Talk:Greg Lukianoff

message: I deleted user Russofyle's opinions of Greg Lukianoff's writing style for inconsistency with Wikipedia's NPOV policy. The NPOV policy requires Wikipedians to "assert facts, including facts about opinions — but don't assert opinions themselves." An opinion, as defined by Wikipedia policy, is "a piece of information about which there is some dispute." While user Russofyle provided links to writings that formed the basis for his or her opinions about Lukianoff's writing, the sources do nothing to change the fact that Russofyle's assessments ("repeated emphatic use of the first person," "lets loose with colloquialisms," etc.) are, in fact, opinions. Russofyle's sources provide no evidence that Lukianoff uses colloquialisms or the first person any more than any other writer. The deleted section amounts to little more than a personal attack.  johndoe3 20:25, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Opinion information

message: I removed the section of Greg Lukianoff's biography as "Author and Playwright" because it does not meet Wikipedia's standards for verifiability, particularly with regard to the standard for biographies of a living person. The assertion that Lukianoff is H. Vassilyev is not supported by the links provided by user "leuler." The links suggest only that Lukianoff writes fiction under a pseudonym and that someone with the pseudonym H. Vassilyev wrote the play that this article asserts that Lukianoff wrote. None of the information indicates that Lukianoff's pseudonym is H. Vassilyev. I would request that Wikipedia administrators or anyone else who doubts this investigate the links for themselves.
 
If Wikipedia is to have any credibility, it must eliminate the unverifiable assertion that Lukianoff is H. Vassilyev. Letting this remain risks misleading people both about Lukianoff and H. Vassilyev, neither of whom might wish to have his or her reputation conflated with that of the other.
 
The following is a quote from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in Wikipedia's official guide to Biographies of Living Persons:
 
"I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons…Real people are involved, and they can be hurt by your words. We are not tabloid journalism, we are an encyclopedia."
 
While the information at issue in this article is better than "I heard it somewhere," its source is questionable and hardly of publishing quality (coming as it does from the open phillywriters.net forum). Using such a source of dubious reliability (see Wikipedia's page on verifiability) when it does not even indicate that Lukianoff is H. Vassilyev smacks of precisely the type of "tabloid journalism" that Wales warns against. I have removed this information since it does not meet Wikipedia's standards and ask that whoever continues to post these unverifiable and unsourced assertions to cease doing so.
Crc32 18:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reson for Lukianoff/Vassilyev edits