Talk:John Thomas Idlet

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I am John Thomas Idlet's daughter, and I was gratified to ready this post. I would really like to communicate with the person who wrote the original entry and chose the perfect references. Perhaps the author could respond in this forum? Thank you. Justice1955 (talk) 04:34, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Editors with conflicts of interest

This article was fairly quiet for seventeen months, but it has recently veered between white-washing and retribution as new editors have made changes to it.

My interest in this subject came from owning a book by Idlet and thinking he should have a wiki entry. I stumbled on a much more interesting story than I expected when I did a bit of research while creating this article.

I am going to put back my original edit on the sexual molestation issue, as I believe it is factual without being sensational.

If either of the two editors above starts an edit revision over this, I will contact wiki administrators to adjudicate the matter which could possibly result in a topic block. I don't think such a thing will happen, but I don't think that principals in this matter should be edit warring over the language and facts in this article.--Paul (talk) 19:49, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you Paul, for asking for my assistance in this matter on my talkpage. Sorry for the delay in responding. I have looked into it in some detail and have some suggestions/comments to make.

• First, per WP:OUTING speculating about the real-life identities of editors is inappropriate. Can I ask you to redact your posting above to remove this asap? I do note however, that User:Pegarty has admitted to being Pegarty Long on her talkpage.
• Editors who have a conflict of interest are best served if they make suggestions on the talkpage, but are not forbidden from editing the article in question. In this case, I see some problematic POV editing from both User:Pegarty and User:Rossen4, but also some helpful edits. In future, however, they should propose their edits here on the talkpage, as it seems clear from the problematic edits that WP (and other media) is being/has been used by both "sides" to further their version of these tragic events.
• There is a sourcing problem here. In the current version of the article a personal account [1] by an estranged daughter and published in the LA Weekly is being used as a sole source here for information about Idlet's conviction. This article has been critiqued by Pegarty Long and Idlet's lawyer, [2] also published in the LA weekly. Neither the daughter's account nor the responses are the kind of high quality sources we should be using for his article, particularly when other, better sources are available. Here are some sources that should be used in this article to expand and source it. Some deal with the conviction and some don't [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] There are no doubt others.
• It would good to see the information in this article greatly expanded with information about his poetry, life etc.
• The article appears to fail our policy of neutral point of view, though this may be related to the weak sourcing issue. Sentences like "Married four times, and remarkably indolent, it seems proper that he was friends with Charles Bukowski whose writing explored drinking, whoring and serial employment in dead-end jobs" need clear sourcing or should be deleted. Same with the more positive soul mate material about Long.

In sum, this article could bear with a neutral party rewriting it with scrupulous attention to high quality independent sourcing and neutrality etc. Different parties have sought to redress what they view as a POV article with yet more POV, poorly sourced material. With these problems rectified it will be much easier to identify and deal with any COI editing taking place. Let me know if I can help any further. The article is on my watchlist. --Slp1 (talk) 15:02, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

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