Talk:Richard Abanes

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Seems pretty obvious that Abanes wrote this page.

There's no objectivity whatsoever in this article.

The neutrality of this article should be questioned. Best-seller? Well-known? Please back up all claims with FACTS!!

Contents

[edit] Cleanup

This page needs some formatting, and wikifying. The structure of the article needs work. There are probably some POV issues as well. --Andrew c 01:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

There is no "probably" with the POV issues. If this wasn't written by Abanes himself, it was his PR guy. Definitely needs work -- I added more appropriate tags to describe the problems. Midnightcoffee 18:51, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree it sounds an awful lot as if it was written by Abanes himself. I have had some personal go-arounds with him in email and this articles sounds like him. It needs more neutrality as well as more citation. FannyMay 02:51, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
I would certainly suggest that the wording be altered that references his "bestselling author" status, since as a non-US citizen I hadn't even heard of him before I started researching Mormonism to a deep degree. I feel it's quite "weasel-wordy" to say that he's an American author and then say separately that he's a "bestselling author" because the way that is done implies he's a bestselling international author, which clearly isn't the case judging by the fact that Amazon.com rank his book #25 out of 100 in the category "Mormonism: Controversial" and only in the late 617000's as an overall sales rank. Whisperwolf (talk) 02:31, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
I've done basic grammar/wiki/style clean-up, non-NPOV clean-up, and general de-weaselwording throughout the whole article...I also added a good number of wikis that should help supplement the sources and provide a tad bit more neutrality. It seems that it was a mash-up between Abanes PR copy (which I have seen elsewhere in basic bio write-ups) and upset Mormons who were unhappy with his books on the LDS church (along with the guys who believe Abanes plagiarized "approximately 90 words" in one of his books). I also moved some sections around to fit the general Wikipedia bio format. [If Abanes reads this... FYI: I shortened a number of lists to include the most notable of the bunch, as that is more encyclopedia-like and actually increases the sense of legitimacy.]
The biggest change I made was to the LDS section, in which there was previously 1) semi-non-NPOV Abanes descriptive copy, 2) very non-NPOV upset Mormon criticism of his books, and then Abanes rebuttal to the Wikipedia criticism, which included an expanded version of the partial quote #2 was denouncing. It looked like a sort of blog comments section complete with repeated quotes, so I tried to neutralize the tone and combine the two Abanes sections into a few statements, along with the Mormon criticism. However, the quote in question still looked weird because both contributors had stuck it in the middle of a sentence and used weird punctuation. Thus, if anyone has the book (I don't) and cares to look it up/fix it if necessary, good for you. Efrafra (talk) 21:41, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] merge tag

I added a merge tag. It's a nice way of saying the page on One Nation Under Gods (a book) should be deleted due to notability concerns. -SESmith 22:52, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion

Some idiot added "He's also a liar! Don't read his works." Save this for your blog! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.83.88.151 (talk) 19:36, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Holy Nonattribution Batman

Could someone please add some sources for this article?? ClaudeReigns (talk) 06:38, 9 March 2008 (UTC)