Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 13:43, 31 July 2006

Full reviews may be found in this page history. For a summary, see Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Recently concluded (2006 July)

31 July 2006

Template:Mergedisputed

I sought only to redirect (not delete) this template. The debate was closed by a non-admin (despite the fact that six people voted to redirect or delete, rendering the outcome far from "unambiguous"). As the nominator, I'm hopelessly biased, but I believe that the rationales provided by the "keep" voters were extremely flawed, as they were based upon false impressions and assumptions. In fact, these comments actually served to demonstrate the confusion that this template causes, which is why I nominated it in the first place!

One respondent noted that the standard merger tags "indicate to uninvolved readers that an article may be defective" (which couldn't be further from the truth). This individual also believes that "when one idiot is going against a consensus , it can be removed by the majority who will have no trouble getting bodies to avoid 3RR." (This makes absolutely no sense, as the tag merely indicates that one person disputes a merger.) Another (who voted twice) was under the impression that mergers are "nomiat" and should have an "expiration date," and that "the template makes note that a third unconcerned party has reviewed the discussion and found it to be recent but in dispute, which clearly delineates the set of articles from a category of unreviewed." (In fact, no such process exists. The tag is inserted by a single concerned party who disputes a merger.) Another believes that there is "no way to get rid of" disputed merger proposals without using this tag (as though consensus alone is insufficient). Similarly, another believes that this template is the only solution to a situation in which "someone slaps a merge tag on an article against consensus" and that it "will prevent a possible merge while the dispute is active." (In actuality, a merger tag that defies consensus should simply be removed, and this tag—which might mean that one person out of ten disputes a merger—does not prevent a merger from occurring. That's what discussion is for.) All of these are examples of precisely the sort of misconceptions that make this template harmful, and they've been counted as "keep" votes. Among the other "keep" voters, one commented only that "it's informative of the discussion." Similarly, another claimed that "it tells readers there's no clear opinion towards the merge proposal." (These statements simply aren't true, as the tag reflects only one participant's opinion). Another provided no justification at all.

It's clear that there was not consensus to keep this template, especially when one considers the fact that virtually all such votes were based upon the types of misunderstanding that justify its removal. In any case, this certainly wasn't an appropriate debate for a non-admin to close. Overturn and redirect the template to {{merge}}. —David Levy 05:03, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

• Relist for broader consensus. Even if we accept all of the keep votes, there were 9 keeps and 6 for deleting or redirecting. That's hardly a clear consensus, and I agree it should not have been closed as "keep" by a non-admin. (I would perhaps have accepted a "no consensus", which would have allowed a relisting sooner than the "keep" will.) Powers 12:19, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Hmm... when I counted it there were only 3 delete votes... User:Fredil Yupigo/signature 13:10, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Jim Shapiro

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Jim Shapiro (discussion blanked by speedying admin!)

Extra material from this page, including relevant sections of WP:BLP and extra sources for the article have been moved to Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Log/2006 July 31/Shapiro

Let AfD run course. This article was speedily deleted as an attack, despite every word being sourced and referenced. I quote from WP:CSD: "This includes a biography of a living person that is negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no NPOV version in the history to revert to." It could be argued that perhaps the article was negative in tone, it was not gratuitously so; any negativity resulted solely from the verifiable facts included. It was no more negative in tone than any Misplaced Pages article on any infamous person, say Pol Pot or John Wayne Gacy, or even Uri Geller. More importantly, the article was most definitely NOT unsourced. As such, it meets no speedy deletion criterion. Several people, including myself and User:WAS 4.250 (see his working version here: User:WAS_4.250/1), were working on making sure the article was sourced, relevant, and NPOV. Instead of giving us chance to do this while the AfD ran its course, User:Tony Sidaway decided to delete it -- this despite the fact that the grounds for a speedy was contested several times already. If the consensus is that this article shouldn't exist for whatever reason, that's fine -- but let's try to get a decent article first, and then judge it, rather than speedily deleting an evolving article that does not have to be just an attack page. Powers 00:52, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Let me add, also, that despite the objections of two particular users, the references used in the article all appear to be reliable. The alleged bias of Overlawyered.com, in particular, is irrelevant as long as the information presented is not biased (and it isn't; it's "just the facts" without commentary). Local newspapers are also reliable sources, so I'm not sure what the complaint is in regards to them. Powers 00:56, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep deleted, effectively an attack page -- it was created to disparage and since there's no plausible reason to keep it around, keeping it would only endorse that motive. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
  • I'll also note that to class this individual with Pol Pot is utterly absurd. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:02, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    I missed this one. Wow. Yes, this attorney is hardly even infamous in his own community, let alone nationally or internationally. A local newspaper reported about the sanction of the attorney for false advertising. That is hardly the equivalent of Pol Pot or John Wayne Gacy. To compare them says volumes about the author, but not about the subject of the attack.jawesq 01:54, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    So what exactly is your objection? First, you seem to make allegations about tone of the article. Admittedly, the article was crap before, but that can be addressed. Then when someone tries to address the tone, and claims that the tone can be addressed just like an article on Pol Pot, you switch your arguments to notability. While noone is going to claim any parallels with Pol Pot with regard to notability, if your objection is that the article is nothing more than an attack article, it is a valid comparison. --Bletch 02:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    This lawyer is known only in his local community - you could not find any national, let alone international, articles about him, so he is hardly famous or infamous. To compare him to Pol Pot and John Wayne Gacy is beyond absurd. It's crazy. And Misplaced Pages guidelines say that in such a situation, to immediately delete poorly sourced (or unsourced, as this article was when it was AfD) statements that are 'negative in tone'. This clearly meets that. Speedy Delete criteria says the same, and to speedy delete if there is no way to make this NPOV. And there is indeed NO way to make this NPOV, since the sole purpose of it was to attack the lawyer.jawesq 02:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    While the notability is certainly debatable, the prospect that there is no way to make an article NPOV is fundamentally absurd. There are certainly ways to make any article comply with WP:NPOV, whether you are talking about Jim Shapiro, George W. Bush or Goatse.cx. --Bletch 02:14, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    • Well, that is one of the guidelines for speedy deletion. And in fact, there is no way to make this NPOV because the entire purpose of the article is to broadcast to the world how a local Rochester attorney is sleazy. jawesq 02:17, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

