Talk:Chris Buttars

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Unencyclopedic?[edit]

Edwardlalone added the "Unencyclopedic" tag, indicating that the subject of the article may not be notable enough to warrant an article. I disagree. It is true that Buttars is just a state senator from Utah, but his legislative and advocative history is notable enough to have gotten him mentioned in multiple New York Times (and other "national" newpapper) articles, and numerous LGBT web and print publications, to say nothing of the many many many articles about him in Salt Lake are newspapers. I believe Buttars is notable enough to warrant an article. Since the tag was added without discussion, I will now remove it. If anyone opposes, please repost the tag and add discussion here. -Porlob 16:36, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My decision to add the unencyclopedic tag had nothing to do with the noteworthiness of the article as I believe all State Senators are noteworthy but has to do with the tone, and content of the article not being encyclopedic. Notability is a separate issue. I concur with you that Senator Buttars is notable enough to receive an article yet notability is only one factor in determining whether an article is encyclopedic. I had several concerns when adding the tag.
The first is that it does not meet the Biographies of Living Persons guidelines which states in part, "Biographies of living people should be written responsibly, conservatively, and in a neutral, encyclopedic tone" and "The views of critics should be represented if their views are relevant to the subject's notability and are based on reliable sources, and so long as the material is written in a manner that does not overwhelm the article or appear to side with the critics' material. Be careful not to give a disproportionate amount of space to critics..." The section on "Criticism and controversy" is to long and is disproprotionate to the biographical information on Senator Buttars. You are correct in assuming that this information adds to his notability and therefore is appropriate in this article yet you gave to much space to the controversies surrounding Chris Buttars and not enough to the Senator. The only thing in the original article that did not relate to controversial matters was the two sentences that said, "Chris Buttars is a Republican state senator for Utah representing senate district 10 (which spans the cities of South Jordan, West Jordan, and Herriman). He has served in the Utah State Senate since 2001." This article clearly does not meet that requirement as there was no mention of biographical information on Senator Buttars while there was an entire section on controversies surrounding Buttars. The article is in fact consistent with Wikipedias's No original research, and Verifiability and is well sourced. This is the reason I did not choose to delete the section on the controversies and stub the article which would be an action that would be consistent with Wikipedia policy on biographies of living persons. You need to correct this article and make some major changes and I intend to do so when I have time. You did a good job on writing the section on the controversies which warrants attention just like you said but you did not do enough in writing a section on the Senator.
Second, an encyclopedia is defined by Wikipedia as "a written compendium aiming to convey information on all branches of knowledge." This article does not attempt to do that in respect to Senator Buttars and is therefore unencylopedic. The lack of basic information about the Senator alone makes it unencyclopedic. You would not open a text encyclopedia and expect to find no biographical information on the person but an entire section on Controversies surrounding the person. I do not wish to delete the article, or to delete the section on the controversies surrounding Senator Buttars and I feel this is a very good article but it still is not encyclopedic and needs to have at minimum a biographical section added.
As you are knowledgable of Senator Buttars it would be great if you could add just some simple encyclopedic content to the article. I added the infobox for the same reason: to make the article more encyclopedic and to make it more consistent with the other articles on Utah State Senators and Representatives. If you wish to contribute to this set of articles you should do so but don't single out Senator Buttars as being more prominent than any other Utah State Senator and give more attention to controversies surrounding the Senator than to the Senator himself. The majority of the article is about his positions on controversial issues, and is not biographical or encylopedic (I am not asserting that this information should be removed but that the information should only be a small section compared to the whole article). As I didn't have time to add more content to the article to make it encyclopedic I chose to add the tag. As I am working on Utah State Government articles, including articles about each State Senator and Representative I felt it important enough to add the tag. Please check out my article on the 57th Utah State Legislature for more information on this project.
Also see my article on Senator John L. Valentine for what I think the basic article should look like. As there was no mention of Senator Buttars birthdate, or profession yet there was prominent mention of his membership in the LDS Church which isn't more noteworthy than the information which was left out (i.e., birthdate and place) combined with the controversies surrounding Senator Buttars makes it unencyclopedic. So please add encyclopedic content to this article. I am going to re-add the tag until the article has more encylopedic content. I will try to do this myself when I get to Senator Buttars article. I understand that you have done much work on this article and I commend you for doing so but let's not ignore the fact that this article is not encyclopedic. Thanks Edward Lalone 23:38, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removed Unencyclopedic tag[edit]

