Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Walter Bosley

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. Majorly _{(o rly?)} 13:31, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Walter Bosley

Walter Bosley (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Appears to be violation of WP:COI, does not assert notability, does not cite reliable published sources, contains many unverified statements about working for clandestine organization. Jokestress 05:36, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. For some reason, I can never follow the byzantine instructions to make these work. Please check the other parts of this, especially the log. Jokestress 05:37, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Notability: main claims seem to be thinking that a nine foot tall person could leave no mark on the genetic record and books about transgender Amazons. Whether or not COI, it's not a list of world's biggest idiots just yet. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Callix (talk • contribs) 10:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC).
• Delete and bury under jungle tumulus: Alright, let's start. First off, according to Amazon, the most popular (self-published) book this fellow claims to have written (and I emphasize "claims," since there is no attribution to "E.A.Guest" being Walter Bosley) ranks a whopping 1.8 million on Amazon's sales rankings [1] . There are only 110 Google hits (excluding one of Bosley's own websites), most of which are genealogical posts [2]. A search of the Air Force archival section shows no evidence Bosley was ever in the service [3]. The Redlands Daily Facts article he cites doesn't exist [4]. Need I go on? Fails WP:ATT, WP:COI and probably WP:HOAX as well. Certainly fails WP:BULLSHIT. RGTraynor 17:01, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, at best WP:OR; more likely a hoax, with completely unverifiable sources. --MCB 20:53, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
• Well, you all seem to have reached the consensus that I'm a liar. I suggest you call the Redlands Daily Facts ( and ask for STEVEN SABEL who wrote the article himself which ran on THURSDAY 12 JANUARY 2006 on PAGE C1. You might also want to ask DIANE SHOLLEY of the INLAND VALLEY DAILY BULLETIN who wrote the article about me that ran TUESDAY 3 OCTOBER 2006. The reason your lazy research efforts can't find the article is because it is cleared off the internet after so many weeks, and obviously you do nothing BUT the internet. Also, I recommend you research the AFOSI; do real research and make a phone call. I carried BADGE NUMBER 1911, from April 1994 to June of 1999. In fact, I recently received a call from an AFOSI agent in Los Angeles who knows me: NELSON FINK, assigned to LAAFB, El Segundo, AFOSI Detachment 110, as does SPECIAL AGENT DAVID HARPER. Call the FBI HQ and ask to contact SA LES SZASZ, he'll tell you who I am. Better yet, call my ex-wife LAURA EIMILLER, MEDIA REPRESENTATIVE for the FBI in Los Angeles (That's a good task for you, Jokestress). She hates me, but she'll tell you who I worked for. You can also contact General FRANCIS X. TAYLOR, retired AFOSI commander, former Ambassador at Large for Terrorism at the U.S. State Department and ask him to tell you who I am. You can contact my last commander LT COL JAMES MCDONOUGH. I can provide each of you with a copy of my DD214 discharge paper. What access do you have to USAF records? Oh, you don't have access to AFOSI records??? You may also contact author GREG BISHOP who has checked on my bonafides as a journalist. Oh and Miss Jokestress, you may contact a writer named CINDY ROBERTS who worked for ALIAS, because I was referred to her by the FBI in Los Angeles, and she has used me as a source for a couple of years now for that show and other scripts she has written. If she uses a different last name when writing, I'll gladly provide you with her phone number. And also talk to KEVIN SMITH at kevinsmithshow.com because he's checked me out. Do you people do ANYTHING but internet searches??? That's why you haven't even gathered the basic facts because if you can't find them on the web, you give up! Some encyclopedia! Why couldn't you just ask me? Because it's more fun and makes you feel more significant to be cocksure. You guys really need to get out more often; there's a lot more in the world besides your Google. Go ahead and make fun of the theories about nine-foot-tall men. I'm perfectly OK with that. Go ahead and make fun of my publishing company and the fact that, among OTHER authors, I publish my own works. I'm OK with that, too. Contact CHRISTOPHER SPELLMAN at SPELLMAN PAUL ENTERTAINMENT in LA or New York, he's my agent. Ask me to provide contact numbers for these sources, or ask me to provide better backup for the archeology stuff. But don't be morons when it comes to professional things I can prove or YOU can prove by doing more than a Google on so-called USAF 'archives'. Someone who works for me thought it would be a good idea to have this page up on me, because they believe what I do is interesting enough. I don't need to be on Wikipedia to serve my ego, believe me, but I do not like being called a liar where my professional credentials are concerned, especially by the likes of what I see in your profiles.{Lostcontinentlib 07:04, 22 March 2007 (UTC)lostcontinentlibLostcontinentlib 07:04, 22 March 2007 (UTC)}
• To the above: please understand that notability and importance are not the same thing. Contacting primary sources requires resources that not all people have access to, so primary personal sources do not, sadly, meet the requirements of Verifibility. No one doubts that you exist, but in order to have a properly sourced wikipedia article, multiple, secondary, reliable sources need to be found; ones that talk *about* you, not merely confirm your existance. Without that, there just isn't enough verifiable information for a wikipedia article. Also note that in general subjects are discouraged from writing their own wikipedia articles, under the grounds of Conflict of Interest issues. Please remember importance, existance and notability are not the same. The standards of Notability apply to all articles of wikipedia, they're our last protection against spam in many cases, unfortunately people can and do get caught by that standard, but they're very important to the project. Wintermut3 08:36, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

