Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Sweetest Day Hoax

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, this is a canonical example of a WP:POVFORK. I'm sure some (a small subset) of this material can be merged into Sweetest Day. I will userfy the article since the author put much work into it, and again I think that some of this information can be moved to Sweetest Day if it is done in a NPOV way. --- Deville (Talk) 19:28, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Sweetest Day Hoax

This is a WP:POVFORK of Sweetest Day and the creator moved the content from here, apparently because he was unhappy with the edits being made at Sweetest Day. Essentially this article exists to advance the notion that the popularly attributed creator of Sweetest Day was not truly involved in its creation, but rather it was created by a cabal of 12 candy makers. Calling this a "hoax" is an inference based on the primary source The Cleveland Plain Dealer October 8, 1921 and October 8, 1922 editions (see photos here). There simply is no concrete evidence of a hoax here and stating that as fact constitutes original research unless an external source is produced that clearly advances this idea. The only source I've seen so far that supports this notion is the article creator's own website. I've no objection to the factual information from this newspaper article being Merged back into the Sweetest Day article (and as can be seen here I think we were very close to a good version of the article incorporating the newspaper source), but this POVFORK should be Deleted.--Isotope23 14:02, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Merge and Redirect, I agree with Isotope23 in that the "hoax" part should be dropped. "Popular myth" may be more suitable. This info should go under some sort of "Versions of the origins" section in the main Sweetest Day article. Dismas|^(talk) 14:54, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

• Strong Keep. Sweetest Day is one of the most notable hoaxes of the 20th and 21st Centuries. October 8, 2006 will be the 85th anniversary of the first Sweetest Day, which was staged in Cleveland by the Candy Industry on October 7th and 8th 1921. In the beginning (1921), Sweetest Day started out as simple consumer manipulation by the Candy Industry, wherein the 12 Confectioners who constituted The Sweetest Day in the Year Committee co-ordinated advertising, news stories and editorials published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper in order to (A) convince Clevelanders that a new candy-buying holiday was occurring nationally and (B) that they should buy candy for everyone they loved and cared about because everyone else was doing it nationally. The manipulation of Clevelanders' candy-buying habits continued over the first few years, and by 1924 editorials were being published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer informing Clevelanders that Sweetest Day had become a National Institution, and advertisements were calling Sweetest Day National Candy Day. What is perhaps most notable about The Sweetest Day Hoax is that the hoax is still ongoing today, being perpetrated and enhanced by companies such as American Greetings, Hallmark, and Trade Organizations such as Retail Confectioners International. Evidence of the continued attempted manipulation of American Consumers' candy and gift-buying habits are clearly visible in the articles posted on these companies' websites 1 2 3 with the introduction of the phony Herbert Birch Kingston story during the 1990's. The attempts at manipulation can also be clearly seen on the current Wikipedia Sweetest Day site by viewing and comparing the former edits of the Sweetest Day page. The Sweetest Day Hoax has influenced millions of Americans and is a multi-billion-dollar effort on the part of Industry to manipulate the buying habits of Americans over the past 85 years. Wikipedia should allow the new article, The Sweetest Day Hoax, to replace the Sweetest Day article currently posted on Wikipedia. Miracleimpulse 16:29, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Miracleimpulse, this article is a WP:POVFORK and the whole basic premise of it is original research, inference based on primary sources, and unsourced conjecture. The problem is that there are multiple sources purporting a version of events and it is not the place of Wikipedia, or wikipedia editors to decide which one is "right". Wikipedia is here to report what has been written elsewhere. The problem with this article (beyond the fact that it should never have been created; verifiable information should have been left in the Sweetest Day article and editorial concerns worked through on the Talk page... which is what we were doing) is that you've inferred a hoax with no concrete evidence that one exists. You have presented circumstantial evidence and while it is certainly an interesting hypothesis, there are no secondary sources presented that point to anybody else supporting your hoax hypothesis. If there was a body of work out there that supported this hypothesis it would be one thing, but the only source for this that I see is your own website... and the Primary source you've provided only suggests there was a Sweetest Day committee of 12 men in 1921. It in no way suggests a candy-peddling cabal out to push a day of tooth-rotting sales.

