Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sharry Edwards

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

The result was delete. Mailer Diablo 14:23, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sharry Edwards

I'm sorry about the length of the nomination, but I felt it was necessary so that participants are not fooled by appearances. There are many problems with this article, which is about a person who claims to be able to heal and diagnose people through sound (a problem in itself). First, it was written by the subject's lawyer, AKA "The Vitamin Lawyer" and AKA "High Priest, who pretended to be just a fan on the talk page. He has been disciplined (PDF) for practicing law without authorization in Ohio on her behalf. She has needed a lawyer on many occasions because she is frequently involved in lawsuits. Her bank seized all of her funds in 2004. She claimed that it was because someone took a loan out posing as her. However, I found nothing about it from a reliable source. She claimed that they asked her for the funds for seven years, but the bank refused to provide a copy of some documents (there is nothing about whether she used legal means to answer the charges or force them to give here a copy (if they truly didn't) until after they took the money). The method that they allegedly used to obtain the money sounds scummy, but the bank did win in court, which makes me think her claim of someone else using her identity might be false. Given the frequency of injustices in court systems, this is not certain, however.

Second, while she may have done some legitimate work, or at least some less insane work, she makes many outlandish claims. Here is a quote from an ad for a VHS tape of hers, "Sharry Edwards' uniquely healing voice is quantified at a University as a collection of frequencies with measurable qualities. Now science merges with ancient wisdom through the work of Sharry Edwards. Using her unusual capacities for hearing and toning, Sharry has pioneered an amazing technology that transfers her abilities to anyone who wants to work with sound and the healing arts." Note that the "University" is not given a name. Here is more stuff from a different advertisement, "Sharry created combinations of Frequency Equivalents that dissolve the protective coating around a pathogen so the white blood cells can destroy it." "She is researching to see if the right frequencies, played by select radio stations (even at inaudible levels) may be protective from the effects of biochemical warfare."

She did win the O. Spurgeon English Humanitarian Award. However, it seems to be an extremely obscure award and might even be a scam itself. "Spurgeon English Humanitarian Award" ("O" is omitted to increase the results) only gets 19 unique Google results. Also, it is supposedly for humanitarian work, not bioacoustics, and I was unable to find any humanitarian work that she had performed. John Forbes Nash also received the award, but it is unclear what humanitarian work he has ever done, either. In addition, almost all of the other recipients are involved in new age and alternative medicine, not humanitarian work, including Oscar G. Rasmussen, who is mentioned on Quackwatch for being involved in "Commercial hair analysis... a bogus test used for prescribing dietary supplements." Betty Ford might be the only one who qualifies as a humanitarian of any kind. I suspect that she and Nash may have been given the award to make it seem credible and/or important.

The article claims she was published by the Acoustical Society of America, but the link given as proof makes it seem like she was just presenting a paper at a meeting or conference. Also, who knows what requirements there were, if any? Finally, the abstract makes less crazy claims than her other work, although they are still improbable, "The emerging Mathematical Model being assembled through Human Bioacoustic research likely has the potential to allow Vocal Profiling to be used to predict and monitor health issues from the very first cries of a newborn through the frequency foundations of disease and aging." Some problems may be detectable by voice analysis in the future (throat cancer?), but there are many, many problems that would not affect the quality of a person's voice at all. Also, I would think that it would be especially hard when dealing with newborns, as claimed, since there would be no previous voice sample for comparison.

You might be saying, "Okay, she is involved in some questionable stuff, but maybe she's notable for it." In my opinion, she is not. Also, I think that people have to be exceptionally well known to qualify for an article for being frauds. Her name in quotes gets 710 search results on Google, but only about 240 of them are unique (this is pushing the limits of Google's unique search result reliability, but the ratio of total pages to unique is credible). Of the unique hits, some are the websites that she owns or that her lawyer and his wife own, and many others are directory and advertisement type pages for new age medicine. I did not get any results on Google News, but that happens with a lot of notable people as well as non-notable ones. For all of these reasons, I think that the article should be deleted. Kjkolb 10:54, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - per nom. If she becomes more notable in the future (e.g. by being significantly covered in the media, for good reasons or bad), re-adding her could be considered. --SJK 11:48, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete as vanity - she doesn't appear very notable, and the involvement of the editor with the subject makes this a bigtime breach of the Wikipedia:Autobiography guidelines. Tearlach 12:05, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - not because of the vanity/fruitcake aspect of the article but as failing WP:BIO. Cannot find multiple reputable reviews of her and the best sources are her articles in places like Nexus magazine - Peripitus (Talk) 12:15, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per above. I'm most emphatically not a fan of pseudoscientific woo-woo crap like this, but it's fortunate that in this instance, that's not even an issue, thanks to WP:BIO. -- Captain Disdain 15:33, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete; WP:BIO, WP:VSCA. --MCB 16:49, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, per (the lengthy) nom. Em-jay-es 17:47, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as per excellent nom Bwithh 18:21, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - you had me at "Hello". Artw 21:50, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. LOL, Artw. Well-written nomination, Kjkolb. User:Zoe|^(talk) 22:33, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete with infinite light. Danny Lilithborne 23:34, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

• Weakest possible keep per WP:BIO#10. She and her organisation have been covered in the following newspaper stories:
  • Betty Booker. "Tuning to Frequencies for Healing", Richmond Times - Dispatch, 1997-03-10.
  • John Hughes. "Sound of Success", Sun Sentinel, 1993-04-26.
  Note: the texts of both articles are extremely kooky, in my opinion. I am categorically not endorsing any claims, scientific or otherwise, that she has made. One of her books has been cited in the following professional magazine article.
  • B. M. Thompson, S. R. Andrews (1999-03/04). "The emerging field of sound training". IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 18 (2): 89–96. The entirety of her mention in this magazine article, which is an overview of the work of some unrelated person, is "Sharry Edwards [27], who has the ability to hear in extraordinary ranges of sound, created a method to identify the missing sounds in a person's voice and a machine to generate that vibratory sound in order to bring systemic balance to that person." (page 95)
  In the long chance that this article is kept, it needs to be rewritten with verifiable information from reliable sources. This means that it has to be reduced to a stub, because there isn't that much reliable info about her out there. — Kaustuv Chaudhuri 23:52, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. The criteria for actual scientists are set pretty high. The criteria for crackpot pseudo-scientists shoud be higher still. Wikipedia is not a list of everyone ever mentioned in the press. Reliable sources are necessary, but they ain't sufficient. -- GWO

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 article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.