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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ImperfectlyInformed (talk | contribs) at 07:05, 26 April 2009 (→The word consensus: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Christianity Recognized Content • AFD results by nominator

I am also user GRBerry on Commons, Wikispecies, Meta, and (although I speak no German) de.Misplaced Pages. Messages intended for me on any of those projects may be left here, in which case I ask the poster to indicate which project they are talking about. GRBerry diffmeta diff I've also signed up for single user login.

Email advice: When able to be active on Misplaced Pages, I am more likely to read this talk page than I am to read email, as the email goes to my work email. So please reserve email for items requiring 1) confidentiality, 2) the format (forwarding other emails), or 3) some other really good reason for using email. Also, to help it get through my spam filters and to my attention, have the email subject line begin with "Misplaced Pages". If at all possible, I will respond on Misplaced Pages, because I believe that transparency is important, and each user I email lessens my privacy. GRBerry

New sections belong at the bottom, not here.

your opinion please...

I'd be very grateful if you could find the time to read User:Geo Swan/opinions/"False Geber" and what a biography should contain and offer your opinion on its talk page.

In a recent {{afd}} one of your challenges was that the article lacked biographical details. If I understood you properly, you meant details about the subject's birth, education, early career, and so on. While I agree articles are more balanced if they describe the full course of the subject's life, not just the most notable aspects, I have questions as to whether the absence of biographical details should be grounds for deletion. My essay cites a counter-example.

FWIW, it seemed to me that the nominator in that {{afd}} had adopted a position diametrically opposed to yours -- that biographical details served merely as puffery.

Thanks in advance! Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 21:30, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not concerned about biographical details, I'm concerned about independent biographical sources. The two are different. An editor engaged in original research from primary sources would find it no big challenge to learn many biographical details about people with just the sketchiest of starting points. We do not want extensive details (see Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living persons#Privacy of personal information and Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living persons#Privacy of names). Nor do we want editors publishing the results of their original research from primary sources (see Misplaced Pages:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources.

We do want editors to write articles about people for whom biographic sources can be found. Such biographic sources are secondary sources that are substantially biographies. They are writing about a person as a person, not merely mentioning a name in conjunction with a news event. They are not resumes and news reports on events that happen to mention participants. In the absence of biographic sources, it is impossible to write a policy compliant biography, and the attempt should not be made. If someone was involved in an event of significance, cover the event, only cover the person if there are biographic sources that are secondary sources, independent of the person and their employer/agents/publicists, and reliable. If those biographic sources don't exist, don't create an article at their name.

The problem with almost all of the articles titled after people associated with Guantanamo is that they are not written using biographic sources. They need to go away.

• A couple years ago, I thought that the answer for the detainees was to try to merge all the detainees into one big list. I've since realized that the list itself is a problem - these people should not be named in the encyclopedia unless there are biographical sources about them that are 1) reliable and 2) independent. For the majority of them such sources do not exists. I think that we could have an article on the List of Guantanamo Bay detainees, because the list and its (in)completion has been the subject of many sources, but the contents of the list should not be on Misplaced Pages, only linked to in one or more of the relevant sources.
• For the various people involved in the legal and paralegal processes, the same problem exists. I hadn't realized until just recently that we had any such pseudo-biographies. We should have a good article on the legal and paralegal processes, but we don't need or want pseudo-biographies on the people involved in them.

GRBerry 15:53, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

As an example for the first paragraph, look at my rewrite today of Will A. Gunn. There are a lot of biographical details in the sources I used, especially the one that is clearly not independent and to a lesser degree the most independent source. I intentionally choose to omit the details from our article because of concerns about privacy of personal information.

I got your email last night, just as I got the one in 2007. I'm not going to reply via email because of my concerns about my own privacy. I don't think I've lost patience, but I do think that our communal best practices are moving further and further from the article editing practices in the Guantanamo Bay topic area, and that the encyclopedia and you would be better off if you started converging with the current best practices. As far as I can see you are one of the lead editors for the entire topic area - which is certainly worthy of encyclopedic coverage - and if I can get you to change, that will lead over time to change in the entire topic area. I also respect Sherurcij; in 2006 he was one of my mentors on how editors with different points of view can work together (see Talk:1993 Lebanon war and the article's history). But we are as a community getting less and less willing to cover living people over time, so what I thought was good practice a couple years ago I may no longer consider good practice. GRBerry 23:51, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Oi, you.

Something low drama on ANI for once:WP:ANI#scriptural reasoning article. I seem to recall you being involved in some religion wikiproject or another. Most of these articles could use some work. Any idea on how I can easily figure out which ones are worth saving and which ones to prod?--Tznkai (talk) 19:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm tempted to say "oy veh", but I can't spell it right because I don't actually speak that language. I've seen some of the drama threads related to this, and I seem to recall reading a (related?)[REDACTED] article some time (months?) ago. It is the sort of thing I might be interested in actually doing should I have lots of spare time (hah!) and a local opportunity (unlikely to hear of one if it exists). But I don't actually know much.

I redid the search as a phrase, and only for articles/templates:

1. Scriptural reasoning survived AFD,
2. Daniel W. Hardy shouldn't be prodded - there are some real claims to notability there, but the article needs a major rewrite
3. the wall of publications in Peter Ochs should probably go, yielding a weak stub but there is enough scholarly work with citations (Google Scholar) to offer hope
4. I don't know enough about Islamic scholarship to have a meaningful opinion on Timothy Winter, but the only Google scholar citations I found were to a book that he translated instead of wrote, so I'm doubtful
5. Given which professorship he holds David F. Ford would probably survive an AFD, and his google scholar results are comparable to Ochs.
6. Narrative theology and Interfaith are not part of the problem; at most an internal-spam link would need editing out
7. Fatwā appears to have an external spam link
8. Qur'anic hermeneutics is a false positive
9. Christian Kabbalah, Johan Kemper are false positives but the use of The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning as a source in each may not be worth keeping
10. Three Faiths Forum survived an AFD last month, or I'd have suggested prodding. Perhaps push the user that said he would be working on it?

GRBerry 21:12, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Requesting feedback on Open source notability and rewritten TurnKey Linux article

Hi there! You participated in the discussion on open source notability a month ago and I figured you might want to pitch in again and help get the discussion going on User:Abd/Open Source notability.

Also, I've rewritten the proposed article at User:Abd/TurnKey Linux, added reliable sources and opened an RfC requesting comments on how to improve the article and establish consensus regarding it's notability (or lack of). See the talk page for details.

Cheers! LirazSiri (talk) 16:28, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

The word consensus

Hey, I'm sorta discussing the word consensus at MastCell's talkpage and picked out your comment that the 60% against autopromotion was "clear consensus". I'm letting you know so you can defend your interpretation of the word if you want. Hope you don't take it personally, although I do think the word should not be used improperly. II | (t - c) 07:05, 26 April 2009 (UTC)