Talk:Jane Davidson

Contested information

This is a breakdown of the Contributions to Public Policy section and subsections, which seem to be tendentious:

• First paragraph - Accolades and whatnot. Completely unsourced.
• Education and Employment Policy - Unsourced and pointless.
• School and Factory Closures - Should be re-worded to include both sides of an obvious policy debate, rather than just piling it on the woman. Sources are non-verifiable.
• School Standards - Should be re-worded to include both sides of an obvious policy debate. Sources are non-verifiable.
• University Reforms - WP:WEASEL apparently, is the paragraph intended to imply that she was named to something because of grants given under her? It also seems pointless. Sources are non-verifiable.
• Animal Welfare Policies - Should be re-worded to reflect the facts in the Shambo article, where the sources give her credit for upholding UK regulations. The WP:WEASEL wording here pretty much implies that she took a gun and executed the animal. Sources are non-verifiable.
• Environmental and Transport Policies - Serious lack of NPOV and reducing a policy debate down to simplistic criticism of the subject, including quoting a letter to a newspaper (!! WP:UNDUE). Sources are also non-verifiable.

I have trouble looking at this as anything other than a hack job on the subject. Over the time that this article has existed it's obvious that this person's detractors have inserted information that they thought would put her in a bad light. We do not allow information that is WP:UNDUE, nor do we allow people to remove well-sourced criticism from biographies simply because it places the subject in a negative light. We strive for WP:NPOV around here. I also find it positively fascinating that not a single contributor has gone to the trouble of finding a single online source for the claims presented here, since we're not talking about events that took place in 1945. Sourcing to newspapers and so on is fine, but the onus is on the people adding the information to provide additional verifiable sources that support serious claims.

As of now I'm thinking we can pretty much blank this whole mess and start over from a basic stub. Conflicts of interest from accounts removing information aside, this is problematic under policy (which I invite everyone to read carefully, as always). Is there consensus to proceed? §FreeRangeFrog^croak 23:27, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Trim it to a bio article with limited political controversy. That should go in her party's article as their policies. Her job as minister is to follow party line. She isn't the creator of the controversy just has the job of implementing it. --Canoe1967 (talk) 01:22, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

I removed a series of personal and obviously biased political attacks. One was sourced, but sourcing your material doesn't prevent bias. For example, "she was known to respond to letters in completely incomprehensible jargon", following by a link to a regional newspaper where one person has claimed this is not a sourced fact, it's a political attack. Similarly, attacks on a politican by other politicans aren't news - if David Cameron's wiki page was a long list of negative comments said about him by other politicans, this wouldn't be a fair record of his character.Lstokes71 (talk) 17:20, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Wicigate

I have added a section which follows WP:NPOV to the letter. Anyone who removes this section, which also follows WP:Verifiability, clearly meets the criteria for WP:COI and WP:BIAS. -Politicool (talk) 19:00, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Notability Reassessment

It was I who added some of the critical content about the subject. When I started editing the article it looked more like a CV and I thought WP:NPOV would be best served by rebalancing the article. The subject was not perfect as others would like us to believed. Following User:FreeRangeFrog's restoration of my edits I had been intending to make the article follow WP:NPOV in a manner that is not biased either way. This is more difficult now the content has been removed.

But I now believe we should reconsider the subject's notability as per Wikipedia:NOTTEMPORARY#Notability_is_not_temporary. The subject was primarily known for her political work, which one could take as a single event. The subject lacks any notability beyond this and in fact the music education researcher of the same name has more prominence in academia. For instance the music researcher has 150 citations for the paper 'The role of parental influences in the development of musical performance' where as the subject has none.

With the clear WP:COI issues, even if we were to make the article more balanced there would always be a new account started up to remove any criticism of any kind. It might be best for all that the article be deleted.

=Politicool (talk) 19:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

You must be confused, because the point of WP:NOTTEMPORARY is precisely the opposite of what you're saying here. There's no need to try to re-asses this person's notability or anything like that. As to the music teacher, you are more than welcome to create a bio for her, and we can create a disambiguation page and everything. That said of course, you (or anyone else) are more than free to take this to AFD if you feel it's merited. Finally, my intent was never to remove criticism. My problem, which is detailed above (and was reported to WP:BLPN), was that the "criticisms" were little more than personal attacks and liberal doses of undue weight material with weasely wording and little attention paid to neutral point of view. Had this been an article about a species of fish or a carnival ride then I would have placed a few {{cn}}'s here and there and moved on. However, as this falls under WP:BLP the correct course of action was to nuke everything and invite contributors to start from scratch, again observing our policies about biographies. And that's what I recommend in this case as well. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 21:52, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

There is little point in editing the article. This article apparently exists to promote the merits of Jane Davidson, a former politician and researcher in Wales. It has been extensively edited by SPAs and by Jane Davidson herself. The article clearly tries to puff her popularity, as established in the discussion here. She was not as popular as a politician as editors of this article attempt to claim. Any attempts to provide any form of constructive criticism of Jane Davidson will be followed by her meat puppets, or even sock puppets, removing it. Is it worth the hassle? -Politicool (talk) 22:05, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

You are free to remove the praise as well, if it happens to be unsourced. That wasn't my concern, BLP-wise. In fact, you can stub it if you so desire. Our policies have precedent over your political leanings. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 00:36, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

It is nothing to do with praise v criticism, it is about making the facts available for all to judge, as opposed spinning doubtless achievements and popularity to more than they are, which have rather coloured things. I only began editing this article due to the article in the Western Mail about Jane Davidson getting a job at Trinity St David published a month earlier. During her rein Jane Davidson would speak of 'conflict of interest,' yet when she resigned in 2008 she told everyone in the Labour Party it was to set up a home in West Wales, where that university is. Many people doubt why she would give the job up and many still do. From here I discovered references to support facts relating to the allegations in the Western Mail in the form of a prior connections with the University. I spend quite a bit of time ensuring that information I enter into Wikipedia is referenced correctly and I did so in this case - I do not discriminate on party grounds. I feel the whole tone of this article made by Jane Davidson herself and others leads to a misuse of Wikipedia as it is self-serving and I have seen no evidence of the articles I added from Trinity Mirror newspapers being non-notable. If those sources I cite are not notable or reliable, then neither is Jane Davidson, as the remaining content is not citable from independent, reliable and verifiable sources. -Politicool (talk) 05:16, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Should it be of any concern to anyone following this discussion - Politicool describes himself as a Labour party member in his account details, and yet his edits consist of a long list of personal criticisms of Labour politicians, and one instance of a copy-and-paste job from a Conservative Party blog to a wikipedia page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lstokes71 (talk • contribs) 00:23, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

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