Talk:Adam Pearson/Archive 1

How do we make the rules allow disambiguation for personal names when all but one are not yet quite famous enough?

It is a great pity that, despite the exceptions to MOSDAB: "Application of these guidelines will generally produce useful disambiguation pages which are consistent with each other and therefore easily usable by most readers. Usefulness to the reader is their principal goal. However, for every style recommendation above, there may be pages in which a good reason exists to use another way; so ignore these guidelines if doing so will be more helpful to readers than following them." Gurt Posh has chosen to delete both the references about the other people called Adam Pearson, and then MarnetteD has deleted even their mention because they don't have Wiki pages to themselves yet. Both have merely applied rigidly the guidelines as though they are inflexible rules.

Not only that, both of these folk deleted my work only a few minutes (maybe 5 minutes) after I had created the page in the first place, before I had even finished preparing the list of people of that name. I don't have time to waste on argumentation; I shall say this only once: just don't be so damned rigid!

The rich man who happens to make sport into a business in Hull, England is not the only interesting person with this name. As far as I am concerned, the people connected with sport are generally the least interesting people Wikipedia covers, regardless of how often their names appear in the newspapers. That people in big business professional sport get a lot of news coverage doesn't mean they are of any more interest than the fashion pages that make a new story out of it every time Sarah Jessica Parker goes out in a different dress. The other men named Adam Pearson are at least as important to the culture as the one with the page at the moment. by the way, his page should be renamed Adam Pearson (football) but I haven't the time or energy to get into that argument now.

There are at least two actors on IMDb called Adam Pearson, of which one (who his entry says is also a producer, director and cinematographer) would appear to be destined to do something notable some time soon; and the Adam Pearson with the dreadful disease deserves mention somehow, because he is the only one I have come across away from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia searches related for this name ought by rights to reveal that he exists.

The point is that there really needs to be, in Wikipedia, a way for a disambig page to exist without continual threat of deletion by bureaucrats (see WP:BURO. Here we have a name shared by at least FIVE people who are mentioned — indeed featured — on the web in general, but about whom there may not be enough to say to justify them each having an entire page of their own in Wikipedia. That is, the actor I mention (who is also three other things in a small way) has little about him in IMDb so far except the list of the movies he has worked on (I found nothing about him anywhere else, though I didn't look — searches on the name are indeed drowned in reference to the footballing businessman). And the sufferer from neurofibromatosis has had a Channel 4 documentary made about him, and is perhaps the closest we have alive to the famousJoseph Merrick (look at this Adam Pearson on this page!); he is a young university graduate, despite his problems, and apart from anything else he does, he is working on the issue of normal human rights for people with severe disfigurements. He is for example in touch with Dr. Tuppy Owens and the organization Outsiders. However it may well be that there is no huge source of personal information about him from Wikipedia-acceptable sources; that is, you would have to ask him for any biographical details, and those aren't allowed.

Why does there need to be this kind of disambig page? Because if I have been with a group of people concerned about the rights and quality of life of people with disabilities, and one of them mentions Adam Pearson and I have not heard of him, I should be able to come to Wikipedia, look up the name, and find the person they were talking about. No, it was not the football tycoon and it wasn't the (as yet relatively unknown) actor. It also was not the rock guitarist — who, by the way, was at one time in a band that has a Wikipedia article; but my disambig got deleted before I managed to put a link about him together and at that point I gave up for the night. Alternatively if I have been discussing rock musicians with my freinds and one of them mentions Adam Pearson, I should be able to find him.

So it ought to be within the rules for a disambig page for a personal name (forename and surname) to have a list of people of that name who are sufficiently notable for other people (who don't know them personally) to talk about them, but for whom as yet there is not enough reference material from multiple sources elsewhere, to build anything but a placeholder article.

This is a problem because, in attempting to create such Wikipedia articles is that, if the only source is another single web page, the article risks breaching copyright by copying everything there is to be found about the subject from that single other page.

So guys, how do we resolve this? Do you still insist that there is no place at all in Wikipedia for

• an up-and-coming actor, producer, director and cinematographer
• a sufferer from a very rare, one would have thought life-destroying disfigurement but who has started to make a life and to campaign for better treatment for people like him
• a rock guitarist who has been in a series of bands but about whom there may be only one major biographical source, his own page on another wiki (which I found)

...?

