Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:19, 5 August 2006

This article was nominated for deletion on July 27, 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Recent changes

What's going on here? One editor inserted a lot of useful biographical information, unsourced but judging by their nature presumably made by the subject of the article. A more recent edit from an IP address identified as belonging to the BBC has removed almost the entire article in what looks very much like vandalism. Is there any reason for this? --Surgeonsmate 10:30, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm the subject of the entry and I removed it as it was inaccurate, offensive, intrusive and inappropriate.

Fair enough. It contained a lot of stuff like birthdate, education and so on that the average member of the public wouldn't know, so the assumption is that it was made in good faith by someone who knew what they were talking about, and it's hard to tell who made it when it's just an anonymous IP address doing the edits.

But you are a public figure, you have a large and admiring local and international audience, and you are notable enough that you deserve something more than just a bald mention. The last thing we want to do is to put up inaccurate or defamatory material. --Surgeonsmate 20:01, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I have re-written the article, drawing heavily upon Jim's official BBC biography as a source. Further contributions are welcome, but any unsourced material will be removed in accordance with WP:NOR. --Surgeonsmate 20:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The previous information was taken from Jim's own web site at www.jimhawkins.co.uk and from Jim's broadcasts, all material that is in the public domain. However there was certainly no intent to offend Jim and sincere aplogies if such offence was caused. As with Surgeonsmate the intent was just to give Jim a meaningful entry.

Ha! The warning below this window says that content must be verifiable, and some of what was deleted in January most certainly was not verifiable!

I'm Jim, and I'm still not happy about this being here. I've been mulling it over for months, and unless anyone can provide me with a convincing reason why I shouldn't, I'm going to delete this entry in its entirety in 48 hours time.

... and I have done so. And I feel much better already.

Jim, please take a look at Misplaced Pages:Biographies_of_living_persons#Dealing_with_articles_about_yourself. Simply blanking articles is frowned upon in Misplaced Pages even if it's done by the subject. You may nominate this article for deletion if you'd like at WP:Afd. --Phoenix Hacker 00:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I really couldn't care less what Misplaced Pages frowns upon, to be honest, but thanks for initiating the deletion process

I *require* the above list of IP addresses to be removed, otherwise I'll take legal advice, as I am doing about the presence of this article.

If there was no consensus that this article should be deleted, then that also means (obviously enough) that there was no consensus that the article should be retained. So in the absence of any consensus that the article be retained, I'm calling once again for it to be deleted.

I have removed the list of IP addresses in response to the entirely understandable privacy concerns raised by the subject. --Jumbo 18:52, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I returned the template, inasmuch as no legal action can be essayed against Misplaced Pages in view of its inclusion (if only because the IPs remain in the article's history (or in the talk page history, at which the editor contributing from the IPs averred that he was Hawkins) and inasmuch as it is has been our practice to include such templates (see, e.g., Talk:Daniel Brandt and Talk:Siva Vaidhyanathan), such that, if one disagrees with such practice, it is best that he raise the issue on a page at which a meta-discussion might take place (e.g., WP:VP or WP:ML), in order that many editors might participate in a discussion, from which the nature of any consensus might be inferred. Joe 17:01, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm removing it again. Two reasons. The first is that such practice is not consistent across Misplaced Pages, and in the absence of a policy or guideline such issues should be decided as appropriate. Second is that it is a matter of courtesy and privacy. Of course the addresses remain in the history, but the casual reader looking for information is not going to see them prominently displayed.

While I tend to discount the legal possibilities, I also note that the BBC may see this matter differently to random Misplaced Pages editors. Please don't reinset the template without we get more voices on the subject. Perhaps a Request for Comment might be the go? --Jumbo 18:56, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Facing

I quote from the Manual of Style:

Articles with a single picture are encouraged to have that picture
at the top of the article, right-aligned, but this is not a hard and
fast rule. Portraits with the head looking to the right should be
left-aligned (looking into the article).

