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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Yserarau (talk | contribs) at 03:51, 30 May 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Philip Sandifer

Concerns over notability and surrounding disruption. FeloniousMonk 18:17, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete; mentioned in the news, but not otherwise notable. - Liberatore(T) 18:24, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong delete, one story in a local newspaper doesnt make you notable (no offense to Phil). --Rory096 18:25, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. The subject is a published author, he has been written about by a notable writer, and the incident highlights important concerns regarding academic freedom. Story appears to be growing in notoriety. Jayjg (talk) 18:32, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Rebuttal The subject is barely a published author - based on the works referenced in the wikipedia article, he has written two short articles for an obscure online-only webcomics studies website plus he is co-author of a short 4 paragraph response to someone else's article about comics. The subject has been barely written about by a marginally notable writer - Cory Doctorow writes two brief posts about the police/snuff stories/wikipedia incident on the boingboing blog, which publishes 5-8 new posts or so a day (this might have taken Doctorow perhaps 5 minutes total for both posts); the incident is a very localized and obscure example of thousands and thousands thousands of incidents that are related to issues of academic freedom or freedom of creativity. Bwithh 19:32, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete One mention in a local paper about cops asking a guy questions. Oh no the sky is falling! Wikipedia is not wikinews. Also, something being on DRV and AFD at the same time is beyond retarded. Kotepho 18:38, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, the "quality" of the article isn't relevant: we can establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sandifer is a graduate student, that he was mentioned for this harrassment in boingboing, etc. But this doesn't meet the "average professor" test, let alone exceed it--a long-canonical example of the biographical notability requirement. We do not need to use Wikipedia to "highlight important concerns regarding academic freedom" or participate in any other crusades, no matter how worthy we think they are. Demi T/C 18:40, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Seems like a non-story and not sure why anyone would care. But also a decent article backed up by a news source. -- JJay 18:45, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete I've had a hard time deciding on this, but I just am not convinced he meets WP:BIO without considerable bending of the current language. I'm sorry if people see this as wonk-ish of me to vote delete after all this, hopefully my actions in the DRV weren't hopelessly incomprehensible. --W.marsh 18:46, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Disruption is not the same as "things I dislike". — goethean ॐ 18:49, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Demi. --cholmes75 (chit chat) 18:53, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong delete fails the professor test. RN 18:55, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, this is not only about overzealous police, since this (allegedly) started with just an email to Bernie Machen, the University of Florida's president. That makes it a pretty astonishing case of successfully manipulating the president/police to accomplish someone's goal of harassment. Gnewf 18:56, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete and casually wonder why we're talking about it here AND at DRV, failing WP:BIO. This is just a minor news story. Friday (talk) 19:08, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per Demi and Kotepho. Being notable to Wikipedians is not the same as being notable in general. Disagree w/JayG that this is a significant issue of academic freedom. We can wait until Phil gets his doctorate and publishes a crime novel, *then* he'll be notable. (Cheers, Phil!) MilesVorkosigan 19:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

*Delete, very interesting story, but not encylopedic...yet anyway. I once reported to police on a story I stumbled across at a poetry site by an alleged ex-con just out of prison who gave horrible graphic details on what he was going to do to the woman who landed him in prison, including her name, her town, and the date he intended to murder her (just a few days hence from my reading). Phil's story is a bit more mild, but I can see why police might be concerned enough to check it out. On the other hand, Phil also seems to be the victim of harrassment. At any rate, fascinating as it is, it's not encyclopedic. --MPerel ( talk | contrib) 19:21, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep, changing my mind, if Daniel Brandt is considered notable as an anti-Wikipedia activist, then Philip Sandifer is at least as notable as the victim of these activists, particularly since this case is receiving notable attention from Cory Doctorow and UK journalists. --MPerel ( talk | contrib) 00:26, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, great admin, not notable enough for an encyclopaedia. --Sam Blanning(talk) 19:25, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, after arguing against the speedy deletion of this article (which I believed to be out of process), I now switch gears and vote to delete this article properly and within process. He's a favourite target of WR trolls and was harassed by the police because they succeeded in complaining about him. In my opinion, his biographical details and what happened to him doesn't make him notable enough to warrant an article. I'd like to note that I greatly respect Phil and think he is very notable within Wikipedia, but I don't think he's notable outside of it. --Deathphoenix ʕ 19:27, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete not a notable person or a notable incident. Wikipedia is neither a local newspaper nor a provincial outpost of Indymedia. Bwithh 19:32, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Jayjg. Passes the Wikitruth test. Mackensen (talk) 19:33, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I originally was gonig to vote delete but then came across about 300+ articles on google talking about the situation and subject. It creates an odd situation when we as Wikipedians need to vote how notable someone we already know is. Oddly enough perhaps while he shouldn't be notable, his presence as a Wikipedia Admin is causing it to spread quickly on the internet. I think people should step back perhaps and not view this as a fellow admin, but as a person on the net that now has over 300+ articles written about not only his comics but also now this police involvement and judge it from there. Notability sometimes derives from infamy. --Zer0faults 19:36, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, nn outside of Wikipedia. User:Zoe|(talk) 19:36, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Delete If this weren't about a wikipedian, there would be no question regarding non-notability. "Grad student harassed by cops, makes local paper" -- that description fits several thousand people, maybe tens of thousands, considering how vocally politically active grad students can be. I think the speedy was a close call, but valid. I don't even think this should be here. Xoloz 19:48, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, Its a good verifiable article. No good reason to delete it. The bellman 19:49, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Non-notable but well-sourced and written in an encyclopedic fashion (which is to say, in time-neutral prose, organized under a topical name). Wikipedia cannot be harmed by keeping this article, it can only benefit: look at the end goal of the project. