Talk:New York Pathological Society

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[edit] Notability of this article

The general notability guideline indicates that what we're looking for is significant coverage in independent reliable sources. To be sure, the directory cited appears to be independent. I don't think it even approaches significant coverage, though. It's sort of like a yellow page ad from a prior time. Beyond that, it's just one source.

I don't think that status as a professional organization or anything exchanged between myself and the person who wrote the original draft of this article excuses an article from meeting a notability guideline. Now, there might be plenty out there to establish this professional society is plenty notable. I don't have to find it. The person who started the article doesn't have to find it. I do think that according to the standards we judge things by here, it has to carry the notability template until such time as notability is established. Erechtheus (talk) 01:19, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Per WP:NNC (a subsection of the Notability policy) notability has nothing to do with the content of the article, which has already been mentioned to user Erechtheus and which he seems to intentionally be ignoring. The current content, which indicates that mention of this organization may occur in at minimum the biographies of 215 New York State physicians and scientists and quite possibly many more during the two centuries of the Society's existence (founding date of 1844 also mentioned in the article), more than establishes notability. Whether or not Erechtheus feels like looking up on his own the "significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject" indicated by the current content of the article has no bearing on whether or not that notability is established, unless the presented facts indicating notability are false.

Asserting that a nearly two centuries old organization that included a sizeable fraction of the pathologists in New York State as members one century into its existence is manifestly ridiculous. It is my suspicion that Erechtheus would prefer to see more content in this article and is spuriously attempting to employ WP:N to get someone else to write it. Removing the notability template from the article. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 01:46, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
This article does not assert what you're claiming it asserts. It asserts that it began during a certain year and that it had 2xx members as of 1908. Perhaps if it actually did assert any of these things and backed them up with reliable sources, this article would be notable. Rather than edit war, I think it's time to utilize dispute resolution processes. All WP:NNC indicates is that there can be exceptions. Why on Earth there would need to be an exception made for a supposedly century old American professional organization is beyond me. It's not as though the poor pathologists of New York are unfairly discriminated against by those inclined to create reliable independent sources. Is somebody trying to make a point? Erechtheus (talk) 01:53, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
How does asserting that there were more than two hundred members in 1908 not assert that it may appear in more than 200 biographies of physicians and scientiest? Explain to me that one. Per WP:NNC establishing notability has nothing to do with the citations or references in the article. The facts presented are what establishes notability, not citations or hyperlinks that are in the content.

You, who seem to be so fond of telling other people what they need to go read, are not doing a very good job of reading these policies yourself.

Yes, someone might be trying to make a point here, and that point would involve a personal definition of establishing notability. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 01:59, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I welcome outside input on this discussion, but I hope you realize that to support the way you're trying to use notability policy others would need to conclude that in direct contravention of WP:NCC notability policy mandates that particular kinds of facts and citation content must be included in an article. If you think that policy should be changed this would be a great opportunity for you to start a general policy discussion as well as this RfC.--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 02:15, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I have to admit I think I missed your point. Now that I understand what you're getting at, I still don't see how it's relevant. What NNC indicates is that each individual fact doesn't have to be notable -- notability is measured as a whole. The whole here doesn't measure up to that standard. I mistook the flexibility in notability being a content guideline instead of a policy for what you were going for with NNC. Erechtheus (talk) 02:17, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
So are you saying that notability does specifically require content comprising particular kinds of hyperlinks or facts or are you saying that the mention of the New York Pathological Society in hundreds of biographies (which you find immediately if you Google) does not constitute "significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject"?

With your comment above about how this article is "sort of like a yellow page ad from a prior time." - it's pretty clear to me that you have a beef with the content of the article and the way it's written, not the notability of the subject.

Previous to this I would have been suspicious had you surreptitiously switched to applying some other template instead of notability, but I'm seeing that there's some evidence you may have genuinely misunderstood what notability is. If you would like to apply a different template criticizing the way this is written or its volume - which would be perfectly appropriate as it's a stub, I might be inclined to put something like that in myself - I would not object. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 02:34, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
What I'm saying is that NNC indicates that the notability of the whole matters. Notability does not function on a sub-article basis. If this were a section of some other article, talking about its notability would be inappropriate. I submit to read it more broadly than that would gut the whole idea of notability guidelines and result in an anything goes environment. I construct the general notability guideline to be the broader statement of consensus and NNC to be a narrow explanation that notability isn't to be taken up on a sentence by sentence or even section by section basis within articles. It, in turn, includes an exception that states that a person in a list has to be a notable person to be included in the list. Erechtheus (talk) 02:39, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
So again, is this a withdrawal of your assertion about this article's failure to establish notability, or are you saying that the mention of the New York Pathological Society in hundreds of biographies (which you find immediately if you Google) does not constitute "significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject"?

