Talk:Selma Botman

message: I just wanted to apologize to the user "Ptortx" when I said that "Selma Botman's personal secretary might not be the best person to determine bias."  Ptortx is nor former President Botman's personal secretary.  Ptortx is Selma Botman's "Senior Advisor."  I stand by the statements that one sided citations should, instead of being deleted, counterbalanced with citations that show the other side, that events presented in a "biased and selective" way should be corrected to remove bias and expanded to remove selectivity rather than having all record of the event deleted, and that someone who works for Selma Botman might not be the best judge of what is and is not a fair presentation.  Ideally an objective third party should act to control bias.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.111.129.86 (talk) 20:07, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Comment by [[Special:Contributions/130.111.129.86|130.111.129.86]]

message: I again want to state my concern that supporters of Selma Botman are compromising the neutrality of this article.
Today alone Nancy Erickson has made six edits to this page.  The first removed all factual information about the 2012 no confidence vote, introduced a formatting error, and removed all external links.  Fortunately this edit was reverted within hours.
Then she made a series of five edits
Edit 1 concerned the biography section of the page.  She removed all line breaks and links to other Wikipedia pages.  This did not introduce bias, it just damaged the formatting and made the article harder to read.  Also, since it removed reference links it made it so none of the citations in the biography section actually showed up under references.
Edit 2 Again removed all factual information from the "Controversy" section, the untrue information it was replaced with was pasted twice, and a formatting error ("Controversy" opened as a section but was closed as subsection causing Wikipedia to treat it as a section named "Controversy=") was introduced.
Edit 3 Corrected the double pasting that occurred during Edit 2 but left the formatting error intact.
Edit 4 Introduced her own blog as a reference and, because her first and second edits broke or removed all existing references, effectively made her blog the only reference for the entire page.  This is particularly problematic because part of the reason (only part of the reason) the information she introduced with the second edit was untrue is that she (apparently) doesn't even know when the events in question took place.  So making her own blog the definitive source for the information in the article is not good.  This edit also corrected the formatting error from Edit 2.
Edit 5 Removed two external links to a reputable source for no stated reason.
This kind of thing should not be happening. I understand the desire to defend someone you support, but trying to erase events you don't like from the public record is not the way to do that, nor is it right to claim that your blog is the only source for the entire page.
I'm not sure what should be done.  As the note at the top of the page says, this article needs more citations, which means more people editing the page to add the citations, so it shouldn't be locked or anything, but this trend of people just deleting what they don't like or making things up, or linking to their blog as the only reliable source, has to stop.67.255.218.207 (talk) 22:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Further comment by [[Special:Contributions/67.255.218.207|67.255.218.207]], re: History erasing edits 

message: Ok, so first thing's first.  She.  I'm she.  It's not a big deal since this is the internet and you had no way of knowing, but if you're going to use gendered pronouns when you don't need to: She, her, her, hers, herself.
Second, as I noted on my own talk page where you struck up a conversation with me: 220.223 does not equal 218.207.  I'm not going to call you Professor Uzzi because your names both start with a vowel.  Don't conflate two people just because their names start in similar ways.  You need to read names to the end.
Third, you correctly called me out elsewhere for attributing intent to someone when I had no way of knowing.  I said someone lied when all I knew was that they wrote falsehood.  I can only know the actions of people (she wrote falsehood) not the intent (I don't know if she intentionally wrote falsehood or if she was simply mistaken.)  I would thank you to apply the same restraint to yourself.  Consider, "but even from the desire to shorten her term in office by using an unrealistic starting date," if you'd checked the addresses in full you'd know not to assume I am that person, though you're right about one thing: I do approve of what that person has done here.  But not for the reasons you attribute.
I think that Botman waiting almost a full year before holding a ceremony to make her presidency official speaks well of Botman.  It means that when she came to USM she was more concerned with doing her job than basking in the prestige of the position.  A lesser person would have insisted on having the "Make it official," ceremony right away.  So if I were to have the two start dates the reason would not be to condemn Botman but to praise her.  (Though "informal" and "formal" might go better than "unofficial" and "official".)