The origins of this day are murky at best, with the Kingston 1920's version being widely promoted as the "official" version (and I daresay the popularly accepted version). Leigh Eric Schmidt traces it back to 1910, which also doesn't jibe with your version of events. The Sweetest Day article is small enough to easily take on a section on the origin controversy provided we stay with sourced, verified material and stay away from conjecture and promoting theories or conclusions not supported by the source material. There simply is no reason for a WP:POVFORK here just because you don't want to work on a collaborative version at Sweetest Day.--Isotope23 16:57, 1 September 2006 (UTC) [Note: Recury and Antaeus Feldspar have deleted the article published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer dated 10/15/2005 which states "Dozens of Cleveland's top candy makers concocted the [Sweetest Day] promotion 84 years ago" 3 times from this discussion page (see history). Miracleimpulse 10:20, 5 September 2006 (UTC)]

• Delete, obvious POV fork by disgruntled editor (as his comment, above, shows). The existing article makes ample mention of the widespread opinion that Sweetest Day is a Hallmark holiday. NawlinWiki 16:46, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, WP:OR, the Plain Dealer article cannot possibly support many of the claims in this article. This is also a good time to point out that having multiple sources are preferred to just using one for everything. Recury 19:04, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, as clear a POV fork as they come. Weregerbil 19:20, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, per above arguments. Although Sweetest Day should go as well. Oh, well.-Kmaguir1 08:21, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
• Remerge and delete per Isotope23. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:44, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
• Comment It took less than 2 hours at my local library to find all the information and photos contained in this article. Hallmark has been selling Sweetest Day cards for half a century, and only recently started using the premise of the Herbert Birch Kingston story. American Greetings (which has been located in Cleveland for the past 100 years), like Hallmark, has never reported any of this information about the origins of Sweetest Day. The Herbert Birch Kingston story has zero primary source references. Zero. A Google search for Sweetest Day returns half a million results. A Google search for Herbert Birch Kingston returns 254,000 results. A Google image search, however, returns zero results for Herbert Birch Kingston. Is America really ok with the idea of Hallmark and American Greetings re-writing American History in order to sell greeting cards every 3rd week of October? Miracleimpulse 20:34, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment The salient questions here are:
    1. Is Wikipedia really okay with you deciding that, even though it is debated in the real world which of the stories of the origin of "Sweetest Day" is accurate, you will choose for one of those stories to be presented on Wikipedia as "the truth"? (Hint: read WP:NPOV.)
    2. Is Wikipedia really okay with you deciding that, if other editors will not let you present the side of the debate that you favor as the "truth" of the matter, you will start a different article that basically exists just to let you assert as "the truth" what you were not allowed to assert as truth at Sweetest Day? (Hint: read WP:POVFORK.)
  • By the way, I'd like to point out that you're not only violating the above policies, but Wikipedia:Avoid self-references as well. "The attempts at manipulation can also be clearly seen on the current Wikipedia Sweetest Day site by viewing and comparing the former edits of the Sweetest Day page." Aside from all the other policy violations this assertion represents, there's no reason why it should be assumed that the "current" Wikipedia Sweetest Day article will be "current" when the reader reads it, or that Wikipedia will indeed be relevant and of interest to the reader (since it may not be Wikipedia they're reading it on.) -- Antaeus Feldspar 22:06, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

• This discussion is invalid because Recury keeps removing comments (see history). Miracleimpulse 20:51, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
  • So if I started going off on a complete tangent about, say, clowns and seaweed and red balloons, would you say that my tangent cannot be removed without making the discussion invalid? No? Then we are agreed that irrelevant comments can be removed without invalidating the discussion, and what we disagree on is whether the comments that Recury removed are relevant or irrelevant. Obviously you think they are relevant, or you would not have made them, but all I saw was you arguing yet again that your position on the origin of Sweetest Day trumps what everyone else has to say -- and even if that was true, it would still not be relevant to the question we are discussing here, which is what we should do with almost a textbook case of POV forking. -- Antaeus Feldspar 22:18, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

