Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Imaginatorium/Cardarelli

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was keep. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:57, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User:Imaginatorium/Cardarelli[edit]

This is an attack page, contrary to WP:ATTACK, in that its purpose is to find fault with a particular author and his works. The author and publisher are both quite respectable and much of the criticism seems to be OR. This has been the subject of discussion elsewhere. I am especially unhappy that some of my commentary has been cut/paste here without attribution from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aum (unit). I do not wish to be associated with this page as it seems too derogatory and so there are WP:BLP considerations. Independent reviewers such as respectable senior scientists seem to be generally content with the author and his work and it's not our place to engage in OR to prove otherwise. Andrew D. (talk) 17:25, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: This is a page in my user space. I am using it to assemble evidence suggesting that the Cardarelli book is not a factually reliable source with regard particularly to historical units. There is very ample evidence of this in the tables of "old Japanese units" alone, which are a joke. No doubt many "senior scientists" and the like are content with Cardarelli's work in general, and I see no reason to doubt that the bulk of the book, concerned with the scientific units of the title is accurate. I cast no aspersions whatsoever on Cardarelli's good intentions, but I suggest that it is clear that he has copied unthinkingly chunks of anecdotal material of extremely dubious validity.

Davidson seems upset that I copied the references he gave to satisfactory reviews. Well, I grovel in abject apology. I was under the impression that all material contributed to Wikipedia was done so on the condition that it could be used, at least on WP. I will remove all of the bytes that I can trace to Davidson's fingers immediately. Imaginatorium (talk) 18:01, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Imaginatorium didn't just copy the links - he copied several lines verbatim, including my own commentary. Cut and paste copying without attribution is generally not acceptable on Wikipedia. Imaginatorium may well not be familiar with this and I'm not especially upset with him as such technicalities are rife and difficult to avoid. But I wasn't happy with the general tone of the page anyway and so the copying was the trigger for this nomination. The background for this is the proposal to delete a stack of other pages and so another deletion discussion seems fair per WP:SAUCE. Andrew D. (talk) 18:07, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I copied (almost all of) the references you gave to reviews of this book. I am unaccustomed to dealing with lawyers, and I imagined that if you were happy to make these comments, which you presumably believe to be fair comments, in one place you would be equally happy to make them somewhere else. I bow to your vastly superior understanding of WP:ALPHABETSOUP. Imaginatorium (talk) 18:28, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have patrolled AFD for many years and it is a hard school for such stuff. See WP:EIEIO... Andrew D. (talk) 20:07, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Keep There is nothing in the page that attacks anyone or anything. The issue is that a new editor created over 90 articles almost all of which are stubs on non-notable topics, and all of which are based almost entirely on a single source. Information about the articles is most easily seen here. The page at MfD is a very reasonable attempt to gather what is known about the source. I added "no index" to the page. Copy/pasted text can be handled with procedures other than page deletion—I think the text has now been removed? Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Yes, this page is a little problematic. It starts It might become a WP page if thought notable, but for now its purpose is to demonstrate that this is not a reliable source for citation. So it is advocacy, but striving to be objective. It's hard to imagine such a page developing into a WP article that wouldn't be bizarre at best, and probably ripe for a snowy AfD. If this were in my userspace, I'd immediately zap the first clause of that first sentence. But it isn't, so I've let it be (though not without comment). ¶ Yes, the page gives a first impression of disdain for the book. But it conspicuously says at the top any positive information is also extremely welcome. It would not be surprising, for example, to discover that the description of old French units is both comprehensive, accurate and useful. True, this is a recent addition; but as the main author, Imaginatorium seems to have followed this policy even before articulating it. With one minor exception, this bunch of edits to the page are mine; for the most part I give more detail on archaic Japanese units of mass/weight [these would have been used by people unaware of the distinction between the two concepts], but at one point I alter Not standard romanisation to Not standard romanisation (though a common and easily understandable way to avoid the risk of having the word mispronounced to rhyme with "plume"). ¶ Let's look at WP:USER. Its nutshellized version reads: User pages are for communication and collaboration. While considerable leeway is allowed in personalizing and managing your user pages, they are community project pages, not a personal website, blog, or social networking medium. They should be used to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute. This page has been used for collaboration: by me, and (trivially) by NebY. I don't want to boast, but I think I may say that the collaboration has been constructive: Imaginatorium's presentation of the material on archaic units of mass/weight impelled me to buy a copy of Koizumi's historical dictionary and do some reading there; the Cardarelli-irrelevant fruits of my labors may of course be incorporated within the article "Japanese units of measurement", which they would, I think, improve. I cannot see how the page is described within "What may I not have in my user pages". ¶ Now the matter of WP:ATTACK, which, rightly, is a policy page. This says: An attack page is a page, in any namespace, that exists primarily to disparage or threaten its subject; or biographical material which is entirely negative in tone and unsourced. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, these pages are subject to speedy deletion. There may be a trivial amount of biographical material; this is not negative. Nobody is threatened; nothing is threatened. Does the page primarily exist to disparage its subject? Imaginatorium did indeed emit some bluster suggesting this. Here's the incriminating nugget: I make no secret of the fact that I would like to demolish the apparently unwarranted reputation of the book. But note that the very same comment continues, and that it ends: Of course what I am working towards is simply a fair assessment of the quality of the book. I believe that the page is an incomplete draft at the latter, and that it has been used for constructive collaboration; and I value attempts to evaluate the reliability of putatively reliable sources that (for better or worse) are widely used in WP. (I note that the nomination says that the publisher is "quite reliable". Certainly Springer is justly renowned for entire series of books. However, it has been inconsistent. More bluntly, it has put out some turkeys. Consider Advanced in Computer Science and Its Applications.) -- Hoary (talk) 02:40, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Canvassing The comments of Johnuniq and Hoary were solicited by Imaginatorium, contrary to WP:CANVASS. Imaginatorium says "I know nothing of the procedures etc here and would be grateful for advice." I advise him that, when he is in a hole, he should stop digging. The quote provided by Hoary above is quite damning, "I make no secret of the fact that I would like to demolish the apparently unwarranted reputation of the book". You should realise that all of this is very public. Johnuniq says above that he has tagged the page as NOINDEX but it's too late. When I Google on such simple keywords as Cardarelli + unit then this attack page appears as the fourth hit, with a higher rank than Cardarelli's own personal website. People routinely search the internet to see what's being said about them and so we have quite strict policies such as WP:BLP, "Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page." I'm not trying to harass Imaginatorium — I'm trying to protect him (and myself) from any such unpleasantness. Andrew D. (talk) 10:33, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, really, this is getting silly. ¶ You say The comments of Johnuniq and Hoary were solicited by Imaginatorium. Click on that incriminating (not!) one link, and you'll see that he mentioned it in a single, obscure talk page in userspace. No mention of it on my talk page (and you're most welcome to check the history of this talk page to make sure that I haven't sneakily removed any such notice). (Actually I didn't need to see this, as the Cardarelli page was on my watchlist.) ¶ You say The quote provided by Hoary above is quite damning; perhaps you were so flabbergasted by it that you failed to read the second quote that I put in the same sentence. I apologize for the length of my previous comment, but do please read it. ¶ I'm not so happy that the page, in its current state, is so visible via Google: it won't stay so visible very long, because, well before this particular complaint of yours, User:Johnuniq added "__NOINDEX__" to it. ¶ You point out that WP:BLP says that Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page, but you fail to add that there is virtually no information about Cardarelli in the page, and that very little about WP:BLP seems to be relevant to treatment of the creative works of living people. (If you have a particular WP:BLP concern, do feel free to bring it up.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:01, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have had User:Imaginatorium/Cardarelli on my watchlist since being notified of its existence on 28 December 2014. I linked to the page at WP:Articles for deletion/Aum (unit) on 8 January 201. Johnuniq (talk) 22:38, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I insist on talking about the basic issue, which is that Cardarelli's book includes significant amounts of nonsense. Readers might also notice that in the very first draft of this page (from the history) I said, of the bulk of the book on SI units and suchlike, "...it seems reasonable to assume that except for possible typos and awkwardnesses of English from a non-native speaker, since this material can be transferred from any number of currently available sources, there should be no gross errors." Thus I have no difficulty in believing that "senior scientists" and the like are satisfied with this book, since I imagine they are only interested in these scientific units (of the title). Doubtless they regard it as idle entertainment for crossword puzzle setters to know that a "karus hiri-ichi-da" is 18/16 of a "kiyak-kin", and typically have as much knowledge of Japanese as Cardarelli (or his editor) obviously has, which is to say none. Imaginatorium (talk) 11:26, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Keep – The page seems to have resulted in productive collaboration and is still evolving. I don't think it's necessary to get too excited about the indexing on Google. Now that it's NOINDEXed that will be cycled out soon enough. If it does become an article I will read it. I'm curious, having seen the book in AfD discussions. – Margin1522 (talk) 13:29, 10 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - I don't see how this is construed as an attack page. It is an in-depth analysis of a reliable source. It could also even potentially become its own article, so I think this deletion is a little hasty. If it were an attack page, it wouldn't look like this. — kikichugirl ^speak up! 21:42, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Move to Village Pump - You put this in a userspace, which is not a great place for something as far reaching as this. I honestly would consider posting (or alternatively, linking) to the Village Pump, which is intended for these kinds of talks. Plus, you would gain more opinions and expertise. Cbrittain10 (talk|contribs) 21:51, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.