more, until the editors working on article thought it was taking up too much space in his main bio.  That's when the material about this controversy was spun off as a daughter article, leaving only a summary in the main bio.  If the standalone article about the attack on Kerry were to be merged wholesale into his bio, it would be undue weight there.  If we were to merge a pared-down version or keep a pared-down version as a separate article, we'd lose a lot of properly sourced information.  These are bad alternatives.  The way we've actually done it is better.


 * The existence of a separate article is frequently the way to solve the "undue weight" problem. When it comes to undue weight, form is substance.  A Kerry bio with a brief summary of the attack on him, including a link to a daughter article for more detail, is well balanced.  If we changed only the form, by taking the current daughter article and putting that exact same text into the main bio article, that would be undue weight.


 * I don't think Google search results are relevant to assessing an "undue weight" concern. Our job is to prepare properly informative encyclopedia articles in accordance with our standards.  This website gets so many hits that quite a few of our articles are in the top three Google results for their title.  I just did five "Random article" hits and Googled them, with these results: South Ayrshire by-election, 1970, #1; Angel Samson, #1; Sara C. Bisel, #1; Mühlbachl, #2 (might have been #1 if I had restricted to English-language pages); and Choate (law), #6 (disambiguating parenthesis dropped us down).  Beyond that, this argument about us allegedly "participating in the victimization" amounts to saying that, on some subjects, making information more readily available will work to some people's detriment.  I don't doubt that that's true.  Sometimes we'll be exposing evildoers, and other times we'll be bringing scurrilous charges to the attention of more people.  That's inherent in writing a good encyclopedia.  At least none of this Santorum material involves false statements about him, the way the Kerry stuff does.  There's no dispute that Santorum really did make the comments that prompted Savage to act. JamesMLane t c 22:49, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I've posted in some of the other areas about this, so may as well put it here too. Basically put me in the Slim Virgin camp.  It comes across as an attack on a BLP.  If it were just a listing at List of gay slang terms, then I prolly wouldn't bother.  If there was some need to include some of this, then I'd be of the opinion that it should be in the Savage article, or possibly in the "gay controversy" article about Santorum.  — Ched :  ?  00:28, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

"Be very firm about the use of high quality sources"
While many sources used in the article are of sufficient quality for an article that fits under WP:BLP's purview, many of them are not of sufficiently "high quality." It's not like the article currently suffers from being overly brief, so surely the article can be trimmed, using only the high quality sources. I don't see how opinion sources that don't get coverage in third-party news sources can be considered high quality, nor sources like alternative newspapers. That would exclude most of Savage's own highly-opinionated articles for example. Drrll (talk) 00:10, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

One good measure of high-quality sources is the search of 'Major World Publications' in LexisNexis. Doing such a search that includes both the search terms 'Santorum' and 'Dan Savage' results in a grand total of 1 source that discusses the issue in depth--an article in The Phildephia Inquirer. There are 3 additional articles that mention the issue briefly, all 3 of which are in relation to the news of Santorum's Senate opponent returning a campaign donation from Savage. Two of the 3 articles also come from The Philadelphia Inquirer, while the third comes from the gossip column of The Washington Post. Drrll (talk) 00:52, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Obviously, we wouldn't state as fact that Santorum is a bigot and support that statement with a footnote to a piece by Savage. This article should, however, report facts about the opinions concerning the controversy.  That includes giving a fair presentation of Savage's views -- attributed to him, rather than being adopted as fact -- as well as a fair presentation of the other side.  That's why, at Talk:Santorum (neologism), I favored including a quotation from an opinion column critical of what the columnist called "hate content".  Given Savage's role in this, it would be silly to expunge his opinions from the article. JamesMLane t c 03:28, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * It may seem silly to remove Savage's opinions, given his critical role in the promotion of the term, but I can't see how his opinion pieces, largely printed in alternative newspapers, can square with the admonition in WP policy to "be very firm about the use of high quality sources." That applies to the opposing opinion piece(s) as well. In my view, there are a sufficient number of high-quality sources available that can be used to report Savage's opinions and actions. Besides the in-depth Phil.-I article on the issue, there is the New York Magazine article, some additional sources used in the Santorum (neologism) article, a couple of Politico articles, an ABC Nightline broadcast, and a CNN broadcast.  BTW, the only possible high-quality source I could find that could be used to source Savage's definition of 'santorum' is this article. Drrll (talk) 04:13, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Whether a source is high quality depends on the point for which we're citing it. If we want to report facts about an opinion, a high-quality source is one that gives us good assurance that the cited commentator actually expressed that opinion (the only fact for which we're citing it).  Some of the Savage quotations in our article are from columns he wrote that were published in a newspaper of which he was, at the time, the editor-in-chief.  That's an extremely high-quality source.  It's essentially inconceivable that our citation does not represent Savage's actual statement.


