Talk:Merl Saunders

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 within the scope of the San Francisco Bay Area WikiProject, a collaborative effort to build a more detailed guide on Wikipedia's coverage of San Francisco and the Bay Area. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
Start This article has been rated as start-class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale.

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 23:46, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removing substandard citations

I added a Citations needed tag because essentially the entire article is sourced only to Merl Saunders' website at the moment. True, I removed two citations that were in the article but they were exceptionally weak, not even remotely meeting the standards of WP:V or WP:RS. One was to an online forum of fans and the other was to a personal essay online. These sources were used only to source that Mr. Saunders actually attended Starwood Festival. Neither substantiated anything in the deleted section beyond that. The inclusion of only one venue, the Starwood Festival, created a situation of undue weight and higher-than-warranted prominence being applied to that venue in Mr. Saunders career.

Additionally, User:Rosencomet has a WP:COI with inserting mentions of Starwood into articles. Rosencomet is the executive director of ACE, the organization that puts on the festival, and he also handles public relations/communications aspects of the organization. I view his insertion of many links/references to the festival or ACE in many articles as linkspam: "...if you have a conflict of interest avoid, or exercise great caution when... Linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam)". If I find such links to be unsupported or inappropriate within the context of an article, I am removing them. This is one of those times. Pigman☿ 02:38, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The citations you deleted did more than just verify that Mr. Saunders "attended" the event. They asserted that the reunion of the Rainforest Band, which had been disbanded for years, took place at the Starwood Festival appearance. The citation was on the website of Muruga Booker, who is a member of the band. You will not find other listings of appearances of the Rainforest Band for years before that event. This makes it notable.Rosencomet (talk) 15:55, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
The Muruga Booker webpage doesn't meet WP:V standards. Please look at it. It isn't a reliable source. I hesitate to draw conclusions from this but I note that the Muruga Booker webpage you are so keen to use as a citation very specifically names a large number of people who have been featured speakers and presenters at your events. This isn't a surprise. The surprise to me was how closely and thoroughly Mr. Booker's list of notable people who have attended these events over the years paralleled your work on Wikipedia. Out of the hundreds of different people performing or presenting at these events over the last 26 years, I estimate between 95-98% of the people on his list have Wikipedia articles you've started or inserted references to Starwood into. This is a remarkably high congruence in my opinion given the number of names involved. The percentage is slightly lower in one musical performer section (the second para) but is still approx 70-80%. I find this interesting. Cheers, Pigman☿ 20:56, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
You say "I note that the Muruga Booker webpage you are so keen to use as a citation very specifically names a large number of people who have been featured speakers and presenters at your events". There's nothing surprising about it. Read the article; it is a list of people Muruga has shared the stage with at Starwood and SpiritDrum. Muruga Booker is a member of Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band. Muruga brought most of the musicians that appeared at the SpiritDrum Festival. They posted an article about their association with the Starwood Festival and SpiritDrum, so naturally the list of people who they played with there includes a lot of people who also had mention of those events in their articles. I'm sure they used the Starwood program booklets, either ones they have or the online versions, for their research. Also, Muruga and the Global Village Ceremonial Band (who include a lot of these folks) have played at Starwood several times, and Muruga has appeared as a speaker at WinterStar.
Yes, I was inspired to write articles about people I had seen at these events who did not already have articles. What's wrong with that? Either I could support their notability, or (like AmyLee, Joseph Rothenberg, Taylor Ellwood, and others) they did not survive. However, there were already articles about Badal Roy, Halim El-Dabh, Perry Robinson, Amampondo, Gaelic Storm, Baka Beyond, and a whole lot of others in that article on Muruga's website, and some have no Wiki article at all. Since I have added mention of Starwood to a lot of articles (though hardly any since the arbitration), which I thought was perfectly legitimate since Starwood is the biggest and oldest event of it's kind, there's no surprise that if Muruga posts an article numbering acts he's shared the stage with at Starwood, those acts would also mention Starwood.
However, as to verifiability, the article is on his website, and every artist can be found in the online program of the event in question on the website of the organization who held the event. Furthermore, the fact that Starwood was the site of the reunion of the Rainforest band is on both websites. Yes, it merely says that the band played there on that date on Merl Saunder's website, but you will not find a gig for the Rainforest band listed ANYWHERE for a matter of years before that date including on Saunder's website.
Unfortunately, there has not been much revision of the Saunder's website since his stroke about two years later. The gigs he had for a while after that Starwood were still "Merl Saunders and his Funky Friends", and though they did begin booking the Rainforest Band a year later (I believe Nelson's Ledges advertised them, and perhaps Hookaville), most of those gigs had to be cancelled. Since the Rainforest Band had to stop playing as such, it is not surprising that there is little subsequent mention of it's reunion. But the information is true. I think mention on the organization's website, the website of a member of the band, and at least verification of the appearance itself on Saunder's website, should be enough to support the fact. And certainly the reunion gig at Starwood 2000 for the band with which Saunders put out the celebrated album Blues for the Rainforest (with Jerry Garcia and Muruga Booker) and Fiesta Amazonica should be mentioned in the article about Saunders, especially since he lectured about the plight of the rainforests at the same appearance. Rosencomet (talk) 16:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)


