Talk:4897 Tomhamilton

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Untitled[edit]

It might be worth mentioning in the article that Hamilton was a student of Jan Schilt (asteroid 2308 Schilt), as was Eugene Milone, asteroid 4725. Schilt was a student of Jacobus Kapteyn (asteroid 818 Kapteynia). Also, Hamilton's student Fred Espenak has an asteroid (14120 Espenak), as does former student Sheldon Schafer. I understand the Director of the Minor Planet Center, Brian Marsden, said this collection is unique. Also, without trying to be too pointedly observant, Hamilton is the only one of the group whose article has been deleted. But I was his student (a couple years after Espenak), so I guess I'm prejudiced.Sharonro246 (talk) 00:07, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's been thirteen and a half years so I don't expect you'll get this message, but I've linked the discussions about Hamilton's article deletions below. They're uniformly deletions based on the promotional tone and overall quality of the articles; his name has not been salted and a better article would likely be welcome (and a better location for the details I've removed from this article and elsewhere). Mockingbus (talk) 04:53, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty sure Tom Hamilton has been puffing up his biographical details[edit]

…both in this article and elsewhere.

User:Tham153 (read: THam, T.Ham[ilton]) self-describes as "a former actor, cable news show producer and college teacher" on their user page, and says in Talk: "I'm a retired astronomer, and have been bouncing around adding or editing mostly astronomy-related articles, including adding several prominent astronomers' bios". Their edits here include highly specific (and minor) updates of his publication history. I'm not the first to notice this, and the user previously wrote an article about Thomas William Hamilton that was deleted. Twice. None of these suggest he's not professionally notable, only that his article was full of fluff and did not meet minimum quality standards.
Earlier User:Tom4897 similarly shows a level of expertise in astronomy and a similar preoccupation with Thomas Hamilton's biography and childhood acting career.
In 2009 there is a series of edits by ‎4.236.240.x and 4.237.x.x IP addresses to this article and the Barnaby comic (again with the child-acting fixation). The IP range has since been blocked as an open pool of Azure instances. This is less conclusive, of course, but it is suspicious given the very tight fixation; those IP addresses have only ever been used to edit those types of articles. At least one IP, again, shows some expertise in astronomy. Lately (late 2019 forward) this pattern has continued with IPV6 addresses.

I've removed the extraneous biography (and am off to remove it elsewhere), but that doesn't mean that it can't go into a properly-written, properly-sourced article about the man himself. Mockingbus (talk) 04:53, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Far from puffing up, I've left out about 80% of my relevant experiences, such as a child actor in a production of Huckleberry Finn, appearing in ads, etc, very few of my publications (I had the second longest list when Wagner College published a list of faculty puiblications back around 1979), none of my political involvement (ran for elected office twice), and most of my work as an astronomer. As for needing a citation for my birth date, I would send you a copy of my birth certificate, but I burned the damn thing at a peace rally over 40 years ago when I found out I was the first of my family to have one, so just check with St Luke's Hospital. TWH 2603:7000:6A00:32DA:29A7:9299:3296:A837 (talk) 20:27, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for acknowledging yourself and your edit history.

Unfortunately, if these experiences haven't been documented (and their significance established) by reliable, third-party sources, they don't rise to the Wikipedia standard of notability, and certainly don't warrant inclusion in tangential articles. As I said earlier, you probably are professionally notable; the case is just poorly documented and even more poorly presented.

Editing articles about yourself (or to include yourself) is considered generally poor form.

I hope your considerable accomplishments bring you happiness and satisfaction, but the case for them being wiki-worthy seems… thin at best.

Mockingbus (talk) 17:12, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]