 * Of course, we don't need to cite every opinion. We should fairly represent all significant sides of a controversy without slipping into "Shape of the Earth -- opinions differ" silliness.  In that respect, where an opinion appeared may be important in deciding whether it's notable enough to mention.  In this instance, however, Savage's and Santorum's opinions are both important, regardless of where they appear.  All we need is the assurance of accurate quotation or paraphrase. JamesMLane t c 05:04, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you know of any policy language that supports that contention about whether a source is high quality? I guess I'll bring up the issue more generally in a new BLPN posting. Drrll (talk) 05:36, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with Drrl. JamesMLane, your principle, "Whether a source is high quality depends on the point for which we're citing it. If we want to report facts about an opinion, a high-quality source is one that gives us good assurance that the cited commentator actually expressed that opinion (the only fact for which we're citing it)." could be applied to any tabloid, blog or self-published book, and would thereby turn such citations into "high-quality sources" for BLPs. They're not. Importance is measured by where something is published. A chapter in a book by an academic publisher, or a well-researched article in the Washington Post or the The New Yorker, carries more weight than a column in a free alternative weekly, or pieces on activist or satirical websites. -- J N  466  17:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * You're confusing two separate concepts: reliability and importance. We wouldn't cite most blogs for a proposition like "the plan would cost more than a billion dollars," but a citation to Joe Blow's blog is a very reliable source for a statement like "Joe Blow denounced the plan as too expensive."  That latter fact will sometimes be worth reporting because, even if it's not in the mainstream (i.e., corporate) media, it can be important enough.  Appearance in those media is one factor as to whether something is worth citing but it's not the only factor.  If Dan Savage launches a neologism to embarrass Rick Santorum, then opinions by Savage and Santorum can merit inclusion.  More generally, I don't share your blanket disdain for free alterntive newspapers.  In my experience, those papers have lied to me less often than the more traditional media. JamesMLane t c 04:13, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Drrl, as for Savage's definition, this is also quoted in Value war: opinion and the politics of gay rights, by Paul Ryan Brewer, published by Rowman & Littlefield. It's a quality source, although it's in a footnote. In my view, the lead sentence should not state "Santorum is a sexual neologism for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex". It should state something along the lines of
 * "Santorum is a sexual neologism coined by humorist and sex advice columnist Dan Savage in response to comments Rick Santorum made in a 2003 interview about gay sex. The meaning Savage gave to it, based on suggestions submitted by readers of his column, was "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" ...
 * That would also ensure that the second Google search result for Santorum's name does not display
 * "Santorum (neologism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 * The word santorum /sænˈtorəm/ is a sexual neologism for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex". ..."