oh, and also, please refrain from personal attacks, they're unconstructive, may hurt your case and are generally a bad idea. If reliable sources do exist however, feel free to add them to the article, drop me a line at my talk page or mention them here so they can be added. Wintermut3 08:41, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: I can think of no reputable encyclopedia that exists that would take someone's naked, unsupported word for a damn thing (or, alternatively, "call up my friends and they'll vouch for me"); if Mr. Bosley doesn't believe that, he should feel free to contact the Brittanica or Encarta with the exact same information and the exact same lack of verifiable sources, and see if they'd be any more likely to give him his own article. RGTraynor 13:33, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
• I didn't think you'd take the time to really verify anything beyond Google. My sources are officials who can verify the fact of what was entered about me, but because they don't splash it all over the internet, it's not valid. Because they don't 'talk about' me in internet articles, I'm not valid. I didn't write the article. An employee logged on with my email address to create it. Sorry that person violated the 'standards'. I see now. You essentially Google for your facts and go no further. It's sort of like television. Higher ratings mean 'better', rather 'it must be good'. It's all based on popularity, really. Yes, I get it now. By the way, very funny Mr Traynor, putting yourself and Wikipedia in the same class as Encyclopedia Britannica. Remove the article, if you want. It really doesn't matter to me at this point. I recommend you read 'Atlas Shrugged', if you can understand it. Oh, and RG, you state on your own page that grammar and punctuation are peeves of yours? For crying out loud, learn how to spell 'Britannica' correctly in a public forum, OK? That alone makes your contributions to an encyclopedia suspect already.{Lostcontinentlib 15:16, 22 March 2007 (UTC)}

• Comment: Leaving the personal attack aside (I'd recommend a peek at WP:NPA myself), suppose you review the provisions of WP:BIO (governing notability) and WP:ATT (governing verifiability). In particular, the mandatory policy expressed in WP:ATT runs "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is whether material is attributable to a reliable published source ... The burden of evidence lies with the editor wishing to add or retain the material. If an article topic has no reliable sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." (emphasis mine) Further, "Reliable sources are credible published materials with a reliable publication process ... Material that is self-published is generally not regarded as reliable ... Any unsourced material may be removed, and in biographies of living persons, unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material must be removed immediately." As someone who claims to have had a career in the military and law enforcement, you cannot be unaware that rules and standards exist. Meeting these thresholds are fundamental to Wikipedia's standards, and working to meet those standards is a far more productive use of your time here than chastising or insulting us for following them. RGTraynor 15:37, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: Per all the comments above, I will ignore the personal attacks to note one thing. In one of the few published sources cited, the Redlands Daily Facts, you are merely quoted. It is not a biographical interview about you. The threshold for notability is multiple non-trivial works. See WP:N. Please add more published sources where you are the subject of the article. It's a more producitve tactic than attempting to insult people. Thank you. Jokestress 16:46, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
• comment as to the accusations of using only google as a source I can assure you that most of our best articles, in fact many of our articles period, cite published books and scholarly journals. Google is used, along with things like Alexa pagerank (for websites) or Amazon rankings to determine the likelihood of the existance of sources. In an AfD debate, we don't often care what the sources are (beyond the requirements of reliability and verifibility) simply that they exist or could be found to improve an article. For a biography it's not always accurate, but in the abscence of compelling sources, a low number of gHits (especially when news articles are often indexed by Google) is oftentimes indicative of non-notability. This doesn't mean it's a foolproof test, but it does often allow us to either say "woah, this subject has a solid web presence, maybe it's more notable than the article leads on" or confirm that no sources exist. Wintermut3 23:34, 24 March 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.