Talk:Soulsville (Huey Lewis and the News album)

Personnel disputes

A look at this article's edit history shows that its Personnel section has been repeatedly edited for several years now by IP editor(s) with unsourced claims about personnel which have consistently been reverted. Based on the pattern of the unsourced edits, it appears to be an IP hopper making these changes, a claim supported by some of User:Binksternet's edit summaries that have contained text such as this: "Rv... Block evasion by Verone66, also blocked as Special:Contributions/107.77.169.7 and Special:Contributions/99.23.39.93" and this: "Rv... Long-term abuse. Currently blocked as Special:Contributions/76.30.25.202 and Special:Contributions/107.77.173.4" and this: "Rv... Block evasion by Special:Contributions/Verone66, Special:Contributions/76.30.25.202 and Special:Contributions/107.77.173.4. LTA from Texas."

A similar pattern of disruptive edits can be seen on the articles for Huey Lewis and the News, Plan B (Huey Lewis and the News album), and the template for Huey Lewis and the News.

The rest of my comments here are assuming a single IP-hopping disruptive editor, but I acknowledge that this is an assumption.

Among other patterns such as changing instrumentation credits, overlinking instruments and deleting personnel, this IP editor has repeatedly added either totally made-up names of non-existent musicians to these articles (Joseph Stallings, Garnett Andrews, John Koda, Carl Steinberg-Rogers, Lewis Garnett, Stanley Litwakson, Stanley Harland, Stanley Loughran), or actual musicians who have no association with the Lewis band (such as Trombone Shorty, Slyde Hyde, Jesse McGuire), or mis-representations of session musicians as a permanent member of the band (John Gove). On November 15, 2018 I added a reference from AllMusic’s entry for Soulsville, credits section in an attempt to add easy credence for reverting the persistent edits.

The Soulsville WP article has been page protected 3 times since September 26, 2018 due to these persistent unsourced edits. I’ve noted that after the page protection has expired, the unsourced edits by the IP editor to Personnel resume within a short period of time.

In August 2019, as a result of repeated reverts of these patterns of unsourced edits that by this time also included edits to the Additional musicians and vocalists section, I found a Discogs entry that made the distinction between members of the band and those credited as additional musicians (i.e., session musicians) so I added it to the Personnel section as more support for reverting these patterns of unsourced edits by the IP hopper. Specifically according to Discogs, John Gove was credited as an "additional musician" and appeared on only two songs on the album. Gove’s credits in his AllMusic entry does not go to that level of detail, but does reveal that Gove only appeared on this one album by Huey Lewis and the News, which further implies that he is not a permanent member of the band.

This dispute over the description of Gove as an additional musician on Soulsville vs the IP editor’s repeated changes to include him as a member of the Sports Section resulted in the most recent page protection of the article, which expired a few days ago. The IP editor has also returned, making the same changes to Gove’s credits as prompted the most recent page protection as well as re-adding Jesse McGuire as a band member. McGuire has never appeared on a Lewis recording, according to AllMusic.

Yesterday, User:Binksternet replaced the Discogs citation with a duplicate of the one from AllMusic that doesn’t give the specific details of Gove’s contributions to the album, citing WP:ALBUMAVOID. While I acknowledge this is a WP policy, I am writing these comments up to explain the context for why that ref was added to the article originally. Also, please note that the Discogs entry for Soulsville includes digitized images of the CD’s booklet, that very clearly has entries for "The Band" which does not include Gove or McGuire’s names, and "Additional Musicians" which shows Gove played trombone on only two songs: "Respect Yourself" and "Got To Get You Off My Mind".

After I finish typing these comments, I will replace the ref next to Gove’s name with a citation from the WorldCat library catalog that is not as specific as the Discogs entry, but it can refute the IP editor’s repeated and unsourced claim that Gove and McGuire are members of the band for this album. If/when the article is edited again to change Gove and McGuire’s status, I plan to point to this section of the talk page as a reason for reverting those edits.

Thanks for reading. NOLA1982 (talk) 22:49, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

References

Thanks for your vigilance. We'll all keep an eye out. Binksternet (talk) 22:58, 21 December 2019 (UTC)