:To say that "Wheeler's exploits" inspired papers in academic journals like Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is unsupportable and misleading. The Dunning-Kruger paper briefly quotes news coverage of Wheeler but that doesn't mean that his exploits, rather than similar research going back decades, inspired those experiments. Since you talk about "academic journal entries" in the plural, you should provide the other examples that you think exist, in addition to this one passing mention. 
 :Similarly, to say that Wheeler inspired articles in the New York Times and New York Post is similarly misleading. Those articles were about the D-K research whose write-up mentioned McWheeler in passing. They were not about McWheeler or "inspired by" McWheeler and they would have happened if McWheeler had never committed his robberies. 
 :In the article itself, "Social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning were inspired to use his case..." is unsupported by the given reference and whighly implausible given that Kruger and Dunning are social psychologists who would know about the prior research. 
 :If these statements you've made had been true, Wheeler might have been notable, but since they're not, the article is a very clear violation of WP:PSEUDO and WP:BLP1E. The merger of this article is being discussed at Talk:Dunning–Kruger_effect#Merge_McArthur_Wheeler_to_here and I think the case is very strong.