Talk:Willoughby Sharp

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[edit] Request

Can someone with more knowledge of Willoughby Sharp please check to see if the IMDB actor card is for THE Willoughby Sharp. I added it because the films were very artistic which is something I would presume Sharp would partake in. BrianZ 14:51, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I've verified his acting career in these independant films. BrianZ 15:18, 1 June 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Sources

Please review WP:V and WP:RS regarding the lack of appropriate sources for this article. Rklawton 05:39, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I just did. The page meets the requirements for inclusion of material from self-published sources. i.e. "Material from self-published sources, and published sources of dubious reliability, may be used as sources in articles about the author(s) of the material, so long as: it is relevant to their notability; it is not contentious; it is not unduly self-serving; it does not involve claims about third parties, or about events not directly related to the subject; there is no reasonable doubt as to who wrote it." Based on your review of the contents of the page, do you disagree? The purpose of this Wikipedia page about Willoughby Sharp is to make published and, as yet, unpublished information about his historic activities in the art world available. Willoughby Sharp has been active in the international art world since the late 50s and is widely known by reputation and citation for (among numerous other activities): the exhibitions he has curated, most notably "Slow Motion" in (1966), "Air Art" (1967) and "Earth Art" (1969); his role in the publication of Avalanche magazine (1970-1976); his relationship with Joseph Beuys; his artist videoviews (video interviews) with Joseph Beuys (1972), Vito Acconci (1973), Chris Burden (1973), all of which are in distribution through Electronic Arts Intermix in New York. A Wikipedia page has been created to provide factual information, from Sharp's CV, which is otherwise unavailable, to interested parties. As yet, no books have been published about Sharp's activities. He is mentioned in numerous publications which will be listed soon on this page (it is still very much under construction). This page has recently been tagged as possibly containing material from unpublished sources. It does contain some unpublished material from The Willoughby Sharp Archive which is, as yet, an unpublished source, and possibly the material may be more appropriate for inclusion in a privately published web page. Possibly, for this reason, this page should be deleted from Wikipedia. Please post any questions or comments you may have on the material contained in the page. Thank you for your interest. Psmith99 17:02, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

If you would prune this article down a bit and pretty much stick to information that has already been published, there's probably no reason to delete the article. That is, start smaller and then build this article up as verifiable and reliable sources become available. Per your commment: the purpose of this Wikipedia page about Willoughby Sharp is to make published and, as yet, unpublished information about his historic activities in the art world available. - parts of this article stands in violation of Wikipedia's prohibition against the publishing of original research. Rklawton 02:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Your suggestion is understandble and appreciated. Perhaps it would be better to create our own website and let someone else add a Willoughby Sharp page to Wikipedia. He is notable enough for that to happen eventually. If on the Wikipedia page we must stick to previously disseminated information and cannot include any primary source material from the Willoughby Sharp Archive, which constitutes a small percentage of material on the page (other material cited as from the Archive indeed has been published), it is understandable that the Wikipedia standards for verifiable material may require our withdrawal of the page (though from numerous pages I've looked at it appears that Wiki has a long way to go with enforcement of verifiablility. What a difficult task!). If we cannot include any unpublished primary source material then we are not adding to the body of knowledge about Willoughby which is what we we hoped to do on Wikipedia. Recently I added historical, published, information about Willoughby Sharp's curated exhibitions to a site and it was removed as not adding anything to the meaning of the topic. I probably should have asked permission to add the material from the editors of the site. Point taken. It left a sense that Wikipedia is not as welcoming to the dissemination of information as I thought. Possibly historical information to the average understanding of any topic is going the way of photographic film to the photographer - no longer relevant. Given our misunderstanding of the perameters of Wikipedia, we should probably pull the page and put the information elsewhere and let someone else create a page for him. We'll give it some thought and decide what to do within the next day or so. Thank you for your clarification. Psmith99 18:12, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Why not just remove the original research bits and let the article build from there? Rklawton 02:14, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

A review of the content of this page shows that a very small amount of the content could be classified as unpublished. The unpublished content consists of biogrpahical information about Willoughby Sharp. This information conforms to the following Wikipedia criteria for inclusion of unpublished material:

The page meets the requirements for inclusion of material from self-published sources. i.e. "Material from self-published sources, and published sources of dubious reliability, may be used as sources in articles about the author(s) of the material, so long as: it is relevant to their notability; it is not contentious; it is not unduly self-serving; it does not involve claims about third parties, or about events not directly related to the subject; there is no reasonable doubt as to who wrote it."

The edits to the page which were cited in the edit history as sourced from The Willoughby Sharp Archive consist of material from published exhibition catalogues, copies of which are in The Willoughby Sharp Archive.

A comprehensive list of exhibitions curated by Willoughby Sharp has not been published elsewhere and appears on the Wikipedia page for the first time, thereby making unpublished material (in this case, a comprehensive list of exhibitions curated by Willoughby Sharp) about Willoughby Sharp available. The purpose of the page is to make such unpublished comprehensive lists available. Is the inclusion unpublished comprehensive lists of published information a violation of Wikipedia standards? It doesn't appear to be a violation. Psmith99 14:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

The biographical material you noted above doesn't come from a self-published source (or, at least, the source isn't cited). Self-published means "something the subject wrote himself" - not something you wrote about the subject. Rklawton 16:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
You are correct, compiling a list of published catalogues does not count as original research. That part is fine. However, note that several of these catalogues have not been published. Rklawton 16:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
His this subject never been the subject of any book or aricle? If not, why not? If so, then why not use this as an information source for this article? Rklawton 16:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

comment I was there when they did the Nick Zedd film and worked with Willoughby from about 1998 to 2001 on Internet art broadcasts. There is a large whole there of his interactive work with both the ICA in London and the Art societies in Ireland. We did a three dimensional art play using actors on 2 continents as well as audience and video broadcast to create an amazing effect. Can one edit from personal experience? 84.123.114.5 12:23, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

An illustrated 4-page interview with Willoughby Sharp has just been published in the March/April 2007 issue of Flash Art. There are also published citations of his work which have yet to be uploaded. This needs to be as soon as possible. The biographical information on the page comes from Willoughby Sharp's CV, a self-published (written by Willoughby Sharp) source. Psmith99 12:18, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Biography assessment rating comment

The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article.-- Jreferee 21:55, 12 March 2007 (UTC) Thanks for this. Will make suggested improvements as soon as possible.Psmith99 02:41, 20 March 2007 (UTC)