Or again are you saying that WP:NNC can be ignored and you can claim that there must be content comprising hyperlinks to the secondary sources which this article already indicates exist? The policy is quite literal, no interpretation or apologetics are needed: "Notability guidelines give guidance on whether a topic is notable enough to be included in Wikipedia as a separate article, but do not specifically regulate the content of articles."

It would be one thing for you to say that you do not believe in the existence of the mentions within biographies that would be indicated by the content of this article, but you're saying you think those mentions exist and that you want to see links to them in the article. It's nice that you desire that, we all desire Wikipedia to be better, but that's a reason for you to put more content in the article, not a policy issue or a reason for you to go around putting deletability notices on articles that already establish the notability of their subject.

It is especially not a reason for you to take a patronizing attitude towards other authors and tell them that they need to go read policies you do not appear to understand yourself or tell them that they need to rewrite articles towards the audience of someone from Missouri[1] to avoid said deletability..--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 03:12, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm withdrawing nothing. I stand by the position that this article does not assert notability in its current state. While you claim it would come up in hundreds of biographies, it does not. In fact, the article is currently linkless save for a bot that has it listed several places and my user talk page. I'm saying NNC must be read to have the appropriate scope within the notability guidelines structure. It's a narrow exception that means we're not going to fight over whether the personal life section of the Thomas Jefferson article is in and of itself notable. I never said anything about hyperlinks. I said that notability requires significant coverage in independent reliable sources. NNC cannot be read to negate that standard or it removes the very purpose for having notability in the first place! You just can't construct any important statement of project consensus in a way that allows the "exception" to swallow the rule. Erechtheus (talk) 03:26, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
WP:NNC is not a "narrow exception"; it is not labeled as an exception; and I'm not finding any discussion anywhere on Wikipedia of it being anything other than a headlined section of the main Notability policy. Now you're even trying to alter policy to suit your preferences. The sentence I quoted above does not begin with "specifically in cases..." it's referring to all Wikipedia notability guidelines. You can only take the position you're taking by contravening that statement directly quoted from WP:N itself and claiming that notability policy mandates particular types of content appear in an article.

Notability is a matter concerning the subject of an article, not the content of articles, and you are throwing up chaff here to support what was a manifestly unsupportable action. "Coverage in independent reliable sources" has to do with those other sources - it has nothing to do with the content of the article no matter what sort of song and dance you put on here to cover your misunderstanding of a policy you apparently go around telling people they need to read.

You have already demonstrated that your motivation is aesthetic distaste, by talking about the article being written "like a yellow page ad" and by telling me on my talk page that I need to write as if I'm communicating with an audience in Missouri; concerns about the notability of the subject of this article are obviously completely secondary to your aesthetic preferences here, based on your own words. This is the kind of incident that would go on a "Bad Faith" poster if a visual representation of it were possible.

I have no idea what you're talking about it not appearing in many biographies (I did not specifically say "hundreds", I observed that the article mentions hundreds of individuals in whose biographies it would likely appear - but from the looks of things there quite possibly are hundreds of biographies which refer to it). A Google search for "New York Pathological Society" currently returns six thousand, six hundred and twenty documents - are you saying that you went through all of those and verified that none or few were biographies? Because I have definitely come across quite a few biographies containing the mention during my work on Google Books, search results which definitely would be included among that 6,620. This kind of makes it look as though you're now completely making things up to support your position. And also as indicated it's a notable medical society - if you look at some of the near-top Google search results the Transactions journal of this society is in a number of medical libraries.

As indicated by the facts presented in the article, its subject appears in many secondary sources. You need to get around to explaining how the facts in this article do not lead a reader to expect that he will find exactly those sorts of search results that appear in a Google search, which would also appear in library survey of biographies of New York State physicians or any reference work listing medical societies nationally during the past two centuries.

I think you are confusing the idea that subjects documented in Wikipedia need to be notable, and their articles need to mention why they're notable, with some sort of mandate that articles un-encyclopedically try to prove the notability of the subject they're discussing. I noticed that some of your articles end in an unordered list of hyperlinks that mention or relate to the subject somehow, often quite tangentially, without any mention of why they're included in the article; that is neither encyclopedic nor is encouraging that sort of content the purpose of the notability policies.--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 04:25, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I will once again ignore the attacks made and focus on the topic at hand. If I were attempting to delete this article, I would clearly be in the wrong per the "Articles not satisfying the notability guidelines" heading. That's not what I have been attempting to do from the start of this process. I have been attempting to do what that section APPROVES as a remedy for an article that does not cite sufficient sources to demonstrate notability. How, precisely, do you justify your resistance to the notability template in light of that very explicit language? Note that four options are given. They're given in the disjunctive, meaning I am free to choose among them. Erechtheus (talk) 04:36, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Now that I have made specific mention of the authority for my acts, I am re-applying the notability template to this article. I'm confident that, given the dogmatic reliance on the NNC section, that such specific citation to the very purpose of the notability template I'm applying will have won you over. Erechtheus (talk) 04:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I'll also note that I actually just looked via Google for reliable sources to add to this article because it became apparent to me that refusal to do so was just idiotic on my part given the scope ideological dispute. You have demonstrated that you are unwilling to do so based on your comments here and on my user talk page. That means I have covered three of the four options suggested. Erechtheus (talk) 04:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
To reiterate: you either do not understand what notability is or you are intentionally misconstruing it. As I have repeatedly explained and as the policy text itself says in multiple places Wikipedia notability policy has nothing to do with the article content including a bunch of hyperlinks or mentions of specific sources. To quote another section of WP:N that says this: "If an article currently does not cite reliable secondary sources, that does not necessarily mean that its topic is not notable." I would also observe that the sentence I've already quoted from WP:NNC is present not only in that section of the article but up in the very second paragraph of the article, before all sub-headings.