Also worth noting that the two start dates are in the article whether they're in the term of office or not.  When unknown person put two start dates in the term he or she wasn't adding any information, he or she was just making the term listed in the "Term" field agree with the term listed in the article.  (It strikes me as possible that the reason he or she used "unofficial" and "official" is that "official" is used with the second date in the article.)
The other thing that the person you seem to think is me (you are aware that the only numbers in common between 220.223 and 218.207 are two twos and a misplaced zero, right?) did was to add "citation needed".  That's not my style but I approve of it because if you're not going to add a citation yourself (which is my style) you might as well put up a marker so that other people know, "Oh, this is where a citation would be useful."
"and his participation in the events being discussed"
Ok, first off, I note that you hit me with an entire paragraph of male pronouns and only on the last one did you acknowledge that I might not be male but even then had to have the barb of "I think".  What, pray tell, about me strikes you as so damn unfeminine that you need to admit uncertainty after four comments but three is just peachy?  Where, exactly, did I so fail your standard of womanhood that you think I'm male?
I was going to leave that out but since I have to quote one of the unambiguous labelings of me as not-female to respond to that I decided to put it in after all.
You're so very ready to ask about my participation in events, but I notice you're leaving out yours.  You were in the very first news article about the no confidence vote and you dominated the news about it from that point until after the votes were counted.  Even articles about it that barely had Botman in them were full of you.  If I, who for all you know could be one of your students and thus have very good reason not to want to let you know I'm on the opposite side of this argument, should have to be open about my involvement why don't you have to be open about your own?
You've made no secret about your position to the free press, for example.  Why are you suddenly so silent about it here?  I don't know what you're thinking, maybe you're thinking that everyone already knows and it goes without saying, but I do know how you're coming across.  You're coming across as presenting yourself as a neutral party when you very much are not.  The phrase used to describe you was, "vocal supporter of the president," yet suddenly here you're not vocal about it anymore.  Here you are not admitting your own bias or your own participation in the events being discussed while calling on me to do just that.  If you are taking them into account, which you call on me (in such a way that assumes I'm not already) to do, you're doing it privately.  Not in a way that can judge as an onlooker.  I have no more reason to believe that you're taking your bias and participation in events into account than you have to believe I am.
But fine, for you, I'll give you my bias: I'm biased against anyone who tries to delete history, especially from a reference source.  Botman, to her credit, has not done that.  At this point I've moved beyond caring much about Botman, but I am downright pissed off at the people who keep on deleting accurate information from her page.  That's my bias, and now that you know that I'm female countdown to dismissing me as emotional or irrational or (ugh) hysterical in five.
And as for my participation in events, I was and still am a USM student.  One who didn't go headline grabbing and thus you likely won't find in many news articles about the no confidence vote.  And if you're after anything more specific than that, you're not going to get it.  Your posturing here as a neutral observer when you were in fact a vocal supporter of one side does not engender trust.
Regarding both my treatment of the Portland Press Herald article as a source and "especially since they obviously selective.[sic]" how I've gone about finding sources is thus:
1 I find a reputable source that has covered the matter
2 I find the oldest article on the matter
3 I read through that sources articles from oldest to newest and use it to cite anything that needs a citation and doesn't have one or feels like it needs more citations than it has (extraordinary claims and all that.)
4 But I reject it out of hand if it only shows one side.
The Portland Press Herald article used as it's source a statement given by Botman on the night the vote was tallied, it did not touch on the disagreement over how to read the vote (which I know you know about because you were in the press as the representative voice of one side of that argument.)
Thus I would have rejected the article out of hand but previous revisions of the page gave me the impression it was widely regarded as something important to cite.  So I did.  I made an exception to rule four for it.  Honestly, I would have preferred to have presented it in the same way as the opposing press release that came out the same day as the article: Clearly stating that it is one sided and linking to it directly rather than giving it the dignity of being a source.  I've lost a lot of respect for the Press Herald over the years but, "She says she won so she must have won," really felt like a low even for them.  By that same logic I could have become President of the US just by saying I won the election.