• Why did the textbook POV fork occur? Answer: Because the editors on the Sweetest Day page insisted on giving a story with zero primary source references (the Herbert Birch Kingston story) predominance on the Sweetest Day page. (text deleted) Both of these sourced arguments completely justify the POV fork. So let's bring the relevant discussion back to this page, shall we? Miracleimpulse 00:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC) (I deleted text here because POV forks are not justified by being "in the right" and the material removed was entirely devoted to proving Miracleimpulse to be "in the right".) -- Antaeus Feldspar 01:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Why did the textbook POV fork occur? Because you were neither willing to accept the consensus or to use legitimate dispute procedures, neither of which (contrary to your assertions) justifies creating a POV fork. End of story. -- Antaeus Feldspar 01:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Saying the candy & card companies are perpetrating a massive fraud because your sources and their story doesn't match is a "novel narrative or historical interpretation" and thus original research. --Transfinite 04:12, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• My sourced arguments have now been removed from this discussion 3 times by Recury and Antaeus Feldspar. Transfinite has also removed sourced information regarding the first Sweetest Day (October 8, 1921) posted on the 1921 event page. At this point I will remind the reviewing administrator of the Wikipedia guidelines for discussion:

<<Discussion>> <<Do not remove or modify other people's comments even if you believe them to be in bad faith (unless the user has been banned from editing the relevant pages or is making a blatantly offensive personal attack). >>