Notability is the fact that such sources exist, not links to them or citations referring to them being in the article. I'm uncertain of what "four options" you are referring to because I don't see a list of just four things anywhere in WP:N or within WP:N#Articles not satisfying the notability guidelines. But as I've demonstrated repeatedly the article already demonstrates notability; by bringing up "Articles not satisfying the notability guidelines" you are quite clumsily begging the question in another fine display of rhetorical misdirection.

The existence of those sources is indicated within this article by the bibliographic sources previously mentioned and because, as any reasonable person approaching this topic in good faith would acknowledge, any two hundred year old medical or scientific society is going to be mentioned in a wide variety of sources. Reverting the article.

Erechtheus, you either lack the ability or the will to understand Wikipedia notability policy at a basic level. You need to stop going around telling people to read that policy and critically annotating other people's articles, at the very least in regards to WP:N and I hope that individuals reading this would be inclined to look carefully at your assertions on any other policy. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 06:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I noticed that even in the history comments you're saying "I see no claim of notability"; again, notability is not a claim made in article content nor is it a presentation of some sort of proof within an article. It's a characteristic of the subject of an article independent of Wikipedia, which is demonstrated by the facts presented in the article, not by citations or references in the article. Citations and references do not add anything to the demonstration of notability than the facts in an article make. You simply have a fundamental misunderstanding of this. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 06:56, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Wow, I just noticed that on your user page it says you have a Juris Doctor. So the misinterpretations of the completely straightforward language in WP:N obviously can't be a lack of ability to understand it. And I guess I didn't need to hyperlink "begging the question"; you're doing that because you know exactly what it is.

Seriously, did you learn anything at all about honesty or impartiality in school? As a rule I find advanced degrees pretty unimpressive and you are resoundingly confirming that perception. I seriously hope you do not hold a position of any authority IRL, but the way the world works you probably do. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 08:15, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
It may interest future readers on this issue to know that Erechtheus proceeded from this to go and place a copyright violation notice on my user talk page about a public domain work I had copied to Wikipedia. Despite the distate he avows below for allegations that are "heinous and against the spirit of this project".

Erechtheus, if you behave in a manner completely unbefitting a doctor of laws you definitely should expect people to question your choice of profession. Like with putting a fake copyright violation notice on my talk page - condemning an act in strong terms and then unblinkingly performing the same act yourself (or not having the guts to go and retract that accusation of copyright violation, if indeed you put it up in error) is a good example of something a person who has been awarded a doctorate of law should not be capable of doing. It's your own actions and statements that condemn you as lacking integrity and acting with a false pretense of superiority and authority.

Seriously, you need to stop telling people they need to go read policies. It's ludicrous that after all this demonstration that you don't understand the notability policy yourself you'll still claim you aren't being pretentious in doing that. I suppose at this point you've come to a better understanding of it but covering your mistakes with sophistry in an attempt to save face is exactly the opposite of what a person of integrity would do.

There's one exception I'll make to this: if you're some kind of Dougie Houser whiz kid and you have a J.D. at the age of 15 or 16 or something this is an understandable learning mistake. Otherwise, you're an adult and you should know better than this. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 05:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Erechtheus's behavior is now becoming even more outrageous. He took it upon himself to censor my comment immediately above from this talk page; I have restored it.

Erechtheus's overall behavior has significant import to his actions on this page. He is demonstrating that he will without hesitation put his own interests before just about any principle of Wikipedia: notability policy, the right of a user such as me to be free of completely baseless copyright violation accusations, or maintaining an accurate record of the discourse that has occurred in regards to this issue.

Look, Erechtheus - you're just digging yourself a deeper hole by doing these things. You must realize that the reason why you're freaking out about this - to the point you're even trying to prevent, who, people coming to review this RfC? - from reading what I'm writing is because I'm not making things up about you and your behavior; everything I'm saying is directly supported by your ongoing actions. You're resorting to censoring talk pages because you simply have no response - your behavior is completely outrageous and now that someone's pointing it out you're trying to find some way to scatter and sweep under the carpet the various pieces of evidence. Not gonna happen. This all needs to stay in one place, on neutral ground - not your talk page or mine - and there need to be references connecting the articles you've had your hand in to this body of evidence.