 * The proposed lead sentence would be more in line with the focus of the cited sources, and would in addition be more in line with the victimization aspects of BLP, as mentioned by Ken Arromdee above. -- J N  466  18:05, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅, I have implemented the above suggestion, see diff. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 21:48, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Cirt, I appreciate that. Unfortunately, you have been reverted by another editor. -- J N  466  22:09, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I see that, and I see you started a section to discuss that, at Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard. I am in agreement with you, that this is probably the best course of action for now. :) -- Cirt (talk) 02:00, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah, yes, forgot about books & journals--I was just considering news sources. I agree with your proposed change, but I doubt that it could survive the attempt to change it. It seems that there are a group of editors dead set on having the article inflict the most possible damage to Santorum, acting as Dan Savage fans, as well as extending the article ad infinitum. Drrll (talk) 18:22, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * WP:AGF, please. And remember, other editors are living people as well and deserve the same kind of consideration as Santorum. Gamaliel (talk) 18:58, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Point taken. Drrll (talk)
 * I've invited editors at the Santorum (neologism) talk page to comment here on the proposed change to the lead sentence. -- J N  466  20:34, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * "Major World Publications" is a very limited search of Lexis/Nexis and leaves out many sources which are indisputably high-quality sources. A look at the 132 sources used in the Santorum article reveals that many (most?) of them are both high-quality sources and sources that would turn up in a Lexis/Nexis search using different parameters. Clearly a "Major World Publications" search isn't a good metric of the availability of high-quality sources.  Gamaliel (talk) 18:49, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I know that 'Major World Publications' leaves out most online sources and all broadcast sources (which misses such high-quality sources such as Politico, the 3 broadcast networks, the cable news networks, and NPR), but what are some examples of good print sources that it leaves out? The 'All News' selection gets a lot more results, but it also lards up the results with all sorts of blogs and other partisan sources. Drrll (talk) 19:24, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I couldn't name a specific print source off the top of my head, but I do know from experience that the results differ drastically, even taking into account television and radio news. In the advanced search, you can remove blogs from your search results. Gamaliel (talk) 21:54, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tip Gamaliel. Drrll (talk)
 * I had a look at the sourcing. Most of them are standard RS, mainstream publications. The only sources I found that seem a little weaker are the ones listed below (descriptions taken from our articles, where available):
 * 14 cites to The Stranger (newspaper), an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, Washington, US
 * 3 cites to Gonzo Crosswords, a book of alternative crossword puzzles
 * 1 cite to People's World, a news website associated with the Communist Party USA.
 * 1 cite to Metro Weekly, a free weekly magazine-style publication for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Washington, D.C., U.S.A
 * 1 cite to BBspot, a geek satire and humour web site founded in 2000
 * 1 cite to Roger's Profanisaurus, a compendium of profanity, featuring the foulmouthed Viz character Roger Mellie, the man on the telly
 * 1 cite to a self-published erotic novel, distributed as a free e-book (Dunn)
 * 1 cite to a self-published book by Austen James
 * 1 cite to The Onion, an American news satire organization
 * 1 cite to Gay City News, an award-winning, free weekly newspaper based in New York City
 * 1 cite to Wonkette, a left-leaning American online magazine of topical satire and political gossip
 * 1 cite to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist, a quarterly magazine published by the Pink Triangle Trust until 2005 that was issued free to members of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association
 * 1 cite to the Montreal Mirror, a free English language alternative newsweekly based in Montreal
 * 1 cite to the Tucson Weekly, an alternative newsweekly
 * Some of these, like the self-published books, do seem wholly inappropriate; with most others, it's a judgment call as to how much weight to give them.
 * There are also
 * 3 cites to The Daily Show, an American late night satirical television program
 * 2 cite to the The Colbert Report, an American satirical late night television program
 * This is just an analysis based on the publications cited; how they have been used is another matter. Wonkette for example says,
 * "If Rick Santorum wanted to get this sex thing the Internet did to him like a decade ago pushed down his Google results, he could do something relevant for the first time since then. To be fair, he’s trying to do this by running for president. But even his presidential campaign is less relevant than some joke made about him years ago. Which is even funnier than the joke."
