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Welcome!

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Hello, LStravaganz, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask at the help desk, or place {{Help me}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to help you get started. Happy editing! GiantSnowman 11:07, 19 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of page "Harlan J. Brothers"

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No Opportunity to Answer Deletion Discussion

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Hello. I logged in to answer your claim of embellishment (not true) and to provide the requested references and found the page removed already! Wikipedia claims "deletion" is a process, but this was clearly a summary action on the part of an editor. How do I appeal this? Can the discussion be reopened in the the interest of fairness and neutrality? Thank you, GiantSteps (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2021 (UTC)GiantSteps[reply]

Unfortunately I have no say over any appeals process, nor am I familiar with the process. You should contact the editor who actioned the page deletion. However, they may possibly be unsympathetic to your request given that:
  • you have already taken multiple opportunities to present your side of the story;
  • your side of the story did not end up swaying many editors, and in fact, more editors recommended deletion even after our lengthy discourses;
  • you presenting your side of the story is highly unlikely to be seen as "fair and neutral" given WP:COI
  • you did not adequately address the key issue that you do not meet WP:ACADEMIC;
  • the editor who actioned the deletion acted entirely within guidelines set out by WP:AFD. It was not some unjustified "summary" deletion, because we have already had a week's worth of discussion where the majority of editors recommended deletion. That is the process.
LStravaganz (talk) 15:59, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Editor's Claim of "Embellishment"

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For your reference, here is what I spent my spare time yesterday drafting:

“First, I do want to sincerely thank the Editor (LStravaganz) for flagging the article in question - if it survives vetting by the community, it will be a *far* better article with improved references and, importantly, without the fluff of external links that simply showcase my various endeavors. I should explain that when I started the page about 19 years ago (I'm guessing), I had no idea that there was any proscription against autobiographical entries. As the Editor has pointed out, a lot has changed. Having gone back to school to study math at the age of 44, but without any formal credentials, I was looking for ways to share my results. A Wikipedia page made sense.

Clearly, the first thing I should clear up is this idea that I engaged in “embellishment.” This is important given the Editor's comment:

I also want to again point out that the issue of the Larson textbook embellishment has yet to be addressed, either in the article itself or in this discussion. In my mind, this severely undermines HJB's claim to be writing about himself in good faith, and is exactly the reason why WP:COI is a massive consideration in this discussion here. I hope his anticipated response will address this issue satisfactorily.

I should point out that the Editor's use of the phrase "either in the article itself" is strange given that I was explicitly advised by editors *not* to edit the article myself.

I taught middle school for nine years and am reasonably well-versed in issues of curriculum. For reference, here is the Wikipedia definition for the word "curriculum". After John Knox and I published our second paper "Novel series-based approximations to e,” we received email from the publisher of the Larson’s Calculus series that our article had been selected by mathematicians Ron Larson, Robert P. Hostetler, and Bruce H. Edwards as one of the “fifty best articles on calculus from MAA periodicals” and that it was now a supplement to their textbook, Calculus with Analytic Geometry, Seventh Edition. At the time, supplementary material often took the form of a CD enclosed in the book. Textbooks (and all of their content) are clearly part of a curriculum, certainly as per Wikipedia's own definition.

These days, supplementary material often takes the form of a link. Our article is still being published and appears in the current edition of both Calculus and Calculus EFT:

https://matharticles.com/ma_calc11e.html

https://matharticles.com/ma_etf6e.html

In all, the article has appeared as supplementary material in 10 of their textbooks. (I will address the issue of multiple other textbook citations separately.)

The claim of “embellishment” is simply false. By extension, the Editor's "massive concern" and explicit questioning of my "good faith" are misplaced. This claim of “embellishment” is not only incorrect, but I believe it is, to some degree, representative of recurring assumptions and assertions on the part of the Editor that certainly sound in tone like they’re antithetical to the spirit of Wikipedia’s core value of neutrality. My concern is that we are all human and the the Editor’s unnecessarily uncharitable presentation (e.g., casting my relationship with a mentor as cursory, questioning my "good faith") *might* have biased other editors against preserving the article in a much-improved form. Unfortunately, casting aspersions in a debate has an asymmetric effect - it is easy to misrepresent an issue, but it can take far more effort to set the record straight. I am hopeful that I will be given an unbiased opportunity to fully address the stated concerns.”