You are right about one thing, though: the article mistakenly said that the reunion was in 1999, but it was actually in 2000, as both the cited article on the Muruga Booker website and the calendar listing on the Merl Saunders website confirms. Rosencomet (talk) 23:47, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
The overlap between the lists of articles you've worked on or started and the Muruga Booker article at http://murugabooker.com/ace.html isn't just a little or a few names. For example, in one paragraph there are 38 names; there are only 3 of those who you didn't start an article for or work on an existing article. Out of the many presenters and performers at ACE events (there are hundreds), this is a truly remarkable overlap. Strangely, Muruga Booker's list (which he describes as "...a partial list (believe it or not) of speakers who offered classes the years we’ve been at Starwood..." (emphasis mine)) includes Fred Alan Wolf who apparently only appeared at Starwood in 1993, many years before Muruga Booker ever attended ACE events as far as I can see. Perhaps Mr. Booker's website hasn't been updated much but the web page info on that particular article shows it was last updated on Friday, August 03, 2007 2:04:18 PM so I guess someone has worked on it more recently. And, actually, a search through the Internet Wayback machine doesn't show the the Muruga Booker article page existing in July, 2007 so I suspect it is newer than that. (Further investigation shows the page existing in Feb. 2007 but that version isn't indexed by the Wayback Machine yet. Pigman☿ 05:40, 9 January 2008 (UTC))
I've come to consistently question your sources because my experience has shown that you have no clear idea what is valid source for Wikipedia. At a certain point, your ability to invoke WP:AFG becomes impossible to grant. Pigman☿ 05:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Why don't you understand this? I never said that the overlap between the Muruga website article and the articles I've either created or edited is "just a little or a few names". That would be surprising. I have either written or edited articles about most of the presenters at Starwood and WinterStar that I thought were notable enough to merit one, so I would expect that any article by someone else about the notable speakers and entertainers the writer saw or performed with at these events would mostly list people I have written or edited about. That's simple logic. I have also, of course, written and edited a lot of articles about people who have never been to either event. And some of the articles about people who have been there have not survived the notability test, as you know. If you like, I can give you a list of fifty people who's articles I've edited that aren't in the Muruga article, or fifty that were there or at WinterStar that Muruga doesn't mention since they aren't likely to be recognized by those who read his website, but what would be the point? What does the fact that someone who posted an article on the Murugabooker website about ACE and the acts they've seen and/or performed with at its events have to do with verifiability, regardless of how many of the people it mentions have articles I've contributed to?
Also, Muruga and members of his band and family have been coming to Starwood since before their first appearance on stage, at least since the 1997 appearance of Babatunde Olatunji, so one of them might well have been there the year Fred Alan Wolf was there. However, I don't find his name in the article; are you mixing him up with Jesse Wolf Hardin? Or maybe David Jay Brown? I think you owe me an apology for the "wayback machine" comments and the implication thereof. I don't see anyone in the paragraph about speakers who offered classes the years the Muruga folks appeared at Starwood that didn't, in fact, appear one of those years. The article was obviously written sometime before Muruga's appearance at the 2007 WinterStar Symposium, which is referenced at the end as upcoming. Rosencomet (talk) 17:00, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
You're absolutely right about Fred Alan Wolfe not being mentioned in Mr. Booker's article. This was entirely my mistake and I humbly apologize to you for that unsubstantiated example and the conclusion I drew from it.
Nevertheless, Muruga Booker's ACE article on his website still can't be used as a source except maybe for Muruga Booker's own Wikipedia article (and I'm not too sure as to the validity of its use there either). The real issue is not whether people/performers/presenters appeared at ACE events; it's whether the fact is significant in the context of a Wikipedia article on them. I know what your opinion is in many cases but past experience has shown you to be an exceptionally poor judge of this due to your COI. Cheers, Pigman☿ 20:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)