Talk:Harry Demopoulos

Re:Disputed neutrality. What facts are being disputed as not neutral? Ya must help me here.

Re: Citations: Provided, Will provide more..

Doris Duke Death

Did partial revert. The lawsuit initiated by Demopoulos was what finally revealed the facts of Doris Duke's death. This is not insignificant. Also, I fail to see how directly quoting sworn testimony somehow violates NPOV. Facts is facts. BTW, Dr Demopolous is a pathologist and presumably knows a lot about murder.Pproctor 00:27, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

The bold statement the butler did it was POV and nonencyclopedic. (Was he tried and convicted of murder?) Maybe you should add something similar to your second sentence above to the last paragraph in order to make the significance of the trial more clear. Right now (and this could be partially because of my edit--I don't know) it isn't clear that Demopoulos initiated the lawsuit, so it just seems like extra detail about the trial that is unnecessary in light of the relative thinness of the article as a whole.

"The Butler Did it" is a classic folk expression in the US, arising from the mystery novel tradition. Rather than sensational, I was trying to be funny. This is sometimes a mistake on Wikipedia, where people come from all sorts of cultural backgrounds. Possibly, you never heard the expression. In fact, the criminal case went nowhere because "The Butler" died before things went further. Anyway, I concede your point and did not revert this part.Pproctor 00:34, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, that last paragraph is taken in whole from the cited source, but is not put in quotes correctly. It should just be rewritten instead of having it as a completely quoted paragraph at the end of the article.

From hard experience, I often use direct quotes just so there is no question about that the source (here, sworn testimony) says.Pproctor 00:34, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Understand that I came to this article from a position of complete neutrality, having never heard of any of these people except Doris Duke. I am merely trying to make sense of an article that seemed to be going on a sensational tangent. --emw 03:22, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

No sensationalism, just an element of irony and an attempt at levity. This time, really, truly, sworn testimony does suggest "The butler did it". I.e, murdered Doris Duke. But the main point with respect to Harry Demopoulos is that it was his efforts that uncovered this. For that alone, Dr Demopoulos is "notable".Pproctor 00:34, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Addendum: A search on Google gives about 94,700 returns for "The Butler Did It". Google answers has an interesting article of the origin of the phrase. This article states: "According to the most mystery novel fans, the originator of the phrase "the butler did it" is Mary Roberts Rinehart. She first used the phrase in her plays 'The Bat' which were base on the novel "The Circular staircase" ".

Significantly, the phrase the butler did it here on wikipedia goes directly to her bio. I may reintroduce the term in this article with this link so my meaning is clearer. Pproctor 00:49, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Removing prod

I am about to remove the "proposed deletion" template for this article, and would like to explain why first. The article has been around for over seven years and been edited by dozens of people. The material is well-referenced and the subject appears to be notable in several respects. At the very least this deserves an AfD, but I expect that it would easily survive one. Looie496 (talk) 17:09, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

I was directed here from a note on my talk page. I don't have an opinion yet about notability, but I would want to see anything on this page that resulted from sockpuppetry by a now-blocked editor with a conflict of interest cleaned up. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:21, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

The article has been edited about 10 per year, mainly by the sock-puppeteer User:Pproctor and one his pseudonyms. I could remove the content contributed by Pproctor, but that would remove almost everything (most non-Proctor edits are bots and formatting). So my proposal is to trim the article to its bare bones. Advice welcome.--Smokefoot (talk) 20:17, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

I verified some of the statements about his medical contributions by checking Google Scholar, and the statements about his acting career are supported by IMDb (which is not considered a reliable source, but still ...). So the article is apparently not 100% bullshit. Even for sock-puppeteers, we don't ordinary remove contributions made before they started puppeting, unless there is prima facie evidence of falsity. You should feel free to remove anything not supported by sources, but for material that gives references, you should not remove it without making an attempt to verify it first. Looie496 (talk) 23:03, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. Yes I was going to say that a 7-year old turd is still a turd or something similar. The more usual (perennial?) issue is WP:UNDUE. But you have a point, even jerks can contribute usefully. I will eventually pick away at the article, but selectively. Thanks,--Smokefoot (talk) 23:53, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure how much Looie knows about that socking account, but for me, this is one of the few times in my Wiki-career that I feel angry at someone's disruptions, and I rarely let anything really get to me. But this was truly despicable self-promotion. OK, so that's not a reason to delete reliably sourced material. But I think that an important aspect of UNDUE may be whether any of the content gives excessive emphasis to things that the socking account wanted to draw attention to, on the basis of his own semi-scientific agendas. I'm not claiming that's the case, but if it is, then it's entirely reasonable to prune that, even if it's verifiably sourced (per WP:V#Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion). And if pruning that out results in almost nothing left, then page deletion remains on the table. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:59, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

External links modified

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