As far as my mentions of you having a J.D., not only are they apropos to a discussion of your comprehension of policy, so that you can't feign misunderstanding of technical language, but hey, you wanted to invoke the authority of that degree by mentioning it on your user page; I'm afraid that means you've also set yourself some standards to live up to, buddy. You put the information out there willingly, you don't get to control the situations where it's mentioned and censor the ones you don't like. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 12:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
And another thing - if you didn't want me to respond to you here about your choice of profession then you shouldn't have tried to call me out about it in this page. I mean, seriously, you cut out my comment about that but left your own down below? Your basic problem is that you're applying completely different standards to other Wikipedians versus the standards you're applying to yourself.

You are behaving in a completely childish manner at this point. You basically just put your hand over my mouth because you didn't like what I was saying. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 12:33, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
And by the way, from WP:TALK:

"Assume good faith and treat the other person in the discussion as a fellow editor, who is a thinking, feeling person, trying to contribute positively to Wikipedia, just like you - unless, of course, you have objective proof to the contrary."

So you got scared, came here and ripped out my comment, then dumped it on my talk page with some clumsy, pretentious comment about talk page guidelines. Yet another example of you trying to twist Wikipedia policy to support your own interests. Thanks for the ammo.

Talking about sincerity - by now don't you realize that every time I have said to you "you really need to stop, now" I have actually meant it? And you've only dug yourself in deeper when you didn't stop? That's not some kind of rhetorical trick I'm using, it's actual advice. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 12:48, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
For anyone who actually cares about reading and following Wikipedia policy instead of just mendaciously throwing around links, here's WP:CIVIL#Removing uncivil comments:

"Only in the most serious of circumstances should an editor replace or edit a comment made by another editor. Only in the event of something that can cause actual damage in the real world should this be the first step (i.e., disclosing the name, address or phone number of an opponent)."

So yeah, this was definitely a case of someone trying to silence critics. In no way does this censorship have anything to do with Wikipedia policy. Erechtheus obviously did not look into the policy on this before he did it, nor do I think he even thought it through.

Yikes, as I said before, I reeeeally hope this guy doesn't have any authority that would let him do this kind of stuff in the real world.

To Erechtheus again - depending upon your experiences or position in life you may not understand why what you're doing is so disturbing. People with the kind of mentality you're displaying - notice I'm not saying "people like you" because you may change no matter how old you are - people like that who end up as corporate managers or judges or other kinds of authority figures, and who then have power over others to wield when their egos get involved, literally ruin other people's lives to feed their egos. Nothing so serious at risk here - just the welfare of the Wikipedia project, as I said - but if you think you can just laugh off a string of seriously deceptive, manipulative actions like this as some sort of misunderstanding you just don't get what's going on here. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 13:13, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
I will once again point out to you exactly what policy I complied with in removing your comment: per WP:TALK, I removed a comment that is not relevant to improving this article. The whole thread of this conversation I attempted to relocate to your talk page has absolutely nothing to do with the New York Pathological Society. It's a bright line rule, and your attempts to characterize it as anything but is demonstrated bad faith on your part in that I explained exactly what my motivations were but you have persisted in accusing me of having such low integrity that I would lie about my motivations. That, once again, is a clear example of you failing to assume good faith, no matter how much you attempt to modify that policy. Erechtheus (talk) 22:13, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
(continued from my talk page but responding to the above)

Talking about a "bright line rule" when I can point out sooooo many other parts of WP:TALK and the parts of WP:ATTACK it links to that say you should not have done something like that, for example "Never edit someone's words to change their meaning." which is almost immediately before what you quote, again is disingenuous. (I was pointing out that you were being manipulative but you excised mention of potential manipulation in other pages - you were cutting out basic evidence from my overall argument.) Your reading had to be pretty selective, and you had to ignore things like conflict of interest (not the Wikipedia policy, the real world kind) and decide that you could enforce policy in an impartial manner.

I don't have to edit a guideline (WP:AGF is not a policy) to tell you that no one can use "you must assume good faith" as a defense for their actions.

And even if WP:AGF meant that I was actually compelled to assume good faith, what would good faith be in that situation, if someone was honestly using that one bullet point, out of the entire WP:TALK page, to make the edit you made? It would mean that they were tidying up the talk page to make sure conversations are categorized properly or something of that sort. Or, maybe you just wanted to be certain people didn't get confused if they were reading about the NYPS. That is not why you did it - you had entirely personal reasons for doing it, especially doing it right at that moment, you did not delete my comment from this page for the good of the Wikipedia project or something.

And I simply refuse to regard it as a coincidence or something that your action would have kept two very specific groups of people from seeing my comment - the ones who might respond to the RfC and people you might ask to look at this dispute if you referred them to this article talk page.