 * In the article this becomes,
 * Jack Stuef of Wonkette suggested the candidate "could do something relevant" in the campaign to alleviate the issue.[107]
 * I think Wonkette's point got slightly lost there, but one might also question if Wonkette's fun-poke is a significant enough comment to report in the first place. -- J N  466  22:09, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the breakdown, Jayen466. It's quite hard to see how such examples could be considered "high-quality" BLP sources. Drrll (talk) 22:45, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * A problem with even the "good" sources is that it raises the question: Sources for what? The sources document that there's a campaign against Santorum.  But they don't document that the word is used as a word for non-political purposes. Ken Arromdee (talk) 17:17, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Just a minor note here. On the AGF comment above that our editors deserve the same kind of consideration as Santorum.  Ummmm ... you realize this is said in the venue of an article that basically equates a person's and family's sur-name with the anal secretion byproduct of a homosexual act?  Can you see where I'm having some difficulty here?  Personally I'd rather not have that kind of "consideration" to myself thank you.  In regards to the intent though, yes, we should endeavor to be respectful of our fellow editors, and the point is understood and taken. — Ched :  ?  21:16, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This whole article is a cited falsehood, The idea that homosexual people are having anal sex and then looking down and using this alleged neologism and going wow dude look at the santorum coming out of your anus - its just a insulting falsehood, the only place this insult is being used is in the press to attack the person and for the same reason here at wikipedia - wow - your anus is leaking santorum - will be spoken almost never. Off2riorob (talk)
 * Got any sources for that? I have a hunch that your knowledge of what gay people do and say is little better than your knowledge of what Jews do and say.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 21:29, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I am sorry, I understand you are an expert on gay Jew behavior. Tell me - do you personally look down and say it? You bore me completely, your purpose at wikipedia seems to have become opposing me or attacking me at every opportunity - get over yourself. Off2riorob (talk) 21:37, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This isn't the forum for this conflict, so everyone please stop or take it to personal talk pages. Gamaliel (talk) 21:48, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I guess people, especially in the States, who practice anal sex might well say it to their partner, as an in-joke. -- J  N  466  22:35, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * There is a difference between insulting a living individual and reporting that 132 reliable sources have recorded someone insulting a prominent public figure. I think the unwillingness or inability of editors to make that distinction is the root of the conflict here. Gamaliel (talk) 21:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I fully understand the distinction that editors are trying to make here. Even putting aside the WP:BLP, WP:ATTACK, WP:NOT(so many things) .. this idea was an artificially created word by ONE MAN.  And the entire intent behind the creation was to attack an individual with whom he disagreed. (over some fundamental sexual issues and comments the then senator had mentioned).  The distinction that I make however is the entire "concept" of this word (and I use the term "word" loosely), and it's corresponding page.  Back on point though.  The WMF has mandated that we make efforts to be diligent in regards to BLP issues.  One of their statements: (here), covers some of our requirements.  I read item number two at the bottom of the page: "Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interest", and then I look at the article in question and simply see a huge thumbing of the nose at our benefactors.  To suggest that this word is a common term being tossed about in everyday life is wrong.  Perhaps in some gay porn circles a few folks get a chuckle out of this 10-year old boys locker room humor; I wouldn't know as I'm not familiar with those areas.  This simply is not a mainstream neologism.  What Wikipedia has done with the entire matter is effectively empowered, encouraged, and emboldened Dan Savage on his efforts to insult, degrade, and smear another individual.  To those who can not see or understand that, I really don't know how else to explain it to you.  Perhaps some do understand it, and simply find it acceptable.  I personally will never find it acceptable either here on Wikipedia, or in real life.  As I already expended more time on this topic than I ever intended to, I shall take my leave of all you good people, and wish you luck in all you do.  Feel free to hit me up on my talk if you have an issue with my post.  Cheers and best. — Ched :  ?  22:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Lead sentence
I proposed in the preceding section that we could change the article's lead sentence, as that is what is displayed in the Google search results. Cirt responded to the proposal by changing the lead sentence accordingly, so it read:
 * ''The word santorum is a sexual neologism coined by American humorist and sex advice columnist Dan Savage in response to controversy over statements on homosexuality by Republican U.S. Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania.

