Talk:Michael Howard Kay

Untitled

I hope it's not too much a breach of protocol to create this page. There are a couple of articles that mention my name and people have tried to link them to the wrong Michael Kay, so I thought it would reduce confusion. Mhkay 18:44, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Autobiography

I'm adding {{Autobiography}} and {{Notability}} tags to this article, since it was created and frequently edited by the subject and serves only to promote him and his accomplishments, while presenting no alternative point of view. All but one of the references are from the subject's own work, and the other is from a promotional guild of which the subject is a member. In other words, it provides no unbiased documentation of the subject's notability. It reads like a resume, not like an objective encyclopedia article.

I suggest that the subject read and pay serious attention to such WP guidelines as WP:PROUD, WP:AB, etc. While he may be justly proud of his accomplishments, his user page would be a more appropriate place to display them (if they must be displayed on WP at all) than a self-created article that simply by its existence gives him notability he may or may not truly have. As the WP guidelines advise, it is better to let others document one's notability than to do it oneself.

Please forgive me if I have been offensive; I don't mean to be. I do not in any way mean to say that the subject of this article is NOT notable, simply that the evidence of his notability should come from entirely independent sources, not from the subject himself.--Jim10701 (talk) 15:07, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I created this page because there were three other Wikipedia pages that mentioned me and linked to the wrong Michael Kay. The choices were to un-link those references or to provide something for them to point to. At the time I did this, I asked for advice from the Wikipedia community as to whether this was a appropriate thing to do, and no one was able to suggest otherwise. I have kept the facts in the article to the bare minimum as I have no wish for publicity; this has led in the past to the article being labelled as a "stub", which I have challenged on the grounds that I think it says as much as needs to be said, and no more. My edits have mainly been to correct information inserted by other people. If you can suggest a different course of action that I should have adopted given the history, please do so. Mhkay (talk) 20:14, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

In response to this comment, I did take the opportunity to ask myself critically whether I satisfied the criteria for notability. I think that I can reasonably claim that I do, under this heading: "The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews." I have been the lead designer of the XSLT language for ten years, this language probably has half a million users, and there are at least a dozen books written about it including my own, which has sold 50,000 copies or so. Of course, as with most engineers, creating something that is widely used and written about does not (fortunately) bring notability in the sense of making you a household name; but reading the notability guidelines, I don't think that is what they are saying. Mhkay (talk) 14:07, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree that Michael satisfies the notability criterium; he's the person responsible both for helping to specify XSLT, and for implementing the known-to-be-best implementation of it as open source. Reschke (talk) 19:20, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Please understand that it is the principle alone that concerns me. In my original comment above I overstated the article's lack of objectivity; my discomfort with its self-authorship colored my reading of its content, and for that I apologize.

I do not get any sense from the article or from anything Mr Kay has written with regard to the article that he is a megalomaniac bent on using WP for self-aggrandizement. Considering his evident accomplishments, I think he writes about himself with commendable restraint and humility. I am uncomfortable only with the fact that he created the article himself.

I still do not understand why he had to do that, unless his accomplishments are in such a narrow field that very few people know about it. I'm sorry to be rambling on, but I just can't reconcile Mr Kay's accomplishments with the fact that no one but him bothered to create an article about him. Why is that?

If Reschke had written it, for example, I never would have objected at all (unless Reschke is an associate of Mr Kay's, in which case there would still be a conflict of interest). Maybe that is what should be done: request that someone unaffiliated in any way with Mr Kay but familiar with his field rewrite the article using whatever independent reliable sources are available.

In any case, I am convinced now that Mr Kay should have an article in WP; I just wish someone else had written it, and it puzzles me that no one did. But since no one did, it is not entirely outrageous for him to do it himself, and the restraint with which he did it is commendable. I will remove {{Notability}}, but I will leave {{Autobiography}} in hopes that someone will rescue the article I now agree is necessary from the cloud of self-authorship.

Thanks very much for hearing my concerns and for trying conscientiously to allay them.--Jim10701 (talk) 16:53, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

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