Comment The actions of Recury and Antaeus Feldspar on this discussion page constitute the exact type of deletion/editing of sourced material which caused the POV fork on the Sweetest Day article in the first place. Deletion of sourced material on a discussion page or in a Wikipedia article should be frowned upon and discouraged. The only just solution in this dispute is to allow both pages, Sweetest Day and The Sweetest Day Hoax to remain on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is not paper, so why not allow both articles to co-exist in peace. Miracleimpulse 09:57, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• • Miracleimpulse, what this all boils down to is that you feel your sourced material is superior or "more correct" than the more numerous sources that do not agree with your assertions because your source is the older, or perhaps more "primary" source. That simply is not how it works at Wikipedia. If there are 20 sources that say "Apples are Green" and one older source that says "Apples are Red", then the article on Apples needs to present both pieces of information without making a judgement which is the correct color of apples. We also don't write a Green Apples and Red Apples article just because those supporting Red Apples don't like the way Green Apples are portrayed in the Apples article. The only solution is for this article to be deleted and for a discussion to start at Talk:Sweetest Day about what is the appropriate and factual amount of information to be included from The Cleveland Plain Dealer along with the "Kingston" version and Leigh Eric Schmidt's version. Right now, much of The Sweetest Day Hoax is assumptions, conjecture, and original research that is better suited to your own personal website than a Wikipedia article. I'm willing to discuss the Sweetest Day article content, but Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, so WP:POVFORKing is never the answer to a content dispute. There are other avenues that can be taken to resolve content disputes and if you are interested in pursuing them I (or any other longtime user if you don't trust me) can tell you what these processes are (Antaeus Feldspar alluded to them below).--Isotope23 17:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Personally I like yellow apples: the skin on red apples is often too tough and green apples are too tart. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia: <<This means that there is no practical limit to the number of topics we can cover other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page. There is a kind of feasible limit for individual article sizes that depends on page download size for our dial-up readers and readability considerations for everybody (see Wikipedia:Article size). After a point, splitting an article into separate articles and leaving adequate summaries is a natural part of growth for a topic (see Wikipedia:Summary style). Some topics are covered by print encyclopedias only in short, static articles, and since Wikipedia requires no paper we can give more thorough treatments, include many more relevant links, be more timely, etc. This also means you don't have to redirect one topic to a partially equivalent topic that is of more common usage. A "See also" section stating that further information on the topic is available on the page of a closely related topic may be preferable.>> Why does anyone have a problem with both articles co-existing on Wikipedia? Hmmm... Miracleimpulse 18:09, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Hmm, I've always found Yellow to be meally... too overbred... again, read WP:POVFORK. You are quoting from Article size and Summary style, neither of which are the case here.--Isotope23 18:46, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Further Comment Please temporarily protect The Sweetest Day Hoax article from deletion of all sourced material and photos. Thank you. Miracleimpulse 10:00, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment, put it under vandalism protection when nobody has edited the article other than you and Dismas (who simply formatted some dates)? Sorry, but that makes no sense.--Isotope23 13:08, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Hoaxes often involve suppression and management of information, which is exactly what was happening with the edits on the original Sweetest Day page resulting in the POV fork. Although all information posted in The Sweetest Day Hoax article is readily available at many Public Libraries, none of it has ever been published before to help make people aware of the methods used by advertisers and the Candy Industry to engineer the beginnings of Sweetest Day. The relentless deletions and re-wordings on the original Sweetest Day article constitute just such information suppression and management. There can be little doubt that Industry will continue their efforts at insidious deception and information management on The Sweetest Day Hoax page just as they have on the Sweetest Day page. The request for protection is fully justified. Miracleimpulse 17:30, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Commment No, my edits were to put the article in line with WP:NPOV and remove assumptions and conjecture that were being made. I've said this multiple times, but I will say it once more: you are drawing conclusions from the newspapter article that are not explicitly stated in those articles you've used as sources. The fact that none of the information you've cited has ever been used by anyone writing a piece using these primary sources as the basis for an article advancing the idea that Sweetest Day is a hoax started in 1921 makes this whole contention a text-book case of original research and thus not suitible for a Wikipedia ariticle. Furthermore, you are requesting protection for an article under the assumption that at some point someone is going to come along and engage in, as you've called it, information suppression and management when this has never happened in the article. Pages don't get protected against the assumption that at some point someone may edit them; that is the whole point of Wikipedia. You've created an article and now anyone can come alone and edit it provided they cite sources. Please read WP:OWN. Articles don't even get protected against the assumption that they may be vandalised. Protection is only used if and when it has been demonstrated that an article is being repeatedly vandalised and protection is the only way to stop that vandalism. Since the only edits to this article have been by you (other than me nominating it for deletion and User:Dismas doing minor wikification) there is no reason to protect this. Calling for protection is another exercise in jumping to assumptions and conclusions that are simply not justified or supported by the relevant data available.--Isotope23 18:46, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response <<The fact that none of the information you've cited has ever been used by anyone writing a piece>>The October 15, 2005 article from The Cleveland Plain Dealer which states that "Dozens of Cleveland's top candy makers concocted the [Sweetest Day] promotion 84 years ago" has been edited out of this discussion 3 times. So let's put it back in again right here:

Idea behind Sweetest Day was to push candy, not love Saturday, October 15, 2005 Bill Lubinger Plain Dealer Reporter - Today will be sprinkled with cards and flowers, dinner dates and sex toys. - Except Sweetest Day wasn't supposed to be a day for lovers, but a day for lovers of sweets. - Dozens of Cleveland's top candy makers concocted the promotion 84 years ago and it stuck, although it never became as widely accepted as hoped. - "Sweetest Day is extremely regional," said Van Billington, spokesman for Retail Confectioners International. "It basically follows a path from Detroit to Buffalo." - The candy men of Cleveland proclaimed an annual "Sweetest Day of the Year" as a touching way to spread happiness -- not just for family and friends, but orphans and newsboys, too. - What better way to give 'em some sugar than with -- big shock -- candy, "because it has an appeal for everybody, rich and poor, old or young." - Chocolatiers delivered thousands of candy boxes to the needy. To the rest, they sold their product with outlandish claims. - In a special four-page Sweetest Day spread in The Cleveland Plain Dealer on Oct. 8, 1921, they pitched the benefits of confectionery delights. - They promoted everything from almond creams to fruit-centered milk chocolates, as if touting seaweed extract and fish oil. - "Scientists Say Man Can Walk Mile on Power Furnished by One Ordinary Caramel," reads one of the headlines. And did you know, the manufacturers fudged, that animals love candy, too. "Furthermore, most authorities agree that it is good for them." - Horses and dogs are especially keen on chocolate-covered varieties, they insisted. (No mention that chocolate can be toxic to a dog - even chocolate Labs.) - Candy makers wisely used the event to dispel popular myths that apparently hurt sales: Glucose doesn't contain glue, they informed readers, and the product isn't made from horses' hooves or coal tar. - Maybe they got one fact right, though. - "We are known as the greatest nation of candy eaters," the masters of marzipan bellowed proudly in print. "It has been said that all the rest of the world combined eats less candy than we do." - How sweet. - News Research Director Patti Graziano and and Deputy News Research Director Mary Ann Cofta contributed to this story. - To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: - blubinger@plaind.com, 216-999-5531

