Innovationbrain

De Bono

Hello there. All I did was remove an already-discussed controversial sentence - sorry if you felt I was refusing to discuss it, but I did mention the talk page, which already had a thread that stated my point from a couple of weeks ago.

We have to be very careful when making weakly-sourced claims about the work of living people, as this leaves Wikipedia open to libel suits. As WP:BLP says, poorly sourced contentious material about living people should be "removed immediately and without waiting for discussion", until we can find a good source of it.

I'd genuinely like to see the article addressing the original authorship of the "hats" system, but given that this would have to be framed as "de Bono is lying when he claims to have invented them", we need a strong source to back us up. I'm sure there must be some newspaper coverage out there somewhere. --McGeddon (talk) 09:13, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The main guideline here is WP:RS. We shouldn't report something unless it's already been covered by a reliable source. It would be fine to say something neutral like "Hewitt Gleeson claims to have invented the Thinking Hats system in 197x as part of the School of Thinking", provided there was a simple, reliable source that backed this up. If all Gleeson has done is mentioned it in a blog entry on his own site, though, we can't use that. Any respected author can write a blog entry claiming credit for anything, but unless a third-party source documents it, it would be inappropriate to add it to the lead of the relevant Wikipedia article.

The biggest problem with your current edits is that you're saying De Bono's rebuttal is "inadequate", which is a personal opinion, and reflects badly on a living person. I'm happy to go with a compromise of Gleeson claiming credit, and flagging it as requiring a reliable source, but if we can't find one, this isn't of encyclopaedic interest. --McGeddon (talk) 13:17, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. If you can't type the tilde character, you should click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 12:50, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The article in question is not a biography. - although a reference to this event IS present in dr de bonos biography on wikipedia, so if you are that determined to enforce this rule you had better remove it from there too - I don't know how long it has been on there.. furthermore I do not see this as being poorly sourced since it include statements directly from both protagonisist regarding the issue they are disputing - what better source is there on a dispute than the statements of position from the protagonists establishing their position