There just is no way, after you so casually tossed off an accusation that I was breaking the law (an action also taken with no regard to conflict of interest or impartiality), that you're going to convince me that you were acting in good faith. And I seriously doubt any genuinely disinterested third party would believe it either. I also do not believe that you were unable to perceive that you had a major conflict of interest here and would be unable to fulfill the role of an impartial enforcer of Wikipedia policy.

Such a suggestion, I have to say, would be completely ridiculous. I'm not making that statement as a rhetorical tactic, I really think that if you described this situation to almost anybody and told them you thought it was perfectly okay and appropriate for you to personally cut out part of the other side of the argument, even non-Wikipedians would react with disbelief and possibly think you were joking.--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 03:43, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
A few points that are outside of what I wrote at your user talk:
  1. This thread of the conversation has nothing to do with this article's RfC.
  2. You have already seen me resort to dispute resolution, and you know I didn't just refer people to this talk page -- I also referred them to your very own user talk page, the very same place I relocated your comments to.
  3. I didn't accuse you of breaking the law. I used a standard warning that assumes good faith (see WP:WARN for yourself if you like) after I took action. Before I took action, I made doubly sure my action was consistent with the G12 speedy deletion rationale.
  4. This isn't "the other side" of any argument -- it's a completely new thread to the dispute we were having. That's why you didn't indent -- you started it. It was my intent to get it moved to a more appropriate place for it.
  5. As to conflict of interest, I don't think I really had much of a conflict of interest at all. Who else was even paying attention to police it? Has it escaped your attention that nobody has apparently paid any attention to this via RfC?
Erechtheus (talk) 04:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
Okay, the statement that in honest consideration you believed you were an impartial party with no conflict of interest in either the attempt to speedily delete another article of mine or in editing my part of the conversation on this page - I simply do not find that believable at all and to me, for you to say that is further evidence of disingenuousness and hence bad faith on your part.

The issue of manipulation certainly is my side of the dispute we're having and the conversation we have carried on. My very first response to your edit of this article was to go to your talk page and indicate that I felt your action pointed to manipulation. To call the issue of manipulation a "completely new thread" when you know very well it's the origin of the entire issue is again a disingenuous statement. And of course, for anyone to look at the stuff on this page and decide that your actions elsewhere are unrelated they would have to accept the assertions you're making - that despite everything I've laid out you have never at any point intended to manipulate me.

I'm not even going to comment on whether placing a notice saying "As a copyright violation, George Frederick Shrady appears to qualify for deletion under the speedy deletion criteria" on my talk page constitutes an accusation of copyright violation.

I'm not one to drop policy links normally, and as best as I can disclaim this has nothing to do with your RL profession but by refusing to discuss the actual issues of appearance of manipulation, fairness, and impartiality I am bringing up, and instead citing chapter and verse of policies, you are engaging in WP:WL. (I've avoided mentioning this before now because it sounds pejorative on my part but we're at the point it's necessary.)

Regarding non-indentation of those comments, I concede. I didn't indent it and I specifically didn't indent it so that it would stand out from the rest of the conversation because I thought mention of the copyright violation accusation was more important than the rest of it. I should receive whatever sort of censure or repercussions come from not indenting some of the comments in this page and I willingly accept that. But I am unrepentant, I would do it again, at least with the first comment mentioning the copyright violation accusation.

On what you said about the dispute resolution at WQA I acknowledge that some of the links you put up included links to diffs on my talk page. However, I do not think that clears you of any intention to separate and scatter the different parts of my case that you have engaged in manipulative actions.

Moving on to responding to your comments on my talk page. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 15:03, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
It's clear I'm just not engaging you on the level you wish to be engaged on. I don't think that in this particular context, one would have to be an impartial party in order to not have a conflict of interest. I'd suggest that what I understand of WP:BOLD suggests that it's not the same standard that the bar would have me live by. I'll grant you that it suggests not editing the comments of others on talk pages, but I would submit that you have to read that with WP:TALK to distinguish an edit of content of a comment from completely removing a comment. Essentially, this is the way I saw it: we were in a dispute and were necessarily both engaged in interaction with one another. I didn't think the thread that has nothing to do with the NYPS belonged here, so I boldly suggested a different location for it. I did this knowing that you could very easily revert it. I continue to see no issue with that. If we want to create onerous COI rules for this situation, consensus needs to be developed and a whole new section of WP:COI needs to be developed. I don't see that happening, though. I don't think people would see that as benefiting the project.
You just identified why I feel this is a serious problem with you not assuming good faith. From the start, you have just admitted that you have been accusing me of manipulation. I don't think I have come out and said this in these exact words, so I'll say it now: I have never been trying to manipulate you. That was the point of referring you to my edit history. Do you think I'm trying to manipulate everyone who starts an article I put a maintenance template on? I have to suggest that would be paranoia. It's as simple as me perceiving there to be an issue that somebody will hopefully correct. It's the very purpose of the maintenance template.
I accept that you misunderstood some of my actions but that you did so in good faith. I admit that it can be fairly said I misunderstood some of your actions but that I also did so in good faith. We had (and may continue to have) a failure to communicate. I hope this clears up where I have been coming from, but let me know if it does not. Erechtheus (talk) 15:49, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
You can stop tossing "WP:COI" around. I stated quite clearly above that what I was referring to was "not the Wikipedia policy, the real world kind".

