Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joel Hayward (second nomination)

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 keep. Peacent 05:11, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Joel Hayward

Joel Hayward (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This article has been rewritten at least once, but is still dominated by the controversy surrounding the cynical misuse of a naive and poorly supervised masters' thesis by holocaust deniers. There is not much else to say, because the sources are also dominated by this one event. Per the recent changes to WP:BLP and WP:NOT, I believe this should be merged to a section in holocaust revisionism which gives fuller context and does not pretend to be a biography. The fact that the subject is clearly upset by the way the article has been sued in the past to promote an agenda is also a factor. Guy (Help!) 19:18, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

• I concur. This article is a coatrack for the main issue, not a biography. It is best treated as a possible merge candidate. The amount of detail required would be, I propose, so small as to justify a so-called "smerge". --Tony Sidaway 19:28, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
• Comment From the article talk page: "Dear Groupthink, I think what you have written and others have tweaked is, as it reads at this point in time, fair. Thank you for that. Joel Hayward." Zagalejo 00:50, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep If the disapproval of the subject makes a difference ... DGG 02:19, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• Keep because he doesn't like it? Wow. That's a new policy, where do I find it? Guy (Help!) 08:31, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

  Don't be obtuse, what he obviously meant was "if the subject disapproved before but doesn't now makes a difference..." Groupthink 12:40, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

yes, I don't thing the approval or disapproval of the subject makes a difference one way or the other--his career is out there and we are the ones who can see it objectively, not the subject. DGG 04:01, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

• Keep He appears notable enough, perhaps even without mention of the thesis controversy, though I do not believe such an argument to be necessary. Maxamegalon2000 05:28, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. It's only fair to point out that while I have been accused of making edits to this article (specifically to the pre-OTRS-delete versions) that have been unfavorably biased, I can't help but observe (based on language in the nom and recent edits to the article) that the nom of this AfD appears to be favorably biased toward the subject at hand. Even the blp subject thought my rewrite was fair, and (actually his comments came after an edit by JzG, my mistake) While I do think fuller context is called for (which is why I myself put the unbal tag at the top of the page and added expand tags) I disagree that the thesis controversy dominates. Even if it does, none of the objections raised by the nom or by Tony Sidaway are unfixable. AfD is not supposed to be a soapbox for calling for improvements to an article, it's supposed to be used as a tool to cull unimprovable articles.
  
• I think we need to cut to the heart of the matter. I've been avoiding bringing this up directly, but I think it's past time that the elephant in the room were directly addressed: The last sentence in the AfD nom is very telling. In the wake of the Brandt debacle, is it now WP policy that unless sanctioned by a BLP subject, biographical material on living persons is to be suppressed removed with prejudice? Groupthink 06:23, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• The word suppressed would cause me to ignore your input were I a closing admin, so i suggest you consider a different term. As you will see if you read my nomination, I do not argue for removing of the information (or suppressing it in your terms), I advocate merging it to a wider article which is not presented as a biography, as we are beginning to do wiht more and more "biographies" which are in fact just a document of a single contentious incident. Guy (Help!) 08:34, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• All right, suppressed is too strong a word, but the question's still valid: Are the warts of a BLP off-limits?. As for the coatrack accusation, like I said above, that issue can and should be easily fixed by expanding the later sections of this bio. If Stopped At Stalingrad is worth keeping, then so is this article. Groupthink 12:38, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• I can't answer on behalf of Guy, however in my humble opinion there are widespread concerns about biographies of living persons who are mostly notable for a single event in their lives, especially if that event was unfavorable. At the moment the WP:BLP policy doesn't fully reflect this, not least because there isn't enough consensus. Addhoc 16:03, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The "single event in life" argument is a plausible reason when the event is an unfortunate personal or accidental event. When the article is about a scholar, and the single event is about the validity of his work, that's something else entirely. What does apply & is said below, is that the article has to take into consideration all of his work--I respect JH for wishing his career as a whole to speak for itself. As for personal preference as a factor in keep/delete, that was an unbelievable mistake, and I hope will soon be recognized as such--an open invitation to positive and negative bias: "she's only borderline notable, but she likes the article, so keep" vs. "she's only borderline notable, but she doesn't like what we say, so delete it." Such is normally considered the hallmark of the worst sort of commercial pseudo-journalism, and we properly reject using biographical sources for notability that work in such a way. DGG 04:15, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Comment. Thing is, this article is not in fact a matter of "single event in life." I spent some time doing some research on Hayward today, only serving to confirm my "keep" vote below: Hayward is plenty notable even if the controversy about his masters thesis had never occurred. As it did occur, it is appropriate to include it in this article, but there is plenty more besides that. Getting late here where I am, but I'll add a couple of the pieces I found earlier today before I turn in, and more to follow tomorrow. --Ace of Swords 06:44, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

• Keep for now - per "if Stopped At Stalingrad is worth keeping, then so is this article". Addhoc 16:03, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Military-related deletions. -- John Vandenberg 08:02, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of New Zealand-related deletions. -- John Vandenberg 08:12, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Comments. I wish I'd read WP:COATRACK more thoroughly before chiming in here. If I had, I'd have expressed a good deal more umbrage than I did. First off, WP:COATRACK is an essay, not an official policy. It also doesn't apply. The essay primarily talks about disguised ad hominem attacks; one of the examples it uses is "George Washington visited/slept/worked/ate at XYZ; George Washington was a terrible general and a lousy President, he owned slaves, lied about chopping down a cherry tree, and.... (many following paragraphs all about George with little if anything to do with XYZ)." Well that's NOT AT ALL a fair comparison to my rewrite. Now to be fair, I do agree with the essay's point that it's not fair to put the balancing/expansion burden on others, which is why, despite my desire to be done with this article, I have done some expansion work myself. However, and I cannot emphasize this enough: More can still be done! This article is far from unsalvageable and should be kept. Groupthink 14:44, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep He's a very well known modern military historian. You argue the problem is it is dominated by one event, then suggest subsuming it entirely into that one event. The guy writes military history today, he's very well known outside of the web for his works on Stalingrad. The web reporting on him is dominated by this single event, and now it's proposed Wikipedia have the author eaten alive by one incident. No, he's a military historian of sufficient repute to merit a Wikipedia article about him, not have him shoveled off into the web fracas raised about him as if he didn't exist outside of the internet. KP Botany 15:48, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep While I admit that I do not know which recent changes are being referred to in WP:BLP and WP:NOT, I do not see anything in these two policies indicating that this article should be deleted. I write this recognizing that the entry once lacked balance. While I believe more emphasis should be placed in Mr Hayward's post-graduate/professional work, I think the balance tag can now be removed. We have now a short, well sourced article on a historian of note. Victoriagirl 16:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Notable historian who meets WP:PROF, regardless of the controversy. Active editors on this job have also been working well and hard to improve this article and remove its imbalances, and were doing so even before its nomination for AfD. Let them keep working. --Ace of Swords 21:37, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. A notable subject even without the controversy. With it, even more so. But to merge this with holocaust revisionism would be to ignore the non-controversial parts of this subject's career, to say in effect 'the only interesting thing about this guy is that his Master's thesis caused a furore'. There's more to him than this attention-grabbing topic, and the article is beginning to grow to reflect this. Kim Dent-Brown ^{(Talk to me)} 09:44, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
• Keep Subject meets WP:PROF and notability criteria. He is notable enough through mentions in textbooks on history, and various other publications as well (I will have to source these!) --SunStar Net ^talk 09:49, 21 June 2007 (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.