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, being the instrument by which Sweetest Day was foisted upon Cleveland by the Candy Industry, is the ultimate source on Sweetest Day. Who would know better that Sweetest day is a concocted promotion than The Cleveland Plain Dealer? They helped concoct it!

• Comment OK, and this could be referenced in the article, but again your current version makes assumptions and conjecture that is still is not backed up, even by this article. Even then, it can't be "the only" version represented in the article because this is not the universally accepted version of events. WP:NPOV makes room for all versions to be represented. This should be moved to the discussion page of this AfD... just to make it easier to focus on the discussion here.--Isotope23 19:45, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: Miracleimpulse, you are like a motorist who has been caught speeding and who thinks that as soon as he explains that it was entirely the fault of that idiot in the Chevy Nova he was stuck behind for twenty minutes, who made him so late he had to break the speed limit to catch up, the traffic cop will say "Oh! You're clearly right! The need you were put under by someone else's wrong action completely justifies your own violation of the speed limit!" and tear up the ticket. The motorist is not being realistic and neither are you. Even if things at Sweetest Day were exactly as treyf as you claim, that's a reason to seek mediation or to file a Request for Comments. It is not a justification for starting a POV fork. -- Antaeus Feldspar 12:54, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Right Feldspar. Just like Sweetest Day was founded by candy store employee Herbert Birch Kingston and his small group of friends doing good deeds for the forgotten. It's all in the wording and context, isn't it. There are two distinct points of view about Sweetest Day in our society: one held by those making profit from the event that it is a legitimate holiday, and one held by others that Sweetest Day is a made-up Hallmark Holiday. These two points of view cannot co-exist within the same article without one being cancelled out, because one is true and the other false. The truth does not attack a lie; it simply replaces it. Wikipedia is not paper. Both points of view should be allowed on Wikipedia until one just disappears. Miracleimpulse 17:30, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Miracleimpulse. Both points of view should be allowed on Wikipedia, if they are both significant points of view. However, the place for both points of view, contrary to your assertion that they "cannot co-exist", is Sweetest Day. Other projects, like Wikinfo, are free to make their own choices about giving differing POVs their own articles; Wikipedia has already made a choice to disallow such things. "Wikipedia is not paper" does not overrule "Wikipedia is not a soapbox" or "Wikipedia is not a free host" or "Wikipedia is not a directory"; I fail to see why you think it overrules WP:POVFORK. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:12, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment These two viewpoints must co-exist within the same article because they are both sourced to varying degrees. "True" and "false" in this case are subejctive statements of a certain point-of-view. Neither can be objectively proven with the data and sourcing that has been provided at this time. I'm not trying to be unWP:CIVIL here, but I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works as well as how a logical, factual, neutral article should be created.--Isotope23 18:46, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Is it really possible to have a neutral point of view on a hoax? We will never agree on this issue, which is why the topic of Sweetest Day deserves two articles on Wikipedia. By the way, how is it you can watch this site all day and respond within minutes? Don't you have a job? Or is this your job? Just wondering... Miracleimpulse 19:03, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Miracleimpulse, that is a violation of WP:CIVIL and you would be well-advised to apologize for it immediately. Comment on the content; comments about the contributor are frowned upon and scurrilous insults like "Don't you have a job?" and insinuations like "is this your job?" are not permitted. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:12, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Kind of like your comment comparing me to a wreckless deceptive weasely motorist? In bartending we say "What goes around comes around." I am willing to go public with my identity on this page. My name is Robb Thomas and I live in Chicago (where we never heard of Sweetest Day until Hallmark started marketing Sweetest Day cards here). Are you and Isotope and Transfinite willing to do the same? Miracleimpulse 19:36, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