Of course, in a very real sense it doesn't matter.  The disagreement was never solved because the body that could interpret the rules specifically said they wouldn't, the semester ended The Faculty Senate Chair went off to teach a summer course in Greece for Harvard (That made some ripples as I recall), you probably did something similarly interesting, neither side retracted their press release saying the vote went their way.  And it was all made moot because the Chancellor showed up regardless.  The difference between getting the Chancellor's attention with a failed non-binding vote and getting it with a successful non-binding vote is pretty much nil any way you look at it.
So I am sympathetic to the argument that this doesn't matter enough to care about.  "The whole controversy was just one part of an administration which was just one part of the subject's life."  I'm sympathetic, but a disagree.  The thing is: This is true, but it is likewise true that the same could be said of anything.  Writing The Rise of Egyptian Communism was just one part of her literary career which is just one part of her life.  Doesn't meant we should leave it out of her biography.
History, be it personal or somewhat wider in scope, is just a series of moments, if you toss out all the moments because they're so small compared to the rest you'll have nothing left.  This event may seem insignificant, on a certain level it may be insignificant.  But for those of use who were in the middle of it that semester (not sure how it felt to those, like you, who were higher up) it mattered a lot.  It changed everything for a time.  It is a part of our shared history, yours and mine.  We lived through it.  And it should not be forgotten.  Certainly not erased.
You seem interested in a certain point:
Here: I don't know why this controversy is being reenacted in Wikipedia.
My talk page: Why this battle is still going on, I don't know.
I can tell you very simply: because people are still trying to pull a damnatio memoriae on the no confidence vote.  I came here because Nancy Erickson vandalized the page.  It was fixed by not-me.
But I had come, and I had come to a conclusion.  This happens too much and instead of just leaving it at revert, vandalize, revert, vandalize, and on forever I wanted to do something different.  I didn't want to limit myself to stopping the page from getting worse by reverting it after it was vandalized.  I wanted to make it better.  You see that in my first edits.  The references section was in the wrong place, I moved it to the right one.  I fixed broken formatting, I tried to put it in chronological order so a reader could more easily make sense of it.  I added some more citations.
Then Nancy Erickson vandalized it again, this time with less restraint than she used the first time (she deleted about a third of the page) and with little apparent reason for what she deleted (who benefits from her kicking Selma Botman's page out of the USM category?)  Again fixed by someone not-me.
Then Nancy Erickson vandalized it again, and this time I was the one to fix it.  And that's what prompted the comment to which you're responding.  Because it wasn't my goal to be reverting vandalism at that point.  I wanted to be working on her biography.  I know of at least one interview that should be rich with stuff for her childhood.
Why is it being reenacted?  Why is it still going on?  Because the page is still subject to vandalism.  If Nancy Erickson hadn't vandalized the page at all I wouldn't even be here.  No reenacting, no going on.  If Nacy Erickson hadn't vandalized the page the third time I'd be deep within writing up a well cited biography of Selma Botman that doesn't make it seem like she popped out of thin air fully formed in a university setting.
But instead I've had my time taking up reverting vandalism and talking to you, and constantly wondering two things:
1 If I add one more citation to this part will it stop her supporters from deleting it?
2 If I start writing now will someone have vandalized the page by the time I'm done.  (Look at Erickson's run, she showed up on two days and between those two days made 14 edits.)  Sure it might go days or even a month without being vandalized, but it also might hit a bunch of times in a row and you have no way of knowing when it will.
That hanging over you makes it harder to write the biography.
It's hard to write new stuff here, or expand existing stuff there, when a lot of attention needs to be devoted to the possibility that this already well cited section will be deleted, making sure that doesn't happen, and if it does and you fix it then for all you know it'll be deleted again in an hour or less.  Also a good deal of my attention right now is taken up talking to you.
I want to write a good biography, showing her good and bad traits, but it's hard to do when people keep on burning up the already written parts.
I want it to be the case that when someone comes here with vandalism in mind the article is so well written they have second thoughts.
I don't want it to be one sided, in spite of what you may think, but the solution isn't to erase the truth, it's to show what it looks like from both sides.  If Erickson or Ptortx or whoever were coming here and adding to the page with well documented true material that casts Selma Botman in a better light than the article currently does, maybe it would bother someone, but not me.  They're not trying to build Botman up, they're trying to erase anything that makes her look less than perfect.  That's not right.  If you support someone then support them with truth.  If Erickson had described and linked to one of her articles supporting Botman that would be a hell of a lot better than the "Delete almost everything, replace with untrue thing" path she ended up taking.
