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The Barefoot Doctor

Thanks for getting in touch, it'd be good to sort something out. I guess I'll start by explaining each of the changes I made to your edit, and the relevant Wikipedia policies involved, so you can let me know what you disagree on.

• You changed "Russell" to "The Barefoot Doctor" in a number of places in one section. The rest of the article (and the Observer source itself) refers to him as 'Stephen Russell', which has a more encyclopaedic tone, particularly when we're talking about his personal life rather than his published work.

• Claiming that Russell has attracted "worldwide" acclaim for his work is maybe fair enough, if you can provide a source for it, although we should be careful not to use sweeping WP:PEACOCK terms when we can be more usefully specific about which countries he's well known in.

• You switched to the US spelling of "criticized" - WP:ENGVAR says to use British spelling in articles about a British subject.

• "However, these critiques focus on just one aspect of The Barefoot Doctor's work and it must be considered that a great number of people have benefitted from his teachings and practices." was original research - the source doesn't tell us that the criticism only focused on this single aspect, and it's your personal opinion that the benefit to his patients "must be considered". We should report what existing sources have said about him, rather than presenting our own assumptions or opinions.

• I'm not sure what your "freely-given statement" and "he also freely spoke" edits meant, but the Observer source made no mention of the statements being "freely given", so it's inappropriate to make that assumption without a source to back it up.

• "In a special report in The Observer, The Barefoot Doctor was cited as a practicing psychotherapist which is not true." - it's not up to Wikipedia to point out mistakes in articles, books, films or anything else. If there's been some actual controversy over him being called a psychotherapist, feel free to quote and reference that, but if it's just an error in a single newspaper article, we shouldn't be writing about it.

• "This article was published in The Observer, a British newspaper in which he wrote for 5 years, in January 2007." - this didn't seem to add anything to the article. We already mention further up the page that Russell wrote for the Observer. Am I missing something?

• "The article highlights a number of regulations regarding the practice of talking therapists but all allegations made in this piece in relation to The Barefoot Doctor are refuted and on some points unfounded." - I summarised this to "...after five complaints were filed with the patient group Witness. He denied having made sexual overtures to patients in treatment.", which makes it clear which allegations were refuted. I don't see anything in the article that goes as far as saying that some of the allegations are actually "on some points unfounded"; if you've got another source that backs that up, you should mention it.

Let me know if you have any questions about this, and thanks again for getting in touch about it. --McGeddon (talk) 11:12, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Just a couple of responses:

• Yes, the article mentions both his pseudonym and his real name, but that by itself isn't a reason to use one over the other (if it was, the same argument would go for calling him "Russell"). So far as I can tell, "The Barefoot Doctor" is a name he wrote articles under; it's a little odd to talk of a pseudonym "admitting to having sexual relations", especially when the source itself calls him Russell. A good comparison article here is Dr. Seuss - once we've mentioned his writing name, we call him "Geisel" throughout the article. You can see how that comes across more professionally?
• We don't know whether Russell gave his quotes freely, issued them in a formal statement, made them in response to an interrogatory phonecall or private email from a journalist, or anything else. We shouldn't use a wording that makes any sort of extra assumption, and should stick as closely as possible to the source.
• I'm not sure what you mean about the article implying that Russell is guilty of something when no allegations were upheld; if we've made a mistake here, that would be genuinely libellous and we should correct it as soon as possible as per WP:LIVING (if you ever see an unsourced, defamatory claim about a living person on Wikipedia, you're encouraged to delete it immediately). Reading it through, though, it seems like a pretty straightforward report of what the Observer article said. What's different?

Feel free to be WP:BOLD and make whatever changes you feel appropriate. Thanks for your patience on this. --McGeddon (talk) 14:39, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Reliable sources

As I said in my edit summary, I removed the "ever-weaker" sources as per this explanation on the talk page - since Russell has now removed all mentions of the Observer and Wikipedia from his page, it's unclear what "pejorative allegations" he's talking about, and it requires a great leap of original interpretation to use it as a source here.

I'm afraid private email correspondence can't be used as a source, as per WP:RS ("Wikipedia articles should use reliable, third-party, published sources") - verifiability is extremely important, and future readers and editors would have no way to check that the email was genuine.

If you have any questions, I'd recommend raising them on Talk:The Barefoot Doctor so that other editors can give their input, and help to track down any sources we need. --McGeddon (talk) 15:28, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

barefootdoctorworld.com

Thanks for the source. Is this link of yours correct, though? I get a page load error when I try to view it. --McGeddon (talk) 22:18, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay, it's back up, it must have been down temporarily. It's still not a very useful source, as Russell only mentions "some allegations", he doesn't tell us which ones. I appreciate he's probably unwilling to spell out the allegations on his own site, but if he doesn't, we can't be sure exactly what he's talking about, so should be careful about quoting him at face value.

Can I ask what your connection is to Stephen Russell? The statement on his website seems to quote the same email that you claimed to have received personally. --McGeddon (talk) 22:41, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Would you mind answering this question before editing Russell's article again? Linking to websites you have some connection to is explicitly and strongly discouraged in Wikipedia's conflict of interest guidelines. Thanks. --McGeddon (talk) 13:21, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

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