Why did you just mention that you think that in this context you wouldn't have to be an impartial party to not have a conflict of interest - when what you said above was that you don't think you "really had much of a conflict of interest at all"? So we've gone from not impartial with a tiny bit of a conflict of interest, to not impartial with no conflict of interest? Whatever.

So anyways, if you're not going to claim impartiality, this must mean you're saying that you willfully decided to be a non-impartial, biased enforcer of Wikipedia policy who was biased but not in a conflict of interest, or maybe intentionally acting within a conflict of interest - but only a teency-weency little conflict of interest? And at the same time you're going to say it's just craziness, you find it's worth talking about paranoia on my part, for me to think that you ever try to manipulate people.

Heck, you're right. Someone who would conjure mental illness and lay it on the person he's talking to, in the interest of defending his integrity and the inseparable part that plays in his public image, would never, ever try to manipulate anyone. A real straight-up character you are, really mindful of how you speak to others and ensuring you only say accurate, verifiable, non-imputing things about them, just an absolute peach. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 04:41, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
And another thing: I looked through several pages of your edit history before I ever made a comment on your talk page. What I saw in your edit history - lots of critical annotation of other people's work but little work of your own by comparison, that little including creation of the Bart Thomas page which looks as though its subject is considerably less notable than a two-hundred-year-old pathology society incorporated in New York State that had 215 members in 1908 (and also it kind of looks like its notability is established by a "short burst of news reports about a single event or topic" - not sufficient per WP:N) - it was seeing all that in your edit history which helped to convince me that you were just trying to push some personal preferences in stub articles on me.

I also checked the "earliest" contributions page on you to confirm that you were not a new user before I said anything to you, by the way. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 05:46, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Does this article comply with WP:Notability?

Does the article, as written at present, conform with the general notability guideline or otherwise merit an exception? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Erechtheus (talk • contribs)

To try to sum up my side of this argument for anyone who comes across this:
◘   In three places:
  • WP:NNC
  • The sentence from the top of the policy repeated in WP:NNC, "Notability guidelines give guidance on whether a topic is notable enough to be included in Wikipedia as a separate article, but do not specifically regulate the content of articles."
  • The sentence "If an article currently does not cite reliable secondary sources, that does not necessarily mean that its topic is not notable."

the policy clearly states that demonstrating notability does not mandate any specific content be present within an article. Erechtheus simply refuses to acknowledge this and claims that this part of the policy is simply an "exception", which evidently means that it doesn't apply here. Note that in the history comment of one edit he said "I see no claim of notability", as if explicitly claiming notability within article content is part of policy (which obviously would not be very encyclopedic or even very good prose in general.)
◘   Three facts present in the article establish the notability of the subject:
  • The mention of 215 individuals who were members of the society in 1908, whose biographies would constitute independent sources mentioning the Society
  • The fact that the society was established in 1844. I would expect anyone approaching this issue in good faith to concede that a two-century-old medical society with that level of 1908 membership is going to appear in many independent sources.
  • The fact that it was incorporated in the State of New York, which means that there at some point there existed incorporation documents and all of the documentation that accompanies a corporation (whether those documents still exist is irrelevant to notability)

All three of these facts are established with a citation and both the facts and the citation have been present since the article's creation.
◘   Erechtheus has in at least two places demonstrated that his concern with the article is aesthetic, conflating establishment of notability and aesthetics.
  • In this talk page at the beginning of the discussion above where he complains that the article is "sort of like a yellow page ad from a prior time."
  • In my user talk page when he told me I needed to write the article as if I were "Pretend[ing] that the Wikipedia user is from Missouri..."

I have encouraged him to place content-related or source-related templates in the article regarding those complaints but he insists on trying to recruit WP:N as some sort of bludgeon to support his preference in how stubs are to be written. (This article has also been tagged as a stub from the beginning.)
◘   Also, Erechtheus is establishing a pretty firm record of flaunting Wikipedia rules and policy and appears to consistently act in a manner completely contrary to his own literal statements of principle. To list some of the more ridiculous examples:
  • This entire effort to use WP:N to enforce his aesthetic preferences, of course.
  • He placed a completely untrue copyright violation warning on my talk page. It may have been a mistake, it may have been intentional; in either case he has edited my talk page four times since then, so far, and has declined to either delete the copyright violation notice or explicitly say that he made a mistake in making that accusation. This is despite the fact that both in this page and on his talk page I notified him of his error, and despite the fact that a couple of other users have confirmed that the article content (art.) is valid for inclusion on Wikipedia as a public domain source (a measure Erechtheus evidently didn't consider it important to take before making the accusation.)
  • He actually attempted to censor from this talk page any mention of the fake copyright violation incident, ignoring Wikipedia policies which are quoted in the discussion above.