• No, there is no equality between your scurrilous innuendo and the comments I made earlier today. My comments concerned your behavior, not unfounded speculation about you having a financial motive affecting your editing. As for your "deceptive weasely motorist", I would not say that the motorist in my example was deceptive or weasely -- he honestly thinks that it is all right for him to violate the speed limit, if someone else did something they should not have which "forces" him to speed to make up for it. If he has a flaw, it is less deception than self-deception. In contrast, you made a clear accusation of dishonesty. That is a violation of WP:NPA. -- Antaeus Feldspar 20:07, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
• Comment, yes it is absolutly possible to have a neutral point of view on this topic... and since you seen to be insinuating it is my "job" to edit this article... <start sarcasm> I created a user account here over a year ago, racking up a number of edits on a myriad of articles, and learning the policies and guidelines here just because I knew you would come along and create this article and my whole history of edits is a machavelian attempt to hide my true purpose... to edit this article! How did you ever figure it out</end sarcasm>. I know that wasn't WP:CIVIL, but I couldn't resist. No need for an apology... I have a thick skin... like the chocolate casing on a Rollo candy...--Isotope23 19:45, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Conclusion Until I began editing the Sweetest Day article on Wikipedia, the article was a basic copy (nearly word-for-word) of the Industry Spin used to sell this holiday on countless websites across the internet. Once I began posting actual facts and photos about the subject, editors appeared out of nowhere to contradict, alter and delete what has turned out to be primary sourced information and photos. To date, the only source referenced on the Sweetest Day page is The Cleveland Plain Dealer and that reference is to the information I posted which remains on the site. To my knowledge, American Greetings, Hallmark, and Retail Confectioners International have never been listed even as secondary sources on the Sweetest Day page. Lacking any type of primary source reference whatsoever, it can only be concluded that the Herbert Birch Kingston story of the origins of Sweetest Day is a cleverly crafted industry-generated hoax, the purpose of which is mass deception about the true origins of Sweetest Day in order to increase sales of candy, greeting cards and other Sweetest Day-related products. This being the case, the Wikipedia article entitled The Sweetest Day Hoax is indeed a distinct new topic on Wikipedia which will provide accurate and sourced information on the real origins of Sweetest Day to Wikipedia readers for years to come. I would like to thank Wikipedia for the opportunity to post this information on their site and offer a word of caution: that Wikipedia can be and has been used by industry to promote disinformation about topics such as Sweetest Day. I also look forward to working with other interested Wikipedians to present all new information which comes to light regarding The Sweetest Day Hoax.

Thank you again and best regards,

Robb Thomas Miracleimpulse 22:46, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

"it can only be concluded that ..." Once again, incorrect. Someone who looks at the evidence might indeed conclude that the official story of Sweetest Day is an industry-concocted hoax. But then again, they might not. It is neither your duty nor your right to try and step in and declare which they will do -- declare your own view "the truth" and everything else falsehood. -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:02, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

