User talk:Amalym

Oneal Walters

The standard for inclusion in Wikipedia is that the article is referenced to reliable sources — i.e. real media — which demonstrate that he meets one or more of the criteria listed in WP:BIO. Having a Wikipedia article is not an entitlement; the onus is on you to write an article which demonstrates that he genuinely belongs here. You're always free to create a new version which is properly referenced and makes his notability more apparent — but your original version was a promotional statement, not an encyclopedia article. You even acknowledged right at the bottom of the page that it was written both "for Wikipedia and for his personal webpage" — which is not acceptable, as content on here cannot simply be copied and pasted from another source. Articles on here have to be original content which is properly referenced to real sources, maintains a neutral point of view rather than a promotional one, and is not written by someone who has a personal conflict of interest with the subject. Bearcat (talk) 17:24, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not questioning your own credibility here; I have no reason to doubt that you acted in good faith. But the thing is, Wikipedia forbids original research — such as, for example, basing an article around personally-conducted interviews with the article subject. We need our content to be properly verifiable in public media sources, such as newspaper or magazine articles about him — we can't even list a person's birthday from personal knowledge if that information hasn't actually been published in real media already. So it's not really a matter of who interviews him, because our articles aren't supposed to be based on one-on-one interviews at all.

The main problem is that if somebody else comes along and makes factual changes to the article later — which anybody can at any time — Wikipedia will have no way of knowing whether the original article was wrong and the new change is correct, or whether the original article was right and the new change is wrong. That's why we have to insist on verifiability in reliable sources here — it's not because we doubt your sincerity, it's because those sources are the primary mechanism we have to make sure that our articles remain accurate. Bearcat (talk) 18:46, 2 June 2011 (UTC)