As a last word: The blog.
First, I'd have had no problem with Erickson linking to it if she labeled it as what it is: a pro-Botman blog run under the blogger ID of one of Botman's strongest supporters.  Just like I'd have a lot less problem with you saying I should state my bias (which I've never tried to hide) and participation in events if you had opened up by pointing out that, like Erickson, you were one of Selma Botman's strongest supporters through the events in question.  I have problem with bias, I think it's probably impossible to avoid.  We are people and people have inclinations.
The problem I do have is when biased information is presented as unbiased.  People can still look at it and make up their own minds but that decision is no longer wholly their own because the framing has prejudiced them in a certain direction.  They've been told it's not biased, if they believed it then they've let their guard down and are more easily manipulated.
As for the content of the blog, some of it will be useful to me as I try to make this into a page worthy of USM, yet at the same time I basically lost faith in it the moment I saw how it handled the Rosetta Stone Incident.  As a USM student I can talk to people who were in the room when the rumor causing comment occurred.  I can get, to the best of their recollection, the exact words used.
But if I weren't a student at USM and didn't have access to these first hand accounts then all I'd have to go on is what is in the blog and that would leave me still not knowing what it was (the blog never describes the incident) but knowing that I was supposed to think it didn't happen.
That does not inspire confidence.  Generally a first step to dismantling a rumor is to say what it is.  Then you take it apart piece by piece.  If you refuse to even tell people what the claim you're countering is, you're not trying to enlighten.  You're trying to push people into your way of thinking.
Failing that, tell the truth that started the rumor, what was the "comment in passing"?  What was the context?  What was being discussed?  What led up to it, what followed from it.  Actual information.  None of that is given.  67.255.218.207 (talk) 07:53, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Further reply by [[Special:Contributions/67.255.218.207|67.255.218.207]]

message: ::If I had known I would get a response so soon, much less two, I'd have checked back much earlier.
::No, I do not want to nominate this article for deletion.  What I want is someone who is not me, who is not at USM, who is not in the entire UMaine system, who does not personally know Selma Botman, Page, LaSala, or any of the other people involved, to look at this article and its sources in depth and then, based on that, make the determination as to whether it should stay or go.
::An example of what I mean by looking at the sources is that the Bangor Daily News is undeniably the thing that first broke the story of the then-upcoming no confidence vote, so one would think that it was a good source for the article (and it usually is a good source) but it also reported, at least twice perhaps more often, that the pass fail threshold on the vote was 50% when in fact it was two thirds (with debate over exactly what "two thirds" meant) so there's a basic, critical, fact that this usually reliable source got completely wrong.  It never, that I can find, offered a retraction.
::Or what I said above about mistaking "didn't resign" for "did resign" a mistake like that makes a source seem quite unreliable, but I think pretty much every source covering the story made that mistake and, I'd have to check, but off the top of my head I don't think any of them offered a correction or retraction.
::So it seems like this bio is a case where determining what constitutes a reliable source requires work on a case by case basis.  But since throwing out a source as unreliable could mean throwing out important events or quotations, it seems like it's a place where personal bias could creep in.  Look at how many times the word "bias" appears on this talk page, bias is a major concern.
::I don't trust myself or anyone else directly involved in the UMaine system to be able to determine which sources to leave in and which to leave out objectively.  Some cases are obvious.  When the article says 50% where it should say "two thirds" don't trust anything it says about the rules of the vote.  But when it comes to the more liminal cases where it's not obvious and one has to make a judgement call I can't see someone not being at least somewhat influenced by whether or not they like what the article is saying when determining whether or not to count it as a reliable source.
::And since notability rests on reliable sources as its foundation, that means that I certainly don't trust myself or anyone involved in UMaine to determine if it is notable or not.
::So I don't want to nominate it for deletion, I want someone who is uninvolved, unbiased, to give it a good long look, and not just on the page now but also previous revisions as at one point there were more than twice as many news sources cited as there are now, and based on that long in depth look, determine without my input or influence whether it should be nominated for deletion or not.