• CommentAntaeus has it exactly right. This conclusion is yet more unsourced conjecture and misrepresentation of the facts (for instance, Sweetest Day draws on many sources listed in the External links section, they are not listed in the "Sources" section because it would be redundant to do so. At this point I'm tired of reiterating the same points over and over and too many editors have spent too much time on this discussion. Bottom line, this is a clear WP:POVFORK and should be dealt with as such.--Isotope23 03:38, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Final Comment All primary sourced information shows Sweetest Day to be an industry-generated hoax and the subject should be reported as such on Wikipedia and elsewhere. RT Miracleimpulse 16:05, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment "All" meaning 1 newspaper article (that is a primary source) and "industry-generated hoax" being your interpretation of what was written in said article... you are filling in the blanks here with your own views and interpretations and that goes against WP:NOR. Beyond that, you keep harping on this "primary source" thing... please read Primary source. Having supporting secondary sources is preferable. The one secondary source you've supplied (the Bill Lubinger article) is interesting and should be incorporated into the Sweetest Day article, but in this case too you are reading more into it than it actually says and using it to "support" a hypothesis that it does not support.--Isotope23 16:27, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Response Incorrect, Isotope23. All means All. You are assuming that all primary source information has been posted, and it definitely has not. The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides a treasure trove of primary source information on the origins of Sweetest Day beginning in 1921. The Sweetest Day Hoax article can and will be expanded exponentially using these sources. As is stated on the first edit summary, The Sweetest Day Hoax article is a work in progress (like all Wikipedia articles). Also, you are overlooking the US Census documents which have been posted that are primary sources of information. Meanwhile, the Herbert Birch Kingston story on the original Sweetest Day page (and all the other countless places it appears on the internet) remains unsourced in any way, primary or secondary. As a matter of fact, it seems like all editing on the original Sweetest Day page has stopped at a rather pathetic stage. What's up with that? Miracleimpulse 19:10, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment well, by all means... if you have "primary source information" that has not been posted here or in the article yet, that specifically proves this day was a hoax created by the 12 individuals you feel are responsible for it and refers to them as "founders" of Sweetest Day, then what are you waiting for? I for one welcome you to produce this evidence if it exists so I can stop wasting my time here... As for the census data, I'd already seen all that during the original AfD of Sweetest Day and I'm at a loss to see what you think that proves. It shows that he exists, that he resided in Cleveland, that he worked in advertising, and at some point he apparently owned a confectionery shop. How is that at odds with the popular mythology of "Herbert Birch Kingston, a philanthropist and candy company employee..." Candy companies employ advertisers. Anyone can be a philanthropist. The census data proves nothing either way... other than his exsitence, residence, and employment. As for sourcing, the current article is sourced by primary and secondary sources. I'm tired of explaining this... so I'll leave it at that. If you have problems with sourcing of information on other websites, I suggest you contact them. The original Sweetest Day page has stopped because it is finally to a point where it contains only information that is verified. You may think it pathetic, but IMO this is probably the best version of this page that has ever existed at this namespace... though it would be improved by Leigh Eric Schmidt's version of Sweetest Day from his book.--Isotope23 20:04, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
• What a brief, concise statement by you Miracleimpulse. Possible sockpuppet or imitator, maybe? Wait, he said that was the final comment so all of these after it don't count. Recury 16:30, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Response It says final comment Recury, not final response. Casting doubt on my identity will not work, since I am the only one of us proud enough of my contributions on Wikipedia to reveal my identity. Who are Isotope, Feldspar, Transfinite and Recury? Who knows. Robb Thomas Miracleimpulse 19:10, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Hey, don't think you can boss us around just because you are the singer for Matchbox 20. Recury 19:17, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

The lead singer of Matchbox 20 is Rob Thomas, only one "b." I do wonder, however, if he also thinks Sweetest Day is an industry-generated hoax. Someone should take a poll. Sweetest Day, Holiday or Hoax? What do you think the results would show? RT Miracleimpulse 19:30, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Overwhelming indifference? Recury 19:37, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Comment, It doesn't matter who I am. I have a public record of contributions here at Wikipedia that speaks for itself. My real identity has no bearing on this discussion, and frankly, this isn't nearly important enough of a topic that I'm going to suddenly reveal my real name. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm having a bit of a labor problem; lazy Oompa Loompas...--Isotope23 20:06, 6 September 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.