    • For the record, I was NOT "comparing" Shapiro to Pol Pot. I'm using Pol Pot, the article, as an example of one filled with verifiable facts that paint the subject in a negative light, yet does not violate our NPOV guidelines, and saying that there is no reason Jim Shapiro, the article, can't do the same. Powers 13:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

• Endorse deletion, attack page. Blanking was also correct per WP:BLP by extension, althoguh I have suggested we clarify this in WP:BLP. Sorry for putting this out of order, but I don't want to get mixed up with the lengthy text below. Just zis Guy you know? 08:03, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep deleted, for the same reason -- it's an attack page. There is no reliable source that can be referenced here. "Overlawyered", although a political page, may sometimes be refereneced for an opinion, but not as the sole 'reliable' resource. The other sources were a local paper and a local court sanction of the attorney. This attorney is not known outside his local community. To disparage him like this on Misplaced Pages is to make him known, in a purely disparaging way, to the whole world. It is not encyclopedic. Rather, it is tanatamount to a gossip rag. jawesq 01:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

This was from WIkiquote administrator, where a similar attack was waged on this lawyer, linking to the WIkipedia article:

• Delete. Jim Shapiro must not use the Internet to get business, as this ill-sourced attack page has been around for nearly two years. Our article was created only 1 day after the WP article was created, and the second WP edit was made 3 minutes later to add the WQ box link, strongly suggesting that both article creators are the same person. The sole external link provided in the WQ article appears to be a squirrely personal website with no provenance. (I've listed some details about it in the AfD for the WP article.) All in all, this looks like a set of bad-faith editing by someone with an axe to grind. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:16, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

  Speedy delete, per discussion below. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:27, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

  I also want to point out that the article that was set for speedy deletion had no citations, so how the author can claim every word was cited is beyond me. IT simply is not true. He only added citations after it was called an attack piece. And none of those references are reliable, therefore it meets the speedy deletion guideline. One cannot make an attorney known only in his local community notable. Moreover, one cannot under WIki guidelines write an article about a non-notable individual that is purely disparaging. A number of people weighed in on this, explaining why it merits speedy deletion. The article was purely a hit piece.jawesq 01:50, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