As you can imagine, it was a shock to see that the discussion was suddenly closed this morning and that the page was removed. GiantSteps (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2021 (UTC)GiantSteps[reply]

You seem to miss the point. When I raised the issue of "embellishment", it was because you wrote about Larson's inclusion of your work in a very misleading way. You claimed that "these methods subsequently found their way into the standard college calculus curriculum by way of two popular textbooks on the subjects". Any reasonable person would intepret this to mean your work is "widely taught to college calculus students", in the same way that eg. Taylor series is part of a standard curriculum. This is clearly untrue, as I've pointed out; in the textbook itself, your paper was a mere footnote with exactly zero mention of your actual e limits. Even if it is true that your work features majorly in some supplemental CD, it is still not exactly taught universally in college classes as the article seemed to imply.
Your defence thus only amounts to semantics over what "curriculum" means; you have taken the broadest possible definition of "standard college curriculum" and equated it to the contents of textbooks, for the purposes of shoehorning in a claim that superficially sounds very impressive but does not actually reflect reality. It matters very little what the dictionary definition of "curriculum" is, because the context-appropriate intepretation is that no calculus student actually sits down, studies or is examined on your work (unless you can prove otherwise), so it's incredibly misleading to claim it is in a "standard curriculum". And, just to clear it up, I never expected you to edit the article directly, which is why I put in "either in the article itself or in this discussion", which you seem to have deliberately ignored?
The second half of your message above is frankly a very unwelcome exercise in gaslighting, despite its apparent civility cloaked by verbosity. I nominated the article for deletion because it was an autobiography about a subject who does not meet Wikipedia's established criteria for notability. If you think I was unnecessarily uncharitable, or if I made "recurring assumptions", it was because I literally had so little to work with, given that your article was devoid of sources and littered with broken links! I questioned your good faith then because of what I noticed was an obvious exaggeration, as described in the previous paragraph. Now, I have even less confidence in your good faith given your gaslighty accusations that I am somehow acting against Wikipedia's values??
I also have absolutely no idea what you mean by me "casting your relationship with a mentor as cursory"; I think you're wading into strawman territory here. If this is about your collaboration with Mandelbrot, note that I never doubted your relationship as a genuine partnership; rather, I claimed that having relationships like this do not confer any inherent notability.
I point out the obvious fact that there were **multiple** editors who agreed with my assessment of your page. You want to paint me as having biased others against you, which sounds like a very bad-faith way of admitting my arguments were more persuasive than yours? Even the mere suggestion of me holding some sort of sway over other editors is honestly quite insulting to them, who are fully capable of making their own independent assessments.
Look, I know it's ego-bruising to have your page deleted, but unfortunately, a process was followed to its conclusion. If you genuinely feel there is something worth fighting for here, go chase it up as is your right to do so. However, this is not a fight you should have with me, as it's not up to me to facilitate your appeal. So, I'd appreciate if my talk page were not used to continue discussion on this topic, or be used as a platform for you to undermine me. You may find WP:AVOIDABUSE helpful. LStravaganz (talk) 16:49, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have in no way engaged in abuse. I tried to do the right thing by consulting this page: Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion. It appears to say that one should communicate first with the appropriate Editor.
For the record, I want to let you know that I understand your above explanation re: embellishment and can respect it as an alternate point of view. A simple edit could have fixed the issue without attributing motives to the "embellishment".
As for clearing things up:
And, just to clear it up, I never expected you to edit the article directly, which is why I put in "either in the article itself or in this discussion", which you seem to have deliberately ignored?’’
Here again, your claim that I “deliberately ignored” your statement is not true. The second part did not sound strange, only the first part which is why I quoted just it and not the second part. Nothing has been cleared up.
As you wish, I will no longer engage with you directly. GiantSteps (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2021 (UTC)GiantSteps[reply]
I've requested for my talk page to no longer be where this discussion occurs, yet you still *had* to sneak in a few sentences.
I'm really bewildered why you want to make such a major point about this. I was literally prompting you, when I said "either in the article itself or in this discussion", to explain your embellishment in the discussion. So why are you fixating on the article bit when you knew perfectly well that you could have just engaged with the discussion? This is a really really bizarre hill for you to die on, and yet another point that undermines my confidence in your ability to engage with good-faith discourse.
I reiterate again that I'd appreciate if you had this discussion elsewhere, perhaps as part of a WP:DELREV discussion, although I'd advise you to read very very carefully the WP:DRVPURPOSE section. If you want me to engage with you in those subsequent discussions, you can invite me there at that time. But for now, please refrain from using my talk page to grind axes with me. LStravaganz (talk) 02:26, 5 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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