I think we should be able to have Wikipedia disambig pages that list such people, with each linked to an external web page about them; they should not be deleted just because there is as yet not enough information from the right kind of source (according to the rules) for there to be a Wikipedia page about them yet because of copyright restrictions. Iph (talk) 11:21, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

You need to read MOS:DAB a little closer. Dab pages are not articles. They are created to take readers to other articles. They also should not link to other wiki's. As it currently stands this page should most likely should be deleted. MarnetteD | Talk 15:49, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

To clarify further DAB pages are not to be used as an article to get people mentioned that don't yet have full articles. They are more in the line of a housekeeping tool to aid; a) readers to find a given article with a title that has more than one use and b) to help editors to disambiguate links. One other point, WP:NOTABILITY applies to DAB pages as well as articles. It is incorrect to try and get around policy by putting someone on a DAB page who is not notable enough for a full article. If you have any further questions you could try asking them here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation. MarnetteD | Talk 02:57, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

A disambiguation page is essentially an index of Wikipedia articles. I think your best point is this: Because if I have been with a group of people concerned about the rights and quality of life of people with disabilities, and one of them mentions Adam Pearson and I have not heard of him, I should be able to come to Wikipedia, look up the name, and find the person they were talking about. But that is what a search engine like Google is for, not Wikipedia. The editors who have worked on this are not being bureaucrats, but are using guidelines that have been developed over years and reflect the consensus of WP editors. Please see MOS:DABRL and MOS:DABMENTION for when people without articles can be added to disambiguation pages - it allows for a lot of entries. Boleyn (talk) 07:16, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

• I've spent a lot of time on this, and two of the redlinks meet MOS:DABMENTION. The one on the Adam who had a documentary made about his condition could be added if he gets a referenced mention in the article on the documentary. Boleyn (talk) 08:05, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Bureaucracy! Change the rules

You are mainly answering like bureaucrats! I quoted what I did right at the top because I feared this would happen after what was done to myu new page. Neither MOS:DAB not anything else is statute law; they probably aren't perfect. You, MarnetteD, quote them as though they are from teh US Supreme Court or articles of your constitution: "Dab pages are not articles. They are created to take readers to other articles."

The most glaringly bureaucratic dumb-insolence answer to my question is this bit: "It is incorrect to try and get around policy by putting someone on a DAB page who is not notable enough for a full article." Basically, "if somebody isn't important enough to have a whole page of biography about them, they are not important enough to be mentioned at all." As though "policy" were more important than making Wikipedia as useful as possible to people who consult it wanting to know something!

You haven't answered my qyestion: Here we have people of some note; the notability thing assumes that this is a binary property with just two values: either you are notable or you are not. That is obviously extremely stupid. There are almost infinitely many shades of notability from the all-time famous (say, Albert Einstein) to the "not insignificant in their own field". There are very many of the latter who don't yet have a Wiki article, and many may not really be interesting enough for a full length Wiki article of their own, not notable except in a special area. To be specific about this page, why is Joseph Merrick notable? Because a movie was made dramatizing his life. The movie was maybe 124 minutes viewing time. Adam Pearson who has again been deleted from here has had a documentary made about (and partly by) him, of a nominal 60 minutes. That makes him half as famous — well, "notable" — as Joseph Merrick, doesn't it?

And this is the problem. You have people about whom there may not be much that is anybody's business, or of interest to anybody generally. Often such people will have only one other source of info about them so (I repeat as you didn't read MY statement of the problem carefully enough) creating a Wiki article about the person without it all being from one place and hence a breach of copyright is a problem. They may not even be important ewnough to have more than two lines: "Oh, he is the poor guy who suffers from ...".

I say that if you don't want disambig pages to have external links, you make it impossible to look up in Wikipedia anybody who isn't important enough to have a whole page of biography about them, and that you should stop thinking of them that way.

Why should not a disambig page be regarded as an article? It's an article about (in the case of a personal full name) all the famous to moderately notable people who have that name. That is useful information. I am a contributor, but I don't regard disambig pages as a "housekeeping tool"; they are there for the reader/visitor to use and should be designed to be as useful as possible to that reader/visitor, not restricted in order to comply with your bureaucratic idea of what is convenient for a few narrow-minded Wiki editors to have.