Some may wonder why I am willing to expend so much effort in this matter. It's because I have seen too many good editors driven away from Wikipedia by other users taking on the pompous, pretentious, and patronizing attitude that Erechtheus is exhibiting and by tactics like this, trying to use policy to push his own preferences on others. This is a particularly egregious and ridiculous case of it, not only because a two-century-old medical society that was a running concern for at least a century is so manifestly notable (especially when its establishment date and various other facts have been cited), but because even after admitting that his aesthetic tastes are involved Erechtheus is so intentionally and willfully trying to hang on to a tool he has clearly tried to used to push me around with. And from his talk page and contribution history it appears he works his will on other Wikipedia users with this personal notability policy and other tools as well.

I just noticed that on Erechtheus's user page it says he has a Juris Doctor IRL, so don't cut him any slack for misunderstanding things: that ought to mean he understands exactly what's going on here, in very fine detail, and isn't having any trouble at all understanding what the language in WP:N means (he's also announced there that he is a native English speaker) and I should think that also this means the various rhetorical fallacies he's been using have been very consciously employed.

I may revise the above summary as the discussion continues, check the history for earlier revisions. I would of course encourage Erechtheus to place his own summary here. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 07:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

By way of summary, I added the notability template to this article while reviewing new articles. I felt that there was an issue with the article asserting notability that did not rise to the level of speedy deletion. I understand notability policy to be that when an article topic may be notable but it does not show it, the notability template is appropriate. It is with this in mind that I added the template. It is not my aim to be pompous, pretentious, or patronizing. It is not my aim to somehow blackmail the writers of stubs into expanding them. I find such allegations to be heinous and against the spirit of this project. I do concede that the organizations notability guideline does indicate that the age of an organization may be relevant to determining notability. I submit that nothing in this article makes a solid claim that the organization the article is about even existed after 1908. I'll quote from the notability template itself: "This article may not meet" Wikipedia's standard for notability. I'm raising a concern in good faith. It's still a concern, and I can say now that I have looked with some care at available online resources that might cement notability for the article. I don't see anything. It appears that there is an organization of the same name some claim to be a member of, but there is no website. There is nothing that indicates that the 1800s-early 1900s society is the same as the modern one. As this has expanded way beyond the topic of this article to the point that accusations are being made about my profession of choice and even my native tongue, I'm not sure I have much more to say about this. At any rate, I think an RfC is supposed to be more about requesting the views of others than getting into writing position papers. Erechtheus (talk) 22:30, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] About the society

I do not have any issue with the notability of this organization so much as a total lack of direct or secondary sources indentifying it so succinctly. Its records and other works appear referenced throughout the internet frequently enough, but a total lack of direct discussion about the organization stifles proving its notability, and personally seems quite Masonic to me (old Masonic, not modern Masonic). - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 16:59, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Now a request for information about the notability of this organization sounds just fine to me when it's not accompanied by the insistence that the notability itself isn't demonstrated and not accompanied by threats of deletion or other talk of deletion. You're quite right Tony, for all I know this Society might be like another notable Society, the FreeMasons.

Good peacemaking Tony (assuming this is acceptable to Erechtheus), I must say I would not have expected it after the way you spoke and acted in our previous encounter. I am impressed. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 19:49, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
If you ask me, the notability and importance templates are essentially the same. I understand the suggested distinction, but it's always a guess if you ask me whether something is more than likely notable or more than likely not notable. I prefer the notability template because it is a superior explanation, but I have no quarrel with the importance template at all. Erechtheus (talk) 22:32, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] more content please

We'd have a pretty darn good article here if 1/10 the effort spent arguing was instead spent adding content. More content please! AllGloryToTheHypnotoad (talk) 00:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

That's going to be a challenge. I've looked into it. As indicated above, somebody else has looked into it as well. The article creator has notoriously refused to be "bullied" into adding content to this article. I'd love to see it expanded. Aiding with structure is my forte more than creating content, but I love reading content. That's why I like this project. Erechtheus (talk) 00:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Also, I have to say that I accept blame for letting this go way too far before resorting to dispute resolution. Erechtheus (talk) 00:34, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Erechtheus, if you are genuinely interested in adding content to this article, how about you add content discussing the existence of the Transactions journal of the Society, which I mentioned to you above as a secondary source whose existence is indicated by the current article. Looks like it ran for at least a couple decades. Here's a Google search:

http://www.google.com/search…

--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 18:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Oops, I miscalculated, the timespan I was reading covers six years. Still, it sounds like the kind of content you've been demanding be added to this article. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 18:54, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
I discovered that the Society used to meet in a room at the New York Academy of Medicine around the turn of the previous century, and even as recently as 2005, cosponsored events there. But it's like UFO sightings: everyone seems to be certain it exists, but its activities are notoriously impossible to track down! - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 19:02, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
The NYAM reference desk has no recent information about the society; except what I already found. The nice lady who answered the phone suggested that I try out http://www.NYC.gov, but that was a dead end. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 19:17, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Tony, if you were indeed serious in saying this article needs to contain more content about the notability of its subject, I of course extend to you the same offer I did to Erechtheus, that you can add information about the at least six years' worth of medical library reference material that exist documenting the Transactions of the society. You really make yourself look completely disingenuous, not to mention a complete buffoon, to respond to that offer by saying the article is like a UFO sighting.