I took the time to add some more content and removed the unenclyopedic tag. This article still needs work but is more encyclopedic and the tag no longer serves a purpose. Edward Lalone 00:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Salt Lake Tribune Links[edit]

All links to the Salt Lake Tribune need to be updated or deleted as they are dead links. Thanks. Edward Lalone 00:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Racism[edit]

The statement about Buttars being accused of racism needs to be sourced. I do not doubt he was accused of racism by people but this information needs to be sourced to be consistent with Wikipedia's Verifiability and No original research policies. Who accused him, and where is it published? Thanks. Edward Lalone 00:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Deletion of Talk page and biased article edits[edit]

Please do not delete the contents of the talk page... Also, the article itself has recently been edited in a decidedly non-neutral-POV way. (edited to add my signature. Whoops!) Porlob (talk) 20:31, 2 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have reverted the article to its last form prior to edits made by User:Senate10. Those edits systematically inserted a non-neutral-POV into the article, and due to the fact that the use made edits to only two articles (Chris Buttars and 10th Utah Senate District (the district Buttars represents) and the user's name, I believe it likely that this user is acting on behalf of Senator Buttars office.

The article needs work to be sure, and there is room for improvement in making it neutral-POV, but representatives of Buttars' office should not be making those changes. Porlob (talk) 20:59, 2 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Worst Person" and other issues[edit]

Due to recent negative publicity, this article is getting quite a lot of sudden attention, and recent additions have violated NPOV and BLP rules. Additionally, I have to take issue with the constant adding of the fact that Buttars was once named "Worst Person in the World" on an episode of Keith Olbermann's Countdown. This is not a terribly notable distinction; there is a different one every night, 5 nights a week (okay, half the time it's Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, but still, that's hundreds or thousands of people given this title, usually not mentioned in the recipient's article). It is also misleading. Anyone unfamiliar with the show would likely think this is significant superlative, not a humorous hyperbole. This isn't Rolling Stone magazine calling Hendrix the best guitarist of all time, it is a gimmick that is different every episode, and Olbermann makes it pretty clear the title isn't serious; even Limbaugh on his worst day is no Hitler, Stalin, or bin Laden. It really doesn't warrant inclusion; certainly not without context. -R. fiend (talk) 07:36, 21 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Controversy, comments about gays[edit]

The HRC just released an audio file of an interview with Chris Buttars by Reed Cowen where he calls gays the "meanest buggers" he's ever seen, among other things.[1] should this be included in the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.49.207.38 (talk) 03:01, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why not? There was also a protest that I heard about that the Gay and Lesbian people were doing, kind of tongue in cheek called Buttars-Palooza... could add that too...Sanitycult (talk) 03:38, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Creationism[edit]

In the section about Buttars and his Creationism legislation, there is an inference that creationism is an alternative theory. The title of Theory when examined in the phrase "theory of evolution: is a distinct scientific description, a description that evolution as reached with a broad consensus of science. Since Creationism can not be tested, observed, or disproved, it doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis, and certainly shouldn't be inferred as an alternate theory. One could just as well say the world was invented by turtles, because it can't be proved otherwise. As theory of turtle invention does not qualify as a theory in scientific discourse, it is improper to refer to it as an alternative theory in conjunction with a theory that does qualify. It isn't simply semantics, because the term "theory" has a distinct meaning in the empirical sciences that is constantly garbled when referenced to this particular issue. JasBrunner (talk) 14:29, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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