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:52, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:BIO. Gamaliel 19:55, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete failes WP:BIO. The only test relevent is "The person has been the primary subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the person. (Multiple similar stories describing a single day's news event only count as one coverage.)". One event with little coverage doesn't measure up. --Rob 20:02, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep for now - he's borderline. If deleted, it shouldn't preclude recreating the article should notability increase - the story is still live and may achieve greater prominence. And academics specialising in comics aren't that common either. Also, I think with the number of people who will be watching it, it'll stay written and referenced to a good standard - David Gerard 20:02, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete not notable. Fred Bauder 20:05, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete I think there's juuuust not enough notability to have an article on the subject. I agree with David Gerard that recreation is a definite future possibility (not that the article cannot be recreated anyway, just that I think it should be in the future if further notoriety is asserted), but as of now, I don't think Sandifer is sufficiently significant. -- Kicking222 20:06, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Not sufficiently notable with his own work for inclusion (or else every professor at my undistinguished alma mater is, too). Though he is currently in the media, it's not for his own notability but rather as an example of someone affected by this sort of situation; I don't think this justifies an article yet. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 20:11, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Adam Bishop 20:15, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: The slate was wiped clean when the article was transferred? That's good in a way, because here I will say the thing that really bothers me about the article before I offer up the Wikipedia-reason. Stalkers are out for power. They are like rapists, in that what they want is to own the person they're bothering. Having an article about the effects of the stalker's actions would be nothing but sheer joy and reward for the person who wrote the U of F president. Let's not give the arsonist the pleasure of watching the fire. As for the deletion guideline reason, it's pretty simple: charges and allegations are not notability/fame. Phil was accused of being a bad person, and that caused a tempest in a teapot. It is illustrative, and it is interesting, and the article was well written, but it doesn't rise to encyclopedic level. Were Phil kicked out of his program or arrested, then he would become a cause. Essentially, the question is whether this goes beyond the local (and web local ... meaning us) to the regional and whether it represents a new offense or a reiteration of an old one. To me, it does not rise to the level of encyclopedic yet, and we should be happy that it doesn't. Geogre 20:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Geogre, we don't know who did this to Phil, so I'm speculating, but my guess is that they're not at all happy with this article, because what they did has backfired, in that they didn't harm Phil at all (the reverse, if anything), and it may backfire even more if this lawyer gets hold of the records. So although I agree with your arsonist reasoning in general, I don't think it applies in this case. In any event, we shouldn't create or delete articles with that kind of thing in mind. SlimVirgin (talk) 20:33, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One of the votes below is to move to namespace and preserve it in the accounts of stalking. I understand that Phil could have offended folks with some other activity, that it might not have been Wikipedia related, but it seems to me that we only know about this incident because we're Wikipedians and so is he. I.e. I doubt any of us would have encountered the story through the Florida papers. In my own day, we had a director of composition who was having sex in his office during office hours with a 19 year old student while going through a divorce and had advertised for "bi-curious females" to have a threesome and video session with, and his ex-wife leaked all this to the press. It raised a whole raft of interesting ethical and academic questions, and it ran in the newspapers (three of them) for 2 months and made a mention in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then he got caught double billing the U. and got fired. No one remembers this now, except those there at the time. My point is that my U. refused to act on personal actions and free expression to terminate this guy, so the U. failed to really create news. It was juicy, and it was racy, but the measure of it is after the events have concluded. If we preserved this in a namespace 'tales of stalking' or 'how to save yourself' file, it would be cool. Geogre 23:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
thanks for pointing that out, updated--Strothra 04:22, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Whether Cory Doctorow is a "reputable" journalist is disputable; he's probably better known as an indefatigably self-promoting minor science fiction writer with a raging Disneyland fetish. The story was "covered" with a couple of brief posts on a blog. Bwithh 02:40, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Phil doesn't view it that way. Jayjg (talk) 02:41, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete not notable as an academic or outside of wikipedia. This is an article which only reports attack on some person who is only very weakly notable to wikipedians who are "in the loop" because of that - I would think only a small number of WPedians watch AN/I, read the signpost RfArb, RfC types of things.Blnguyen | Have your say!!! 02:43, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How can it be an attack article if it says nothing bad about the subject, and the subject doesn't view it as an attack article? Jayjg (talk) 02:45, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Blnguyen, if it were an attack article, I wouldn't have worked on it and would have supported its deletion. SlimVirgin (talk) 02:47, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I reworded my comment, but mainly the subject is only notable for being the subject of attacks.Blnguyen | Have your say!!! 02:53, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We have lots of articles on people who are only notable because of something that has happened to them, rather than because of something they've done themselves. SlimVirgin (talk) 03:14, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • To second your point: I think WP must recognize that like a news service, an encyclopedia is an observer (of notable news or facts, respectively). In both cases it is imperative for the neutral observer not to create news or facts while observing, just like in science a good sensing device must not influence the phenomenon being sensed. I think, hard as it may be to resist, WP must have a higher threshold of notability for anything related to itself, lest it create a feedback effect and thereby create new facts by its own reporting action. Crum375 19:11, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the subjects Boingboing posts about are not notable enough for an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not meant to be a dumping ground for every kind of ephemera. Bwithh 20:14, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment about "Short Story" I've just read Paul Sandifier's "I'm ready to serve my country". It's literally 9 lines worth of non-literary and non-poetic text. I think the description of this piece as a "short story" in the article is misleading Bwithh 20:34, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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