Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Thelema/Peer review/Aleister Crowley

This is the Discussion Page for the Aleister Crowley Peer Review. Please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~). Place comments that start a new topic at the bottom of the page and give them ==A Descriptive Header==. Please respect etiquette and assume good faith. Also be nice and remain civil.

Rewriting the Bio section

The Aleister Crowley biography section is currently disjointed, confusing, unreferenced, and not very well written. Crowley is a major 20th century figure, and deserves a grade A treatment here. So, let's make this thing shine!

Three articles to get everyone up to speed: How to write a great article, The perfect article, and What is a featured article?.

Although the entire article needs sprucing up, I suggest we focus on the bio section. Right now, it's just a massive block of text. Considering that his life had many significant chapters, I offer the following sub-sections:

Early life (from birth up to GD)
Mystical beginnings (from his 1896 visit to Stockholm up to his 1900 trip to Mexico)
Yogi (from 1900 thru 1903)
Mystic (from 1904 thru 1911)
OTO (1912-1914)
Crowley in America (1914-1918)
Abbey of Thelema (1920-1924)
A magical life (1925-1947)

These are just my ideas, and not written in stone. However, if someone wants, this will likely go a lot faster if different people take different chunks.

Finally, we really need to use references and cite them properly. There are many Crowley bios. I think the best are:

Crowley, Aleister (1979), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, London;Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Kaczynski, Richard. (2002). Perdurabo : the Life of Aleister Crowley. Tempe, AZ : New Falcon Publications.
Sutin, Lawrence. (2002). Do What Thou Wilt : A Life of Aleister Crowley. New York : St. Martin's Griffin.
Booth, Martin. (2000). A Magick Life. London : Hodder & Stoughton.

Okay! Let's get to Work!

If we are to do this, we are going to have to make this its own page. Now, will this have to be called Aleister Crowley (Bio) or Aleister Crowley (Magical Bio)? Or will we add those in to other main articles? I think we should start with making the bio a main article, then, unpo reaching areas where he entered the Golden Dawn, OTO, we start making main articles for those as well (as well as main articles that delve into the A:.A:., acounts of people who were with Crowley during magical experiences, etc etc) I think I'm going to start by making the bio page its own article, that way we can address issues that may arise there. Zos 17:42, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Due to space issues I have moved the bio to Aleister Crowley (Biography). Zos 03:06, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fannish Adulation has got to go

Good luck. I tried to add an external link citing examples of gender bias, racism, nationalism, and bigotry in the works of Crowley (nothing new -- the same sort of thing Sutin and others have mentioned) and the link was deleted within 24 hours as being "not related to the article.".

At the present time, the supposedly "biographical" Crowley page appears to be heavily policed in order to delete or remove any mention of the following:

Child and wife abandonment in China and subsequent death of child
Mountaineering accident and subsequent abandonment of climbing partners
Racism in writings
Gender-Bias in writings
Nationalism in writings
Writing for a Pro-german magazine while in America during WWI and falsely declaring himself an Irish national.
Self-claimed violent assaults upon others (e.g. Bengali doctor)
Types of drugs used, including cocaine, ether at al.
Basic falseness of the novel "Diary of a Drug Find" which implies that the author had the power to cure his own drug addiction, when he did not.
Deaths at Thelema Abbey (of student and of child)
Expulsion from Italy
Unusually obsessive diarizing about anal sex acts with prostitutes

Instead we read sentence after sentence about his pathetic failed career in chess and wacky "trivia" about his happiness when Queen Victoria died.

"Peer reviewed" does not mean "written by a clique of fans." It means "subjected to scrutiny by others with sufficient knowledge to impartially review the material." Until an attempt is mde to address the issus brought forward by other biographers, but kept away from Wikipedia, this page will never be anything but an embarrassment. Catherineyronwode 02:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I'm concerned, you are welcome to incorporate facts into his bio. This is why I put Crowley into this peer review...the bio as it is is terrible. I would be careful about beginning with a conclusion, such as that he was a racist, and then fit in facts to support it. A straightforward bio is best with external links to more controversial information. –Frater5 (talk/con) 03:46, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. There are many bios of controversial figures in WP that do not shuffle the controversy off to external links. See Henry Ford, Mircea Eliade, Alice Bailey, Gerard Encausse (Papus), and Julius Evola for samples. There are others. Catherineyronwode 09:25, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is an online encyclopedia. Crowley was a controversial figure with many highlights and...uh....not so highlight-able....events in his career. Beginning with a conclusion would be a bad idea because that introduces bias into the article: however, the good and bad in Crowley would still need to be addressed for the sake of the reader. Although I think that the details of Crowley's controversial life should be left to external links, a mention of Crowley's high and low points in life is in order. FUTURI (talk) 18:56, 25 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cat, notice how you did nothing in the way of actually sticking to the definition you are giving in quotation. Wikipedia does not allow you to link pages from your personal work as sources, and usenet pages on top of that. When the deletion was done, there was no "fannish adulation". You, lacking of understanding of the guidelines is what happened. Zos 10:20, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Zos, you are highly confused. I did not "link pages from [my] personal work as sources." I provided an external link to a group of four pages that present evidence of white supremicism, nationalism, racism, gender-bias, and bigotry in Crowley's published writings. I know better than to confuse an external link with a source. Surely you you do too. If not, please read up on the subject. Catherineyronwode 09:25, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Providing evidence is the same as citing a source to me. I realize where it was located on the page, I've already addressed this issue. Zos 09:34, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thelema

Actually, I'd like to see more factual evidence on all Thelema related articles. And by this I mean from non thelemites and real sources. Should we just let all the pages go with no verifiable sources? Make Thelema look all made up? This is what its showing right now. These are all just claims if we don't back them up with hard proof (if there be any). Zos 06:11, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Abbey of Thelema

I do recall somewhere, where it was stated that the first time the Abbey was mention in a book by Crowley, was Diary. I think the book's passages pertaining to the Abbey may serve as in intro to that affect. Zos 17:44, 21 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]