--Surgeonsmate 18:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Removing this article

This article may be proposed on Articles for Deletion, where it will be examined and opinions sought as to whether it should be kept or deleted. --Jumbo 04:10, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

In accordance with Jim's wishes, I have listed this article for deletion. Given that Jim is a living person who is not immensely notable (well, not like Tony Blair or Nicole Kidman, anyway), I suggest that his wishes be respected. --Jumbo 04:18, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Removed personal info & corrected error

I know that Jim is likely unhappy with the fact that this article was not deleted, so at the very least I thought I would correct the error about the award that he won (a silver Sony award according to the Sony awards site), as well as removing the personal information listed previously under the section Other Interests--it seemed not only irrelevant, but was in fact mostly non-verifiable since it had quite a lot to do with the subject's own preferences--we could ask him if he really likes unusual vintage vinyl, but I doubt he'd care to respond.

btw, Apologies for messing up the history page. I'm new to major edits; I've mainly corrected facts and typos as an anon. until recently & I'm still learning.--Ibis3 23:54, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

The personal information likely wasn't encyclopedic, but almost all of it was surely verifiable ; the fact of his being married, and his wife's name, are surely notable, but I'll leave it to those more familiar with the subject than I to determine how/if to reintegrate such information... Joe 02:00, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

With WP:BLP and the subject's wishes in mind, have we established exactly what the objection to the article is? Presuming that we stick to verifiable material, I mean. - brenneman 06:27, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

An offer to Jim

The deletion request for this article ended in no consensus, so it has not been deleted (I did vote to delete). Presumably, Jim is still unhappy with the article. I would like to offer to edit the article to something both Jim and the community can be happy with. Obviously, in doing so I cannot and will not violate Misplaced Pages's other policies on articles... for example, I will ensure that the resulting article will be free of bias and will not sound like an advertisement. I do not wish Jim to end up with a negative impression of Misplaced Pages, so I will try to fix things.

If Jim wishes to discuss these possibilities, I invite him to contact me either on my talk page or via email using this link. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 15:57, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Jimbo's comments

In his keynote address at Wikimania 2006, Jimmy Wales spoke a bit to this topic. His speech (which is well worth listening to in its entirety) is located through the Wikimania site and stored here. Go to minute 34:10 of about an hour's worth of talk.

One of the social things that I think we can do is WP:BIO. During this past year, in the English Misplaced Pages in particular, our policies on biographies of living persons have become much more refined and really a a strong focus on higher quality.

Part of this is just in response by the community to not just the Siegenthaler incident but to lots of other similar incidents. As Misplaced Pages has gotten to be larger and larger, two things happen. It's become more and more important, so everybody who's famous, like, Stephen Colbert, looks himself up in Misplaced Pages. But also because the project's gotten larger and larger, we're actually writing articles about less and less famous people. So, you can write anything you want about George Bush and he's not going to call up on the phone and complain, right, he's heard it all. But what happens is, we have very minor celebrities and sort of controversial people, they read their article on Misplaced Pages and if it isn't good, then they complain, they get upset...

There's a sort of typical pattern where I've seen this happen over and over and over. Somebody, they go to an article and they see something they don't like in it so they blank the article. Right. So somebody warns them, and then they blank again and they get blocked. Right. Then they make a legal threat and they really get blocked. And it's just like a totally bad experience for that person, when in fact, they may have been right in the first place Oor maybe they weren't right. maybe they just didn't like what we wrote about them, but still, we didn't handle it well.

I think social policies have evolved in recent years, I mean the recent months, to actually handle this problem a lot better. A lot of the admins and experienced editors are taking a really strong stand against unsourced claims, which is always a typical example of the problem.

So my feeling of it is, my sense of it is, that the living biographies part of Misplaced Pages, which is one of the most difficult and most important areas, is one where we're really seeing a really massive movement towards higher quality. A lot of people in the community are really committed to that.

And the few people who are still sort of in the old days, saying, "Well, you know, it's a wiki, why don't we just... ", yeah, they're sort of falling by the wayside, because lots of people are saying actually, we have a really serious responsibility to get things right.

Getting back to the subject of this article, I ask, have we handled this right? Could we have done this better? --Jumbo 00:19, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

• Biography articles of living people