Talk:David Eller

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]
	This article is supported by the Science and academia work group.

[edit] Verifiability

Negative information about living people is always dangerous, but it's significantly more dangerous when an especially loathsome crime of child abuse is alleged, and even more so when it threatens a person's career as well as his personal life and his liberty.

This article seems to have pretty much the tone of news accounts I have heard. I don't allege that it's a hatchet job. However, it IS sloppy and full of holes. Sloppy writing suggests poor scholarship, not just to other editors, but to readers. Wikipedia isn't about truth, because we can't tell what the truth is. It IS about verifiability, and this article doesn't pass the laugh test in that regard. There's FAR too much in this article that is omitted, attributed to unstated persons, left to guesswork.

The Wikipedia:Verifiability page says:

Be careful not to err too far on the side of not upsetting other editors by leaving unsourced information in articles for too long, or at all in the case of information about living people. Jimmy Wales has said of this: "I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons." ^[1][2]

1. ^ Jimmy Wales (2006-05-16). "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information". WikiEN-l electronic mailing list archive. Retrieved on 2006-06-11.
2. ^ Jimmy Wales (2006-05-19). "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information" (followup post clarifying intent). WikiEN-l electronic mailing list archive. Retrieved on 2006-06-11.

This article only appeared today, and it's the first piece submitted by the author. Consequently, I have not yet commented out all the questionable material; but if this article doesn't get cleaned up promptly, that step should be taken. ClairSamoht 03:36, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Poor article

This is very poorly written. Instead of being a biography it contains only details about the case he was involved with. --196.15.16.20 09:56, 18 January 2007 (UTC)