lol, Sue Gardner just created a biography on Salim Tamari, and it's immediately tagged as a possible copyright violation by CorenSearchBot.

Perhaps her 6 other article creations deserve more scrutiny.
Suelette_Dreyfus
Michael_J_Sheeran
Kay_Bojesen
Kate_Lehrer
Noticiero_Digital
Marion_Sandler

And she removed the tag a few minutes later.

Will Coren dare to block? Mua ha ha ha.

Idiots.

That article is horribly formatted. There's no References heading or Further Reading heading, there are no sections in the body at all, and the guy's name isn't bolded in the first sentence. For that matter, the first sentence isn't a proper first sentence for a BLP as it is. It jumps right into his childhood, there's no lede whatsoever.

How can someone who knows how to perfectly format references not know how to do these very simple formatting steps?


Edit: I just looked through the rest of the articles you linked. The only passable one is Noticiero Digital and that article itself is entirely negative information.

Good heavens ... how can we expect a woman in her position of responsibility as Executive Director to be able to create exemplary Wikipedia topics.

What she obviously needs is a wage raise in order to facilitate the optimum contributing conditions! $240,000 per annum (what is that ... $30,000 per topic) is surely not enough.

What's good for Sue is good for the Wikipedia, and the rest of you can remain unpaid. It's always been better to keep the serf classes underpaid, under the rule of fear and under oneself - with Jimbo on top.

I will not stand idly by and have Sue Gardner accused of plagarism! Do you really think that thisis plagarism of this source?:

Ms Gardner does not appear to have cited this source. I'm sure this oversight will be corrected.

Original:

Gardner:and

Plagiarism aside, and possibly more importantly, Gardner seems to have staked a position in what is probably WP's biggest POV battleground by creating this bio of a Palestinian sociologist and peace talks negotiator. The second sentence of the article reads "When he was three years old in April 1948, his family fled Jaffa when it was attacked by Jewish paramilitary groups as part of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War". One might think that the WMF director would carefully source this possibly provocative statement but it is not given a reference. There is a source at the end of the paragraph, but the source merely notes that Tamari "had to flee the city with his family in 1948".

This is an interesting test of the notability rules. This chap is an associate professor at what is rarely called one of the World's top universities. He has done nothing remarkable, and clearly fails WP:PROF. But if Sue thinks he's notable, presumably he is.


Maybe that's why she flouted the notability rules.

...so...tempted...to AfD it.

Are you sure it fails PROF? Have you checked the citations on his papers to make sure that he doesn't actually have a good h-index score?

You know, Gardner might actually learn something of the politics of work on the website paid for by the foundation of which she is the CEO, IF she edited that same article as user:Abbadi123 or something, and found out how fast she got her ass kicked.

You? File an AfD? Next thing you know, mbz will be supporting my RfA.

Is this guy scheduled for a showing at wikimania? I believe it's in Israel this year.

Careful, Silver--it might end up being turned into a GA like Mzoli's (T-H-L-K-D). One of those lower-quality GAs, of course.

Hey...i've made an AfD before...once.

I've voted Delete before, probably more often than you would expect.


@Melloden: That's why I asked what the guy's h-index is. If he fails WP:PROF, then that's that. None of the sources are really that impressive.

Hey Jack! I had thought you put wikipedia behind you. Why did you return to help clean up Salim Tamari?

There fixed it.

How could you not love Tarantino?



Hey, Silver, how would you react if you woke up one morning and found this Wikipedian asleep on your couch?

I like how this part of the article got removed. You know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!

Do you think that Sue knows or cares what an h-index score is? I'd bet that at an AfD she'd rely largely on the quote by Rashid Khalidi, who is undoubtedly worth an article though that doesn't make him carry enough weight to make Salim notable.

Note the edit summary when she created the article: "Created article about Salim Tamari, well-known Palestinian sociologist, scholar and lecturer".

Well hey, Sue likes cigars. Nuttin wrong wit dat!

WMF employee Steven Walling has now done some work on this article, including moving the possibility contentious "attacked" sentence without adding a source, or fixing any of the plagiarism already pointed out. Hmmm.

We should encourage this.

Every WMF figure should have a trial by fire to see the community at its worst. Perhaps adding the Terrorist cat to Menachim Begin (someone suggested I try this once, educational but not pleasant),describe Pamela Geller as Anti-Muslim or something equally correct but sure to incite the rage of the partisan guards. Try cleaning up Israel, Palestine, and the United Nations
Go on.
I dare you.

An obvious POV edit probably copied from a Stormfront publication or maybe the terrorist organization J Street. Everyone knows no one lived in the area before Israel's creation and people claiming otherwise are lying. A land without a people for a people without a land. C'mon now.

And note this edit with edit summary "yay notability: put it up front!" He's more or less admitting that the only claim this chap has to notability is that an admittedly reasonably notable academic once said something nice about him, so he has to pump that.

Am I being naive, or is this actually somewhat extraordinary? AFAIK we still have no idea why Sue Gardner would post an article about this person, nor why Steven Walling would then attempt to "improve" it. Putting aside the "notability" requirements, why wouldn't they use pseudonyms to do something like this? It's obviously a contentious topic area, at least in general... even if you grant that Salim Tamari himself is at the periphery of the contentiousness, it's still not the sort of thing the WMF Executive Director should be inserting herself into, no matter how "neutral" the article is. None of Gardner's previous articles had anything to do with Israel/Palestine whatsoever, did they?

I should say that I'm also glad that Ms. Gardner is once again demonstrating the hypocrisy of her "not editing in my capacity as Executive blah blah blah" line of BS by not posting the article with an alternate account, but let's face it - if she'd posted it with some other account, it almost certainly would have been deleted by now. That's why she posted it as "Sue Gardner" - there can be no doubt about that, no matter what bogus excuse she might invent for it. For whatever reason, this article about this guy was worth her once again revealing the fundamental bogusness of the WMF's claim to Section 230 immunity, by virtue of their materially participating in content-gathering activities.

I'd also say this is a good example of log-rolling, but I don't see where Tamari has been involved with Gardner or the WMF in the past...? The whole thing makes very little sense to me, I have to admit.

Looks like a decent article to me. Yes, Gardner and Walling should have and use an anonymous account, identity only known, say, to ArbComm, because her identity could be prejudicial to article process, but the article itself isn't a problem, quite good, I'd say, and I agree with Walling's changes.

This was a loss, my opinion. Human interest, is that part of an encyclopedia? Or are these only stuffy, dry creations? It was attributed, and Mother Jones thought it was notable, so, who is "SQGibbon" to claim that it's "trivia"?

It is trivia, but it's harmless trivia that humanizes the subject somewhat, so it has to go, right? Heaven forbid that someone might go to Wikipedia and find trivia, of all things.

Was SQGibbon (T-C-L-K-R-D) reading this thread? If so, just a reminder to him/her or any other WPers who are reading this: The problems are:

• whether or not the subject should be profiled in such a manner;
• the person who posted the article; and
• the effect of that person posting it (as opposed to almost anyone else posting it) - not any particular sentence or factoid.

The article is OK in itself, as long as the subject doesn't object to its existence.