User talk:Oulon freud

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I need help with the Kaveh Pahlavan page. I have been trying to edit his page because I did a project as an undergraduate research project that is available on https://web-biography.wpi.edu/. The issue is that there are currently several tags that beg to be fixed. I tried earlier to fix it but ended up making it worst. At first, there were two tags: one asking for more citations and another warning about the contribution of a close subject. Then I added several more citations and removed the citation tag. In addition to that, I reverted to what I thought was a version that did not have the contribution of Kaveh Pahlavan. But then someone put the tag back and added even more tags that now put in doubt the impact of his work despite the existence of several supporting newspaper articles. What do you propose that could be done to fix the issues raised by the tags? I read the various guidelines proposed but could not find something practical and relevant to the issues on the page that would enable me to get rid of the tags. There are several examples of Wikipedia pages of his colleagues that are clean (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Rappaport) and I wonder why Pahlavan's page cannot be legitimate and issue-free. Also, I have been talking to several admins. I feel no one took the issue to heart and communication has been lacking. If needed I get on the phone to clarify. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oulon freud (talk • contribs) 17:05, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Cleaning up an article in this situation can be much harder than you might think. The article has been repeatedly edited, over a period of years, by editors who have made little or no contribution elsewhere, and whose focus has clearly been largely on promoting and publicising Kaveh Pahlavan and his work. In that situation, promotional content is often so deeply integrated into the whole fabric of the article that it can be difficult, or even impossible, to separate the promotional aspects from the factual. It is very different from the situation where an otherwise good article has briefly been substantially edited by one or two editors with a non-neutral point of view, in which case it's easy to simply revert the unacceptable editing.

In an article such as this one, cleaning up by a neutral, uninvolved, editor may require a huge job of going through the text sentence by sentence, checking references, searching for suitable references when none are already cited, and making an assessment of exactly what aspects of the text are simple objective reports of what reliable independent sources say, and what aspects aren't. Often a sentence may contain acceptable content, but expressed in a way which combines it with promotional or otherwise unacceptable wording, and it isn't as simple as removing particular sentences. If this is done by an independent editor, without extensive prior knowledge of the subject, the amount of work required is often way beyond what any editor can reasonably be expected to do. A much easier approach is to just remove anything which isn't immediately obviously OK, but that often results in reducing an article to a tiny stub of only a couple of sentences or so.

I picked out a few sentences from the article, and checked them. The first one I checked said that Kaveh Pahlavan was the author of a number of textbooks which are used throughout the world. The "reference" provided for that turned out not in fact to be a reference at all. It was merely a link to a Google book search, which produced a long list of hits, most of which had no connection at all to Kaveh Pahlavan, and nowhere was there anything at all saying that his books had worldwide use. The second sentence I checked says "He has served as founder, co-founder or chair of several high impact pioneering international conferences, symposiums and workshops". The "reference" for that was just a page on the website of an organisation, listing conferences it has organised. It didn't even say whether any, let alone all, of them had Kaveh Pahlavan as "founder, co-founder or chair". Nor did it say that they were "high impact" or "pioneering", and even if it had done so, that would merely be marketing hype by the organisation promoting the events. Also, it is highly questionable whether such peacock-worded laudatory comments should ever have a place in a Wikipedia article, no matter how well sourced they may be. So it went on with other sentences I checked... Some of the claims made in the articles may be unambiguously true; equally some may be unambiguously invalid, and some purely subjective and/or promotional. Separating the wheat from the chaff would be a major undertaking.

What I have seen makes it perfectly clear that the article contains a significant amount of material which is nowhere near up to Wikipedia's required standards, and there is no way of knowing how much without laboriously checking every single sentence, reviewing cited sources, and searching for other searches if necessary. Obviously leaving the article in its present state, complete with warning tags, is very unsatisfactory. However, granted that those two possibilities are both highly unsatisfactory, the only other option that I can see is to ruthlessly remove everything except a bare handful of really basic statements. It is certainly not an acceptable option to just make a few minor changes to remove the most blatantly non-neutral material and then remove the warning tags. The effect of doing that would be simply to increase the likelihood of readers taking as reliably sourced objective sourced fact material which is in fact nothing of the sort. JBW (talk) 10:00, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank for the thorough answer. Oulon freud (talk) 23:04, 30 June 2022 (UTC)