Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/L. Craig Schoonmaker

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 of the debate was no consensus to delete. Angr/talk 13:16, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] L. Craig Schoonmaker

Is this guy notable enough to have an article on Wikipedia? Surely he's made a lot of different claims on the internet, but does that make him notable? I don't think so. I say delete Science3456 23:52, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

• Strong delete: Short article about a guy that's not very notable Robot32 00:02, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Weak keep pending verification of claims like "invented the term 'gay pride'" (if he did invent it, he's notable, if he just claimed to do so, he's just a pillock), plus if the rather weird-sounding Expansionist Party is notable then so's he, as its presidential candidate in 2000 (though what "self-declared candidate" means I'm not sure). Tonywalton  | Talk 00:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Strong delete This guy is an idiot. He claims this about the ferry-furry distinction: * Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs.

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• Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation.

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• If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers.

• Quote-UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard.

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• I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed!

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• For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else.

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• The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".

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• The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers.

• Quote- YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard".

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• As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong.

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• The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people.

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• Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable.

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• Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you.

No one that makes these kinds of claims should have an article on Wikipedia (or even worse, be elected for the president of the United States)64.194.44.220 00:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Comment well that makes it all abundantly clear. Tonywalton  | Talk 01:13, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Comment wow, hardcore transliterationcruft! Ergot 02:26, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

• • Weak Keep. His presidential bid failed to get off the ground but there is some evidence of his association with the beginning of gay pride [1]. Mentioned in Google books in a couple of books on AIDS. Capitalistroadster 00:58, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
    • His mentions in Google Books are in the "Acknowledgement" sections of two Peter Duesberg books, and that's it. --Calton | Talk 01:41, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per CapitalistRoadster Ruby 01:34, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - non-notable. Starting own political party, running for President, advocating spelling reform, even being an activist are all non-notable. —ERcheck @ 02:13, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

• Delete*I think this could have been speedied (I just came back from a long wiki-break, dont yell at me if I'm wrong) Howabout1 03:43, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete at dubiously nn and unverifiable. At least he didn't claim to have invented the internet. -- Krash (Talk) 13:55, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per Capitalistroadster. Ground Zero | t 00:24, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as unverifiable and highly unlikely to meet WP:BIO. Stifle 00:34, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete unnotable person. Snowball Earth Hypothesis 02:50, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete This guy is not notable now, and likely won't become notable anytime soon. Richard F.

I was notified by email that the article about me was being considered for deletion. I did not write that article, and do not control Wikipedia's behavior. A simple Google or Yahoo search for "craig schoonmaker", however, should suggest that this tiny article should be retained, since such a search produces over 100 distinct mentions, excluding my own webpages and the Wikipedia article and other sources quoting that article. Among the many mentions are an article on the Columbia Journalism School's News Service about my political work regarding Canada(http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/cns/2002-04-30/518.asp); some Italian-language mentions that do not question my role in coining the term "Gay Pride" (http://digilander.libero.it/falcemar/varie/omo/pride.htm and http://www.caffeeuropa.it/attualita/92gay-alemanno.html); a discussion of my work on homosexual separatism that mentions my inclusion (at length, I might add) in the book The Gay Militants by Donn Teal (http://coffeehousestudio.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_coffeehousestudio_archive.html); a mention (with a picture that I did not provide) in a directory of biographies of noteworthy gay men (http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/bios2/scho2.html) that incorporates some info from the Wikipedia article but has other info as well; recognition of my role in questioning the HIV theory of causation of AIDS (http://www.aras.ab.ca/rethinkers.htm); mention by a prominent AIDS Dissident of my role in showing media misdeeds (http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/jlwar.htm); many mentions of my work in spelling reform (my "Correct Pronunciation" dictionary is shown as a resource on many websites) and on, and on. The mere fact that some people may disagree with me on pronunciation or concerning my particular spelling reform does not alter the fact that my system has been mentioned as one of the top Internet websites on the subject. I am in Who's Who in America. I did not put myself forward for inclusion in Wikipedia and frankly, if I have to choose between inclusion in Who's Who in America and Wikipedia, I'll content myself with Who's Who in America. -- L. Craig Schoonmaker, Newark, NJ

• Delete considered the claims posted by the above people. StarTrek 05:51, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per Capitalistroadster and the subject. Kappa 09:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Woodcutting 02:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
• Delete non-notable. Skyraider 21:48, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

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.