User talk:Gareth McCaughan

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[edit] hi

i read your comment on the GH avisualagency AfD page and saw that you have extensive experience on here. i am trying to contribute to the GH article but everyone on the discussion page keeps giving me the wrong advice. most insisted that i have to prove notability, then they said that it was wrong to list articles about the collective. i don't know who to believe as they all keep leading me astray. if you could please offer me any advice on how to make the article better or make any adjustments yourself i would sincerely appreciate it. even if it does get deleted, at least i will have known that i tried my hardest to make it the best i could given the limited time frame. thanks so much.

• for editing reference, these lead to some other wikipedia articles i feel are similar: art collective, artist collective, List of graphic designers

Inspectorpanther 17:54, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I think there are two problems.

• It looks as if GH simply isn't notable enough that it clearly needs a Wikipedia page. At most, perhaps it's borderline. (No offence to their -- your? -- talent or their work; notability just isn't the same thing as talent. Some talentless artists of various kinds are notable, though I'm not going to name names, and there must be many outstandingly talented ones that aren't notable yet.)
• The history of the page looks very discouraging: first it's created by someone who obviously thinks that scrawling advertisements in the pages of the Wikipedia is an acceptable way to behave, and then when it's proposed for deletion the discussion is inundated by meatpuppets. That's bound to produce a pretty negative attitude from anyone who cares about the quality and impartiality of Wikipedia, and since things like "notability" are inevitably subjective it's going to be bad for the article's prospects.

As the article stands now, it's fairly innocuous in itself, apart from seeming rather longer than the importance of its subject merits (but if all pages with that problem were deleted, Wikipedia would be drastically reduced...). But it still seems like the article is there at all not because anyone needs or wants to know about GH, but because GH itself decided to use Wikipedia for a bit of self-promotion, and I'm not sure there's any way to fix that.

The problem with the list of links, and the list of libraries that have a copy of GH's book, is that if they're intended to be good evidence of notability they don't really serve that purpose well. I checked three links at random from the "External links" list. The "Village Voice" article looks like, well, a gossip column. The "thehappycorp" article's only mention of GH is to say "once upon a time they spoke at such-and-such a conference". The "designforfreedom" article looks like paid advertising to me. Now, maybe in fact no one, but no one, gets listed in that column in the Village Voice unless they're tremendously famous; maybe in fact the conference mentioned by thehappycorp only ever invites the biggest names as speakers; maybe in fact the dff's "Focus" isn't an advertorial but the strongest recommendation those folks can offer. I can't tell, and that's the point: if the best evidence of notability on offer is as unclear as this, it's not a good sign. (Libraries? Plenty of people give books to university libraries, and they seldom turn them down. The fact that a book's in a university library proves nothing about the notability of its authors or its subjects. Especially when the two coincide.)

Again: none of this proves non-notability. But in the present context, everything is inevitably going to be looked at with suspicion: is [whatever] really an endorsement to be trusted, or is it a paid advertisement or an article written by someone at GH or ... well, you see the problem.

Assuming, though, that somehow the article survives, what should it look like? Well, it could lose the last sentence of the first paragraph, which says nothing whatever and reads like feelgood promotional material rather than like informative encyclopaedia material. (The second sentence of the paragraph is only a little better.) It could lose the list of libraries that have GH's book, which tells us nothing at all about the agency or its work. The list of external links could be trimmed to include only the ones that actually have useful or interesting material about GH; I don't know whether any would survive. I'm not sure whether any real value is added by the list of exhibitions.

Those changes are all deletions, the general principle being to delete things that advertise rather than inform. What could be added? Maybe a small image of a particularly characteristic piece of GH's work. Surely a link to GH's website.

Gareth McCaughan 19:03, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] thank you!

thanks so much for your astute observations. i will take everything you suggested into consideration. it's all a very interesting process. hope you have a lovely evening. Inspectorpanther 23:03, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] please, mediate Magnetic monopole discussion

At Talk:Magnetic_monopole#Nondimensionalized.2C_SI.2C_and_CGI_comparison and Talk:Magnetic_monopole#Emphasis_here_is_to_the_symmetry.21 -- 12 February 2008. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.107.230.53 (talk) 12:46, 12 February 2008 (UTC)