Talk:Mary Colter

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130225134438/http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=2019&ResourceType=District to http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=2019&ResourceType=District
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Many of Colter's claims of her role as an architect are disputed.
https://www.route66news.com/2018/05/23/mary-colter-fabricate-architect-role/  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.131.206.135 (talk) 06:53, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversy  

message: Now we have Stanley Turkel, another historian who addresses the Colter controversy and is on the lecture circuit.  Turkel, like the Arizona Historical Society, gives talks to people interested in history, and gives talks about Colter.  And like the talks hosted by the Arizona Historical Society, the controversy stoked by Fred Shaw is on the agenda.  
https://www.historichotels.org/us/hotels-resorts/phantom-ranch/history.php
Turkel is a hotel consultant and has a love of the hotel industry. He's written several seemingly good (AFAICT all self-published) books on hotel history, and is a name in the hotel and hotel history community.  
I like how he handles the issue in his book "Great American Hotel Architects: Volume 1".  He goes into many examples Colter's work, describing them unquestionably and admiringly as hers, and only after that gives a couple paragraphs to the Fred Shaw issue, including an excerpt of an interview of the owner of the La Posada hotel in Winslow.  
Interesting quote, which illustrates that this is indeed a “thing”.  Turkel quotes the owner of La Posada as saying,  “All of us in the Harvey world are quite upset about the book. Shaw is clearly a misogynist. The attributions of Colter’s works to Curtis and others is preposterous, and obviously discounted by the many including Harvey family with direct knowledge of Colter and the buildings. We have collectively decided it best to ignore these self-published rantings and not give Shaw a podium for his hatred."
Say one of our readers is planning to attend a Colter lecture, and wants to go prepared.  If anyone were to come to our article to come up to speed on how her work is being discussed and perceived in the community, they would be left sorely and embarrassingly uninformed.  I consider that encyclopedic malpractice.  I have tried to add mention of the controversy previously... it was shot down.  I am re-visiting it now.  
For due weight, and so we don't completely botch our mission as an encyclopedia which is to inform, we need a couple sentences.  This is a reputation issue for the encyclopedia... we should not require our readers to go elsewhere in order to be assured of receiving balanced, high-level coverage of controversial issues, which is the case now, here. 
I propose: 
:Controversy
:"In 2018, Fred Shaw self-published "False Architect: The Mary Colter Hoax" where he claimed Colter was not a trained architect, and fraudulently took credit for the designs of others. Addressing Shaw's claims, owner of the La Posada hotel (attributed to Colter) said in 2018, "All of us in the Harvey world are quite upset about the book. Shaw is clearly a misogynist. The attributions of Colter’s works to Curtis and others is preposterous, and obviously discounted by the many including Harvey family with direct knowledge of Colter and the buildings. We have collectively decided it best to ignore these self-published rantings and not give Shaw a podium for his hatred." Le Marteau (talk) 10:25, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're on the right track, but I'm not sure I would place one person's accusation of misogyny into the article in that way. I don't like to make things like that anodyne, but I would want to see a larger cross-section of opinion, bearing in mind of course that serious Colter scholarship probably amounts to about a dozen people,and we seem to be dealing with dueling self-published research. I have the BLP policy in mind too w/r/t Shaw. Thank you for doing all this investigation, and I think we can implement some form of this into the article with a little more work.  Acroterion (talk) 12:12, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I just would like to see Wikipedia gain a reputation as offering "one-stop shopping" for getting up to speed on things, without readers assuming they need to go elsewhere if a thing is in any way controversial in order to receive balanced coverage.  That may be impossible in this situation, I'm not sure, but in borderline cases like this, I have to come down on the side which minimizes risk to Wikipedia's reputation. Thank you for your consideration. Le Marteau (talk) 15:43, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversy revisited