As in a note I just added to the WP:Assume good faith guideline, simply because I am enjoined to assume you're acting in good faith outside of definite evidence to the contrary is not a license for you to make bad faith statements or take actions of obvious bad faith like Erechtheus has in editing my part of the conversation, etc. You guys sure like to throw policy and guideline links around (and refer to guidelines as policies, I'm now seeing in more closely examining some of these links); well, this implication that this article is equivalent to a UFO sighting falls under WP:DBAD, in case you were wondering.

And here's another relevant passage from WP:HONESTY:

An honest Wikipedian:

...

  • Does not hide their personal point of view in order to pretend they don't have one.

Tony, you've made it clear that you've gotten involved in this article not to improve Wikipedia, but to take sides in a conflict. Adding the Transactions content would be a good first step in showing a change of heart.

Or you could simply leave. This would demonstrate that when you claimed on Erechtheus's talk page that you generally try to ignore me you weren't simply being mendacious in an effort to denigrate me. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 09:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
You are no more entitled to make demands of anyone to add content to an article than they are to make demands of you. Since the premise of your initial response to the notability template I added to this article was, in fact, to accuse me of "manipulat[ing] stub authors into writing content," it seems to me that your current position amounts to rank hypocrisy. Erechtheus (talk) 21:27, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
I am not demanding that you add content to the article. Your position all through this appears to me to have been that the information in the article does not indicate that its subject has "received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject."

AllGloryToTheHypnotoad made the request "More content please!", to which you responded "That's going to be a challenge. I've looked into it." as if I hadn't already handed you exactly the sort of information that you claim must be in the content of the article itself to demonstrate notability. In the face of that your assertion that it's going to be challenging to add content to the article, and Tony's discussion of "UFO sightings" after I went and actually provided the Google search showing which medical libraries contain copies of the Transactions journal, seem like little more than further attempts to imply that the subject of the article just isn't notable.

Seriously, six thousand search results in Google (another fact I already mentioned in the original discussion at the top) and you're claiming it's going to be challenging to add content to a one-sentence article? This isn't even the kind of thing you'd have to go to a physical library to find more information about. Someone in Bangladesh could easily write waaaay more than one sentence about this topic.

Hey, maybe I completely misunderstood the literal meaning of your response to AllGloryToTheHypnotoad. If what you were saying was "challenging" was something other than you, him, or any Wikipedia editor going to Google and finding enough for a second or third sentence to the article, plus maybe a list of doctors and scientists who were members of the society, etc. out of the six thousand search results go ahead and explain what you were saying. Otherwise, it's difficult for me to imagine how you could have made such a claim in good faith after we have discussed this subject and its presence in secondary sources so thoroughly - especially after you've gotten me to explain exactly what sort of sources the current content of the article indicates the existence of.

I saw your questions on my talk page, I ought to be able to respond within a few hours (but if not by tomorrow). --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 23:02, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
Maybe your search is different than mine. Just in case, here is my search where Google admits that while it lists 15,xxx results at first, there are really only 166 that are reasonably unique by its estimation. None of them seems to say much about the society, other than that they published a journal, which I do admit is something that could be added (and that I'll add when I settle on a source out of those 166). I just don't see much that is of any use to add beyond that in my scan of those results. Then again, I never claimed to be a great adder of content. That is, in fact, why I try to focus mostly on adding other things to the project. Erechtheus (talk) 23:35, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
Huh, yeah, I don't know why the number of Google results varies so radically. And Google Books gives 516, including a full view copy of the 1894 Proceedings of the New York Pathological Society, a nice juicy one... (But with the results numbers being all over the place I certainly believe you that your search wasn't showing that kind of stuff.)

Anyways, don't feel like you need to work on this article, I'll definitely get back to it at some point; I think our disagreement over the actual article ended when we both endorsed the change Tony made to include a different template. I'm at your disposal over any other issues (haven't looked at my talk page yet, heading there now.) --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 00:26, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Even if it doesn't exist anymore, it does probably still merit a good article. AllGloryToTheHypnotoad (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you, of course. My idea here is that if someone is reading one of these biographies that mention the Society (which I was) they can find out basic information about it when they come to Wikipedia. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 09:59, 26 April 2008 (UTC)