The definition was then given in the second sentence of the lead:
 * The meaning Savage gave to it, based on suggestions submitted by readers of his column, was "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex"''."

However, Cirt's edit was reverted by Nomoskedasticity three minutes later. As the proposal is a little buried in the discussion above, I've created this section so we can discuss this further. Views? -- J N  466  22:23, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I really think the article talk page is the right place for this discussion. No doubt there's a policy or guideline that clarifies...  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 22:25, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I'd rather keep the discussion in one place. In my experience, once an article issue comes to a community noticeboard, because an editor has requested outside input from neutral editors, discussion continues there; replies to questions raised are generally given at the noticeboard. -- J N  466  22:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Restricting the discussion to here skews the consensus towards the viewpoints of editors who feel more strongly about rigorously enforcing their interpretation of BLP and neglects the viewpoints of editors who care about improving individual articles but who are inexperienced in community matters or are intimidated by noticeboards. In this specific case, directing the discussion here pushes the controversial proposition that the article is a "BLP issue". Quigley (talk) 01:38, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Disagree with the change. The term santorum was not coined yesterday, and it belongs to all who use it, not Savage. The intention to manipulate Google search results is an odious overstretch of Wikipedia's policies and purpose. Quigley (talk) 01:38, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I am ambivalent about the proposed change, but I do not object to it. If it will help editors come to a compromise with regard to this article, then that is a good thing. :) -- Cirt (talk) 01:47, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Support the change. It more clearly states the legitimate purpose of the article: to document the phenomenon of the word's coinage and use, rather than to act as a dictionary entry.  As noted above, it also gives search-engine users a better synopsis of the article, allowing them to make a more informed judgement about the article's utility to them. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 01:50, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Support the change per Macwhiz. Drrll (talk) 06:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Support, this is a healthy proposed change, unlike many of the others which have attempted to do the same thing that has failed and failed again, Sadads (talk) 08:43, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Support Though I would suggest "vulgar" as an adjective in the first sentence.  Personally, I suggest tha neologisms not in common usage (and there is no doubt that this word is not in common usage) should not be considered valid for any encyclopedia. Period.   This is far past a mere BLP concern - it is a concern that being host to such drivel is harmful to the WMF and to Wikipedia itself. Cheers. Collect (talk) 14:35, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Support per Macwhiz. How much of the article deals with the properties, uses, health implications etc of lube/fecal matter? This is an article about a neologism as neologism, not the matter denoted by the neologism. Collect, I suggest we simply remove "sexual" as redundant. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:57, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Rename and reorient the article
Per Dreadstar, above"What we’ve apparently done here is a forced elevation of what is basically an insult and internet prank to the level of an encyclopedic article [...] If we truly want to make this article an encyclopedic entry, then the best course of action is to rename and refocus the article on the actual campaign waged by Savage"Most of the mentions of the "neologism" I've found are in fact focussed on Savage's prank, not unselfconscious employment of the term in its new meaning. The notable object here is the prank, not the neologism. SlimVirgin, Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, and Dreadstar explain this above better than I could. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:00, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Please see Talk:Santorum_(neologism). That discussion has been underway for seven days involving over twenty editors. -- Cirt (talk) 04:15, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Would the best thing not be to merge the contents (just one paragraph describing the campaign) into a subsection of the article about the Santorum homosexuality controversy, which was created first? Then move the santorum neologism title to Dan Savage santorum campaign (or similar), then direct that new title to the new subsection in the controversy article.


