Talk:Warrior Soul, The Memoir of a Navy SEAL
To the or persons responsible for arbitrating articles on Wikipedia:
First, that you for your time and effort. Having worked before in positions that were both thankless an anonymous, you have my gratitude. My name is K----- C----------, I a am the author of both the “offending reviews” (Warrior Soul and Killing Che) and I wish only to make a brief statement urging that they be kept on the web site. Naturally, I will abide by your final decision, and make no attempts to re-post them, should the editors decide to remove them.
I’ve written many book reviews on the net, at Amazon, Powells and B&N. I am a personal friend of the books' author, Chuck Pfarrer. (Who also asked me not do get involved with this). The reviews have been tagged as advertisements by a user name Nobunga. I’m not sure that it is accurate to claim that I've engaged in advertising; I’d have to have been paid for that. I am, however flattered that the reviews “read like book jackets”, as book jackets are concise summaries of plot and content. Though I like Chuck and his books, I do not have the time to play goalie on these postings. I assume that the tag that Mr Nobunga put on them will make sure that they are expunged. I think that's unfortunate, because people can stop here and get an idea what the books are like.
In my opinion, every book ever published should have a wikipedia entry. The better ones, works of literature, should have articles. Lesser ones, like Chuck’s, simply summaries, and yes, if they are good enough, recommendations from readers. The free exchange of ideas appears to me to be what wikipedia is all about. I think it is also unfortunate that one person can, based on subjective judgment, delete a book review. The Nazis used to burn books they didn’t like.
This is only a guess, but I think there must be about 10-20,000 entries on Wikipedia summarizing or recommending fiction and non fiction books. A person could stay pretty busy tagging them all as advertisements. It is slightly puzzling to me why a certain person would go out of their way to have Chuck’s books stricken from the website. I do not know if Mr Nobunga personally dislikes the author, or was angry because he thought Chuck had written his own reviews. (Looking at Mr Nobunga’s user page, it seems odd that he would object to self-promotion.)
I additionally take issue with the claim of advertising, as any of the thousands of pages devoted to movies have obviously been placed there by studios, who have hired writers to maintain a wikipedia presence. These entriies are, genuinely, advertisements and not crtical writing. My reviews, though enthusiastic, are not advertisements.
When I write reviews in the future, I will do my best to write them well, but I will not conceal my enthusiasm for books that I like. You may delete my review, but I’m glad that you cannot stifle my opinion.
Yours sincerely,
K----- C---------- aka 666163
- What you fail to understand is a) You can put just about anything you want on your own user page (Although how you label a short biography, and userboxes self-promotion is beyond me. Perhaps all users are self-promoting, eh?) - if you want to review books there, knock yourself out. Seeing as yours is blank, and the only edits you have made have been to articles somehow related to Chuck, it would appear that you are hyping a book to some extent, or have only read two books, one of which the article says will be published next year - possible grounds for deletion: WP:Not a crystal ball b) Wikipedia is not a review site, so admitting you are reviewing books shows that you don't quite grasp yet what entails an article. The whole point is to present information from a neutral point of view, not individual editor's musings on how good or bad a book is. You may think every book should have a section for recommendations from readers, but that isn't what this is. If you want to review books, do it on amazon. In case you haven't noticed, the articles are not up for deletion, only tagged as "reading like an advertisement," a notice to other users to clean it up. "When I write reviews in the future," - please don't write reviews in the future; that's not what this is all about. Nice touch with the Nazi argument - read up on Godwin's Law (aka Hitler argument).--Nobunaga24 07:52, 6 August 2006 (UTC)