• Keep deleted, it should have been speedied anyway --mboverload@ 01:27, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep deleted First off the speedy deleltion was correct on its face. The purpose of the article as written was an attack on Shaprio, consciously or otherwise. It's entire purpose was to show Shaprio in all his sleazy glory. The article made no claims of his being notable. The original external links did not even work and the original article was citation free. 2ndly, not every article is worth saving. The hallmark of a good writer or editor is the ability to recognize this fact. Even a well written article (which stylistically the last version was not) and well researched article cannot make an non-notable lawyer notable. Adding links is not going to change that salient little fact. And face it, Shapiro is not notable. Name me one major case he has won. Just one. Name me one major scholarly article he has published. Just one. You cannot for he has not done either. Your claim that he is notable due to his commericals. This is laughable on its face. You will find, if you care to look, that similar late night PI commercials have run in every major market at one time or another. Can you prove that Shaprio was the first to run such commericals (that might make him notable)? I know Shaprio isn't the first lawyer to be on the wrong end of a legal malpractice case, so that is hardly notable. Someone valiantly tried to source the article. Can anyone prove the links reliable? Can anyone prove the archived videos were not tampered with in anyway to make them more egregious? Overlawyered.com has been known to leave out important details in its reporting (e.g. its touting of the TTP study without disclosing TTP was an interested party who refused to reveal its sources and methods so that its study could be independently verified). Can you prove it's "just the facts" given Overlawyer.com's history of omission of pertinent facts? I don't think so and Overlawyer.com, in my opinion, forfeited its right to trustworthiness with its academic slight of hand. Six people have weighed in saying that speedy deletion was in order. That's 6-3. If its by majority rule consensus, then the issue is settled. I am sorry to break it to the original author and others, but we are not dealing with a lost masterpiece by William Faulkner here. The article as originally written was an attack without citation or sources. It isn't worth reviving and no amount of editing and adding citations and sources is going to make poor ole Jim notable. Its nothing personal. That's the plain and simple facts Gfwesq 01:41, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Gfwesq, I have a healthy respect for the amount of time you and your spouse have available to write about this issue, but some of the statements you've made really aren't correct. First of all, the speedy deletion criterion refers only to unreferenced articles, which this one no longer was. Second of all, newspapers are reliable sources, local or otherwise. They may not be reliable for scientific or legal analysis, but the references being sourced here were not being used for either of those, merely to verify the facts of the legal case. Third, proving that a video has not been altered or modified is well beyond the scope of WP:RS. Fourth, overlawyered.com can be replaced if there are valid objections to it, but no one gave anyone a chance to do so. Fifth, you demonstrate a distinct lack of understanding of the AfD process; it is most certainly NOT a vote and not subject to majority rule; that the "vote" was 6-3 is irrelevant and does NOT represent a consensus, especially since it had been up for less than 24 hours. I am sure you and your spouse are fantastic lawyers, but I would suggest that you spend some more time around Misplaced Pages to learn our processes before you start talking about 6-3 majority consensuses and similar things. Powers 02:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Comment I still believe this was a re-creation of material that had previously been voted for deletion before; there's no other way I would have been aware of Mr. Shapiro's advertising. But I haven't been able to locate the previous deletion debate or the previous article. I'd be very interested if anyone finds it. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC) P. S. OK, I'm completely baffled. The "view and restore deleted pages" history currently goes back to "21:02, 25 September 2004 . . Bletch (Talk | contribs | block) (Creating article)". I could have sworn that yesterday the history was much shorter and showed the article as having been created recently. I can't find anything in the page history that indicates that the article was ever deleted. I hope someone wiser in the ways of Mediawiki can figure out or not I was simply mistaken in believing there was a previous deletion debate and deletion of this article. If the article has actually existed since September 2004 then it seems bizarre to me that there would be any urgency about not letting it exist for five more days. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:42, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep deleted even though I think Tony Sidaway's action was high-handed, premature, and inappropriate. Although I believe the article was created as an attack page, I believe that when Tony Sidaway deleted it, it had been acceptably edited into a good short article—about a person of no great importance—and there was no good reason not to let the AfD run its course. I further believe that despite the negative tone of the article, well, it was reasonably well-sourced and factual; I won't say Shapiro deserved it, but this was no Seigenthaler affair. I voted "delete" for two reasons: first, I believe but have been unable to find evidence that it was a re-creation of previously deleted material, second, I believe Shapiro was only locally notable, and only for his ads, and they didn't need a whole article; I believe it is exactly parallel to Ernie Boch, in which the article was deleted— Misplaced Pages:Votes for deletion/Boch but Boch was properly noted briefly in the article about his home town. But the bottom line is, I voted to delete, and it appears to me that there was a consensus to delete, and the AfD had been running for long enough to make some kind of judgement about it. If I were to vote to relist this, it would be just to express my disapproval of Tony Sidaway's action... and I think that would be perverse and verging on WP:POINT. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:08, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
  • 16 hours is rather short for an AfD, don't you think? And technically, this entire deletion review is to judge whether the Tony Sidaway's action (specifically, the speedy deletion) was appropriate. It's not a comment on Sidaway himself, true, but if you disapprove of the deletion, you shouldn't hesitate to say so. Powers 11:31, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
    • I disapprove of Tony Sidaway's action but do not think overturning it would serve any purpose relevant to building an encyclopedia. I have clearly expressed my opinion of the action above. My position is that the article should indeed have been deleted, but not for the specified reason and not in the manner in which it was deleted. Fait accompli, water over the dam, facts on the ground, WP:SNOW, WP:IAR, etc. I don't like it, but I don't think overturning and relisting would re-mould Misplaced Pages any nearer to my heart's desire, so I prefer to put up with it.
    • I'd suggest that those who think Shapiro is an important bit of Rochester lore might try inserting about three sentences (with supporting links) into the Rochester, New York article, probably in the Culture and Recreation section, limiting them to the content of his advertising and not his conduct as an attorney. I suspect that would fly. (If Shapiro and his ads are not important enough to mention in that article, then they're certainly not important enough for a standalone article.) Something along the lines of "Attorney Jim 'The Hammer' Shapiro's late-night television ads are locally proverbial. They include violent imagery of explosions and crashes, and Shapiro shouting 'I may be an S.O.B., but I'm your S.O.B.!' and 'I cannot rip the hearts out of those who hurt you. I cannot hand you their severed heads. But I can hunt them down and settle the score.'" (I don't feel sufficiently knowledgeable about the Rochester region to attempt this myself.) Dpbsmith (talk) 12:41, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
      • That's fair enough. =) As for merging it into the Rochester article, it's tempting, but the darn thing is getting unwieldlily long, and there's no obvious place to put it (I see your suggestion of Culture and Recreation, but there's no similar content there with which to group it; adding this would make it look consipicuously like content merged from a deleted article  ;) ). Powers 13:04, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
        • Understand that it's not exactly clear where to put it in the Rochester article. There's a subsection on "vernacular," so maybe a subsection on "local color" would fly. I have no idea whether this link will work: If not, try the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle's search feature and type Jim Shapiro into the "Search for" field. I get three or four of relevant hits. I can only read the first few sentences without paying, but they seem to support Rochester-area notability/notoriety. One of them is about a bit of philanthropy: "A Rochester lawyer, famous locally for his outlandish television commercials, has once again demonstrated that appearances can be deceiving.. James Shapiro, better known as Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro on television advertisements in which he promises to squeeze cash out of drunks and insurance companies, has donated a 14-acre parcel..." Another says "four former clients of suspended lawyer Jim 'The Hammer' Shapiro have sued him, claiming that he botched their personal injury cases" Another says "Tough-talking personal-injury lawyer Jim "The Hammer" Shapiro, known for his in-your-face TV commercials with images of falling bodies and promises to deliver top dollar to accident victims, recently got some legal comeuppance." Amusingly... and strongly suggesting he's locally proverbial... is his appearance as a fake answer in a news quiz: "Here's a quick quiz on last week's news: Local/state. 1. Whose office will soon be at the former Palmyra Town Hall? a) a local doctor b) Jim 'The Hammer' Shapiro c) WZXV 99.7 FM d) the New York state historic marker program." I repeat that if he doesn't rate a mention in Rochester, New York, it's hard to believe he rates a whole article. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:23, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/MONGO (second RfC)