 * That would allow us to cover the controversy; cover the Savage campaign triggered by the controversy; direct readers to it; and at the same time maintain a distance from it. SlimVirgin  TALK |  CONTRIBS 04:28, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I strongly support SlimVirgin's proposal, both in its intended aims and implementation. alanyst 05:28, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I also support this approach. His stance on homosexuality is what is notable, and this campaign is part of it. John Vandenberg (chat) 06:37, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * We're already !voting at Talk:Santorum_(neologism); please take this there. You'll find an overwhelming consensus against the sort of merge you propose. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 06:42, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I also support this approach. An internet prank is not worthy of its own separate article. This is mentioned in the google bomb article as one of many such incidents along with the GWB "Miserable failure", and "French Military Victories" we don't, and quite rightly so, create a separate articles on those bombs. Anyone wanting to pick this one out for special treatment ought to have clear encyclopaedic reasons for doing so, especially when a BLP is concerned. John lilburne (talk) 08:45, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I can't support SV's suggestion because I believe a good case can be made for an article on this unique event – the creation of the neologism and it's ramifications. No good case has been made, and I doubt one can be made at the moment, for an article on the substance, santorum. The article Santorum should cover the properties, uses, health implications, etc. of lube+fecal matter and, being health-related, would need to be sourced according to WP:MEDRS. I doubt this can be done at present, and the present Santorum is definitely not that article, it is an article about the creation and ramifications of a neologism, and should be named accordingly. A sound argument can be made for renaming the article, but not for erasing it or merging it. I believe we should take the former proposal to the article's talk page. Renaming may have the consequence of bumping it further down the list of Google results for "santorum," though that is no reason in itself for renaming. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 15:34, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * John lilburne, what do you think is wrong with google bombing? I've heard that you're proposing to do just that to editors of Wikipedia. Is it your view that it's OK to prank and harass people, just not to write about it?    Will Beback    talk    09:23, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * You heard wrong or have misunderstood. A google bomb is very easy to construct especially with a non common name. It takes very few links and back in 2003 one could do it simply by changing your signature on some web forum - Hey presto 100s of links all with the same phrase all going to the same site, that is the point I made. I also speculated that, even today, many user names here (yours included) are susceptible to such pranks, and it does look as though someone has been checking out the truth of that that statement. In fact depending on who is doing the linking, one can do it with a single link, the google bomb mainly reflects on the linker not the linked, a popular blogger can google bomb with one link. 5 years ago I gave permission to an NA university to use a photo on a course website, my real name was linked to a photoblog, that one link is enough to bring the photoblog as the first link of a Google search for my real name. That is the reality of links and Google ranking. The linking site's 'authority' or popularity, the newness of the link, the number of pages similarly linking. So would I google bomb you? If you've followed anything I've said in the past months you'll know that it is NOT something I'd do. Whilst I think a high profile person may on occasion deserve it, maybe even the guy being discussed here, I don't think it ought to be considered anything more than a footnote at most in their life/career. It may be of more importance in relation to the bio of the google bomber, and it may be considered as an example of the phenomena. John lilburne (talk) 10:50, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that clarification.   Will Beback    talk    12:03, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Once again, there is a discussion on this proposal in an earlier section. The two sections should be consolidated -- this one moved up, or the other responses moved here. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 09:05, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Oppose The problem with this approach is that it circumvents the conversations which have been going on at the article talk page, which has been running forever now and drawn in users from all kinds of different forums includeing a since closed discussion here, WP:AN, Jimmy's talk page, WP:ANI, and several other forums. The proliferation of long and ad naseum discussions, needs to stop, Sadads (talk) 09:11, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Oppose It has already been established -- repeatedly -- that the article Santorum (neologism) is not a violation of the BLP policies. I try to assume good faith, but when it is the same group of editors bringing up the same tired arguments.... This is getting tedious. TechBear &#124; Talk &#124; Contributions 12:14, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * First I suppose I should apologize for returning when I said I was leaving; however, I wanted to make a different note on the post above by TechBear. While it is true that there has been consensus established in the past, there are several items which I think make the current discussion(s) valid.  