On the point about "guidelines that have been developed over years and reflect the consensus of WP editors", well maybe editors like me ought to have tried to find the time to interest myself in the internal, apparently rather often navel-gazing, "debates" among Wiki editors; but I get the impression that there is a danger that too many of the contributors to some consensus outcomes have rather narrow horizons. Spending too much time as Wiki editors, maybe too many have forgotten that the thing they are all --- very admirably of course --- working on is there for the reader/visitor to use, not only for the editors' convenience!

Anyway, back to the plot. Why should these pages not have links to "other wikis" --- other sources of information? If there is any one of these problems:

• just one authoritative source on a subject so an article risks being too short or a copyright violation
• not enough importance to have a full biography of the person in an article of their own

... surely the best solution is to have what is allowed in external references on normal articles: an external reference on the disambig page? But no, the rules ban that.

On another point: Why has somebody picked out the millionaire football club owner from the bulleted list? Because he has an article and nobody else has. What happens when the actor becomes so famous he gets an article? And the rock guitarist? You have to put the football club owner back in the list! Why did you have to interfere with him being a bullet in the list in the first place? Are you a sport fanatic who can't abide your favourite millionaire being in a list with the others? There's no logical reason for it; a temporary housekeeping detail about which actual articles happen to exist at this moment. Why couldn't you just leave it as it was?

The problem, as I see it, is still the rules. Putting the rules of the system before the usability for the real people always annoys me.

Now this: "A disambiguation page is essentially an index of Wikipedia articles. I think your best point is this: Because if I have been with a group of people concerned about the rights and quality of life of people with disabilities, and one of them mentions Adam Pearson and I have not heard of him, I should be able to come to Wikipedia, look up the name, and find the person they were talking about. But that is what a search engine like Google is for, not Wikipedia."

On the one hand you say Disambig pages are indexes to Wiki pages; on the other you say it isn't to eb used as an index because that is what search engines like Google are for. Did you try it on this name? Type "adam pearson" into Google and you get 13,900,000 results! The point of an encyclopaedia is that you don't have to search through millions of pages looking for one about the person you are interested in. If a thousand people all see an article about Adam Pearson the man with the very rare neurofibromatosis and are forced to go to Google because you have deleted him from this page, you force each of those thousand people to wade through 13.9 million search results on Google. If one person has put him on this page and the bureaucrats refrain from deleting him and/or the external reference to the documentary, on the Channel 4 about him (which you can't copy here into Wikipedia because it would breach copyright, remember), you save a billion page fetches: a thousand people each trawling through the first million of those 13.9 million hits.

So: I am not going to bang my head against a brick wall here. Wake up and smell the crowd of people waiting for you to realize that the rules for disambig pages have to be changed significantly to let me put what I originally put on this page.

Are you going to do it? Or are you going to play the stubborn bureaucrat and say "rules is rules; you can't!"? 14:31, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you have a problem with the consensus. In answer to your concerns that someone not notable enough for an article can't gain a mention on a disambiguation page, I point you again to MOS:DABRL and MOS:DABMENTION - they can be included. But again, you seem to be confusing Wikipedia with a search engine. If someone can't find info on a person in the encyclopedia, they Google it.

MarnetteD stated the definition of a disambiguation page (based on consensus), in a polite manner. I don't think comments such as most glaringly bureaucratic dumb-insolence answer etc. are helpful. I did have to laugh at the rude comment: Are you a sport fanatic who can't abide your favourite millionaire being in a list with the others? For the record, I'm definitely the opposite of a sports fanatic.

As to Why has somebody picked out the millionaire football club owner from the bulleted list? see MOS:DAB style guidelines for when there's a primary page. A quick Google check confirms that the sports club owner is more notable, and thus has the primary page, and this is reflected on the dab page. See MOS:DAB for the reasons in depth.

Dabs are indexes of Wikipedia articles - like any encyclopedia has. If you want to find information on someone who doesn't have an article, you use a search engine. I gave details of how the man with a rare medical condition could be added to Wikipedia. As for usability, a disambiguation page with external links to everyone with a hint of notability would be overrun and awful to navigate - unusuable - I'd hate to see John Smith's dab!

I apologise if I haven't answered in the detail you like, but I've spent over one and a half hours today on this dab, and have other stuff to do. If you want to become involved in Wikipedia: Wikiproject Disambiguation, the Talk page there may be a place to raise any concerns. Best wishes, Boleyn (talk) 16:27, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Adam Pearson which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 11:30, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Adam Pearson (businessman) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:45, 9 March 2019 (UTC)