Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Gambril Nicholson
This whole discussion seems to hinge on the value of ''Love in Earnest'' (1970) by D'Arch Smith. The argument that it can be dismissed as a source seems to be that you can find snippets in it that may suggest sympathy with pedophilia. The argument that it is nevertheless a suitable source is that it is |used by others. It has some 150 citations on Google Scholar. A search for it there or on Google Books or on Internet Archive reveals that it is cited again and again in mainstream research on gay literature. Sometimes it's even explicitly recommended to readers, as in a book I cited above. If it's good enough for scholars in the field then it should be good enough for Wikipedia. On a more personal note, I really can sympathize with the desire to delete the Nicholson article. To abandon the dispassionate tone for a moment, I find Nicholson to be an unpleasant person to think about and reading his poems is nausea-inducing. But Wikipedia is not censored and we shouldn't write unpleasant people out of history. The Nicholson article has a number of incoming links, including from ''The Importance of Being Earnest''. We would be serving our readers poorly by deleting it. We should, however, improve it and it should certainly be no hagiography
— User:Haukurth, 10:09, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:USEBYOTHERS (Wikipedia:Reliable sources)