1.) We appear to be drawing in a number of new editors to this discussion.  I suspect that is due to several things: a) The approaching election year in which Santorum may take part in.  b) The recent expansion of the article. c) The "Googlebombing".  I suspect that this has led to a greater awareness of the article and the situation.  2.) While it may not appear to be so at the moment, I remind you that consensus can change, and we do seem to have a more equal balance in this respect than we have had in years past.  While it may be "tedious" to you as a long time defender of such ... ahhhh... contributions, I respectfully ask that you allow folks to voice their views on this matter.  Thank you for your time. — Ched :  ?  15:12, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * This article is a disgrace, it is of a level of puerility that would make a 12yo blush. It reflects extremely badly on the articles authors who ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I suspect that it will many years before anyone takes them seriously again. If the article is in accordance with BLP policy, which I doubt, then the presence of the article also reflects badly upon and diminishes the project itself. John lilburne (talk) 22:08, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Oppose. This has been done to death elsewhere. Forum-shopping isn't going to change things. Yes, the usage is a mere scatalogical smear -- but that's clearly exactly the effect its creator intended; it's a significant example of a piece of highly effective political propaganda, one reported on many, many times by a wide variety of mainstream media, and one that seems to be having appreciable effects on the current U.S. presidential race. Suppressing it to save the blushes of its target, or those of our presumed reader, seems contrary to long-established precedent here. Compare swift-boating. -- The Anome (talk) 22:31, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That is like Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK. John lilburne (talk) 23:23, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Swift-boating -- "a strong pejorative description of some kind of attack that the speaker considers unfair or untrue—for example, an ad hominem attack or a smear campaign" -- destroyed Kerry's campaign. The word "santorum" may well end up doing the same for Santorum. -- The Anome (talk) 23:35, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Key here is "may well" you have no way of knowing, as it hasn't happened. Kerry was the Democratic nominee, this guy is at present a maybe, if he does run you have no way of knowing whether this will have any effect. IOW your justification for the article is CRYSTAL BALL GAZING, and non encyclopaedic. John lilburne (talk) 00:12, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That the article has potential to become extraordinarily notable in the next few months in no way contradicts the fact that it is notable -- and very much so -- right now. -- The Anome (talk) 00:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Arguing for the retention of an article for its polemical value is POV-pushing. John lilburne (talk) 00:31, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The term swift-boating does not use a living person's name or have a scatological meaning, and it is used to disparage an unfair politically-motivated attack, rather than being used to perpetrate it. I don't see how it sets any sort of precedent for what's being discussed here.  alanyst 02:10, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and your assertions regarding the motivations of people who use either term are more-or-less irrelevant unless you happen to be a reliable source. 24.177.120.138 (talk) 03:47, 4 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Oppose forum shopping. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

RfC
I've add the RfC tag to the talk-page discussion to get wider input, so could anyone who has commented here but not there, please add your comments there too? That will help keep things in one place. See Talk:Santorum_(neologism). SlimVirgin TALK |  CONTRIBS 06:14, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Laughing - There is no way that asking that group to behave reasonably has any chance of succeeding. The guy is a figure of hate/ridicule has little support here and as such can be snowed, a similar article on say Palin would never get off the ground. In this case there is a puerile pack operating around the article on a minor figure for the LULZ and partisan POV pushing. But much the same operates in other BLPs the Jessica Black article should never have been made or kept, and 90% of the LaRouche, and Scientology stuff has similar antecedents, and undoubtedly serve as precedents. Common sense, dignity, and just simply doing the right thing have degenerated into "But this RS said he said so first". It allows controversialists like Savage and Beck to spread their attacks across a wide range of BLPs all aided by WP editors with a point to make. Out of control Slim, out of control. John lilburne (talk) 09:08, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Actually just noting that it's a new RfC that has started, because the old proposal was different. It's under the same header: Talk:Santorum_(neologism). Comments welcome. SlimVirgin TALK |  CONTRIBS 10:23, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

FYI, my comment
Please see diff. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 00:19, 5 June 2011 (UTC)