Talk:Takis Fotopoulos

message: The article contains an inordinate amount of links to Fotopoulos' own website. Worse, it contains huge lists of his publications. WP is not a place to publish your list of publications and we usually only list the 3-5 most important ones in a bio. Some of the entries just seem to be dfferent language versions of each other and should be combined as one entry. Books published in Greek will have only a limited reach, so removing those is a sensible first step at pruning the list. Chapters in books are rarely very important in somebody's career, so unless there is evidence to the contrary, these can go, too. As for the "further reading", the first one is published in a copyrighted work, so it the original link was a copyvio, which is why I removed it. That encyclopedia barely mentions Fotopoulos, so this link may be at its place in the article on inclusive democracy, but has not much function here. The same goes for the second one, "The Inclusive Democracy project – six years on", also is about ID and could be cited there, but has not much to seek here. And, in fact, this goes for each and every one of the entries in that particular section.
The article suffers from more problems. Several references seem hardly pertinent. The current refs 2 and 3 are just author-provided blurbs that get posted on websites without much editorial checking and I would not use such stuff except as a source for the most trivial stuff (as actually is done here). Reference 4 is not a source, but an unsourced statement (and rather trivial at that: being a member of an administrative council of a student union is not really a notable feat). The link in ref 5 is dead (sourcing a pretty trivial factoid). A better source is needed for ref 6 , which is just a link to a search result, something we're not supposed to do. Ref 7 sources what it is supposed to source (although it is already a quote in that source, so sourcing it to the original editorial would be better). The remaining references are to book reviews. In short, we have a dearth of independent in-depth references. The book reviews establish notability, but most of the last paragraph of the ID section seems to be somebody's opinion and is unsourced. The article also suffers from unnecessary aggrandizing ("one of the most widely circulated newspapers", "important activists, theorists and scholars"), which is not very neutral and, as far as I am concerned, diminishes the subject (if we need this to show how notable the subject is, then apparently the answer is "not much", a neutral presentation is far more effective in showing somebody's importance).
, in one of your edit summaries you refer to Karl Marx. That is actually an excellent article to take as an example. I guess we can agree that at this point, Marx is enormously more notable than Fotopoulos. Nevertheless, the Marx article only contains a "Selected bibliography", not a complete one. The "further reading" section exclusively contains works about Marx, not by Marx. And while the lead states that "Many intellectuals, labour unions and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's ideas", note the absence of words like "important" in this phrase...
 --Randykitty (talk) 08:48, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linkfarm, list of publications, and other problems 

message: When some 10 hours ago I tried to make a major restructuring of the bibliography in the TF entry, spending several hours in the process which for a non-professional administrator/editor like me is particularly difficult, my only motive was to improve the entry. But then, within a matter of hours Randykitty threw all this work to the dustbin because he ‘democratically’ decided that this was “not an improvement”, without bothering to give any explanation, let alone a proof, for it. Here is what I tried to do so that bonafide editors and administrators can express their view on the matter.
First, taking the point mentioned in a very generally defined tag that the bibliographical list was “poorly defined, unverified or indiscriminate”, I completely restructured the bibliography to make the list much more rigorously defined and less “indiscriminate”, as requested by the tag. Particularly so as there was indeed room for improvement as regards the previous classification of works under three very generally defined classification criteria (books/books published in Greece/contributions to other books). So, I replaced these very general and often incorrectly applied criteria with the much more rigorous criteria (following Cornelius Castoriadis’ entry) of ‘original English/original Greek and selected translations of TF works’. In fact the other relevant bibliographical lists I visited Murray Bookchin, Hannah Arendt, et. al. follow the same kind of classification and I presumed this is what Wikipedia requires. I hope that no ‘clever’ administrator/editor would come back with the convenient wiki rule that WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS is not a good argument. Surely, this rule, as any other rule in general, may be used or abused and it is obviously abused when its provisos are not taken into account, e.g. that “When used correctly, these comparisons are important as the encyclopedia should be consistent in the content that it provides or excludes”. 
Second, in the process, I corrected many errors, like avoiding the too general classification of works as just “books”, or “books published in Greece” by creating a much more accurate classification of works as “translations of other books” and also by introducing a new basic criterion of classification according to the original language in which each piece of work was originally written (as per the Castoriadis’ entry again).
Third, I corrected several typos and other minor errors as with respect to TF's latest work in Greek.
Yet, Randykitty, within a matter of a few hours, had completely undone the new classification. As for any bonafide administrator and editor the restructured entry is far better than the previous one, it is clear that unless he can show in detail why this is not so, providing also concrete evidence about it, one could reasonably assume that his motive is not to improve the entry. I hope therefore, that he will not just undo the new classification without any proper explanation as obviously this would be a case for the dispute resolution procedure to be followed, so that other administrators could also express their views on the matter.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.120.27.17 (talk) 16:06, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Improvements to the entry are undone by Randykitty