This was actually close to a week ago, but still, is it regular for RfCs to be deleted without warning? Granted, the talk page had become less about MONGO and more about accusations of trolling by complainers, but regardless, the thing should be kept as a step in dispute resolution. There are a number of reasons that it should be kept on that line, as evidence of good faith or lack thereof by either or both "sides", but the base point is that there is no real reason to delete it. I think calling the discussioin page a flame war is a little stretch, especially considering that the one's doing the flaming were the ones who were saying it was meritless and should be disregarded anyway. Karwynn (talk) 13:00, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

• Restore. I don't see why, if the talk page "is nothing but flames", the project page ought to be deleted. Powers 13:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: The section was curiously not archived at WP:AN/I, but the last edit that I found was located here. The rationale by the admin who speedied it was "was endorsed by two users who "supported off-wiki personal attacks and the revealing of personal information ... As such, there are no valid certifiers to this RFC." Thus, my deletions." Which is completely and utterly false, of course, as it was endorsed by three users, none of which "supported off-wiki personal attacks" or "revealing of personal information." I'm not taking a further position on this one at this time, but people who do decide to take a position should be aware of the ongoing revisionism surrounding the dispute. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:16, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Restore, as bringer-upper(?) If I can't vote, someone please strike this out. Karwynn (talk) 13:19, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Additionally, the RfC was not about undeleting the ED article, so people swooping in and saying "You can't make article decisions based on what you like, it's got WP:V problems" etc. are missing the point. Karwynn (talk) 13:25, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
• Restore - Every rfc should be preserved about MONGO because he has alienated so many people by his arbitrary reverts and deletions without explanation, and because he does not follow Misplaced Pages own rules. He never investigates complaints thoroughly and makes superficial judgments. Those who are not in the special group of editors he protects need to have some way of voicing their opinion and having that record preserved. This is true because there is no sign that MONGO intends to change his aggressive behavior. Why should he always receive special consideration by the admins? Orangehead 13:43, 31 July 2006 (UTC)