::76.179.113.103 (talk) 23:00, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Response by section author

message: ::Are you sure you meant seven?  I ask because when I go there and look it says "7. The person has made substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity."  Even a cursory look at the article shows that, outside of her family, Selma Botman's impact has been entirely inside academia.
::Her impact outside academia has been basically nonexistent since she first went to Brandeis University.  She has had a small number of quotations in local news media about Egypt (around the time of the "Arab Spring") but the guidelines on number seven specifically state "A small number of quotations, especially in local news media, is not unexpected for academics and so falls short of this mark," so that doesn't count.
::Likewise while she has authored books they are not "widely popular general audience books".  If they were, that would be a good thing to note on the page.  But they aren't.
::Outside of her books and her few quotes in local media, her influence has been inside of academia and of limited scope.  By her own choice, it should be noted.  It's not that she tried to reach a more general audience and failed, it is that she focused herself on academia.  She started as a teacher, then moved into administration.  In neither of those areas did she make a substantial impact outside of academia.
::In her time at CUNY she focused on CUNY, in her time at USM she focused on USM.  It is nowhere stated, but I assume that in her time as a teacher she focused on her students.  And her focus directed her impact.  She had an impact on CUNY, she had an impact on USM, but those are both institutions within academia.
::Now some of what I've said I know as a result of personal knowledge while the rest is a result of the information available in the bio itself.  And you're right, there's clearly been ax grinding going on in this article.  So maybe, at some point that I don't know of, she did make a substantial impact outside academia in her academic capacity and some malicious axe grinder removed that with an edit I haven't noticed.
::There are only 134 edits to the article but I have not looked at them all.  I've looked at what it was like when it was created, some intermediary things (chosen because looking at the revision list they seemed like important points), what it was like before the person with an admitted COI first edited it, what it was like immediately before the no confidence vote was announced, what it was like immediately after, what it was like before the vote was taken, what it was like after, what it was like immediately before the edit warring started, how it ended up and this talk page.  That's it.
::Hardly a comprehensive looking at the editing history to see if an ax grinder removed her making a substantial impact outside academia in her academic capacity.
::But here's the thing, if you're going to say that she is notable and thus this biography should remain on Wikipedia because of number 7 then it requires more than maybe number seven but if so it's since been deleted it needs to have an example of her making a substantial impact outside academia in her academic capacity in the article as it exists now and that impact's existence and substantialness must be verifiable via reliable sources.
::That's not the case right now.  At least not that I can see.  Every impact she has listed, substantial or no, in the bio up now is within academia, not outside of it.
::(And, looking at the recent ax grinding, if an outside impact was removed by an ax grinder it wasn't a recent one.)
::If there's some obvious example of her making a substantial impact outside academia in her academic capacity in there right now, as you seem to imply, I don't see it.  Would you point it out?
::There are definitely areas where I think it's possible that bias might cloud my judgement in this direction or that (which is why I want someone else to determine if she's notable in a way that can be verified by reliable sources) but number seven isn't one of them because, via the bio, it seems clear that her impact has always been within academia.
::76.179.113.103 (talk) 23:00, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Response by section author

message: ::My mistake - criterion #6 I meant. And a suggestion -- huge walls of text do not aid discussion. --ukexpat (talk) 00:47, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Further Response by [[User:Ukexpat|ukexpat]]

message: ::Section author, your IP address appears to have changed. I'm told these things happen for those who use certain ISPs so on the one hand it's not a big deal, but on the other hand it would be easier to follow things if you announced something like, "My IP address has changed, I'm the person who formerly had IP 76.179.113.103."
::I'm following this section with interest because its outcome will determine whether I try to correct falsehoods currently on the page (introduced by good faith editing, not ax griding, by the way) or support the bio's removal.
::I'm not sure whether it's a result of non-University of Maine people finally showing up, or the fact that USM is going on vacation, but other than Ukexpat who has limited him or herself to minor edits and it looks like editing of the page itself has stopped for the moment so we all have some time to think, nothing needs to be rushed to.
::67.255.220.223 (talk) 17:46, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Response by [[Special:Contributions/67.255.220.223|67.255.220.223]]