User talk:Levivich

Why NFOOTY needs to change...

I never really kept up with the NFOOTY stuff you got yourself in, but I just freaking wasted so much of my time because of it.

I was going through Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009 and discovered Nikolai Gromov. Gromov played in a single friendly match for Russia national football team/Russian Empire national football team as a last second replacement against Norway on 14 September 1913.^[1][2][3] I said to myself, there is no way that this could qualify as a Tier 1 match... It was a friendly game. It didn't mean anything! I checked the rules, and yeah... it counts. I figure, Well FIFA is an old organization.. they gotta keep records somewhere about this. I just spent a half hour looking and all I found was a single 2014 circular informing members of what the new rules are (without mentioning the old ones in detail..).^[4]

Why on Earth is this Russian soccer/football player who has only ever played in a single international friendly match against Norway that tied 1-1 because the team needed a halfway decent defender and the only passing mention of him in Russian-language newspapers is simply about how he wasn't as good as the other players -- considered notable???

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:41, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

MJL,^{[you're welcome for the ping]} lol, thanks for introducing me to {{table flip}}, which is exactly how I feel about this issue. Of course it's not just NFOOTY, there are stand-alone perma-stub pages for non-notable actors and songs and politicians and all sorts of things. Even after months of discussing it, I still don't really understand why some folks think the benefit of having these stand-alone pages outweigh the costs. Hey, at least Gromov is not a BLP. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ – Levivich 00:53, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Feelin' empty without being able to begin a reply with a template...* I mean, yeah; it's not a BLP, but it also means that there will never be new content to add to it. His soccer career is forever done.
Also, {{Table flip}} is the best! I'd make more emoticon/emoji templates like that if more people besides me started to use them. / –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 01:39, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

The AE circus

...and to think, I was t-banned for encouraging consensus, presenting valid arguments and being polite which was interpreted as disruptive. Perhaps we would be looked upon with greater respect if we'd partake in profanity, rabble rousing and calling admins jerks like the unblockable editors do?? ^Atsme _Talk 📧 18:49, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Atsme, seems every time I read AE my reaction is (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻. If only they extended the deal to every editor: for every FA, you can tell five editors to "fuck off"; three for a GA; one for a DYK. We'd have so much more quality content! – Levivich 04:26, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Ah hah! Productive use of one's potential. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 08:13, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

"You just wait until my FAC gets promoted, and then I'll tell you what I really think of you!!" – Levivich 15:32, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Featured article complete fraud! Content creators exposed as poseurs have feet of clay just like other editors!

Just to be sure you don't miss this [5]. EEng 07:59, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

EEng, thanks, I would have missed that, since it was so quickly reverted. It doesn't surprise me, though. "Whenever you see anger, you're looking at fear." The only reason someone would get that angry at anyone touching their article or questioning their sources is if they were afraid of something. – Levivich 15:49, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

In all honesty, I never imagined this. I really though EC and that bunch are these meticulous researchers and article writers whose detailed sourcing would of course be unimpeachable if you wasted your time checking, and the differences between us were just about different writing-style sensibilities. I only went to get the sources when EC claimed (see Talk:Moors murders#Out on the moors) that my change from

Brady reappeared, alone and carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier. When Hindley asked how he had killed Bennett, Brady said that he had sexually assaulted the boy and strangled him with a piece of string

to

Brady returned alone, carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier, and told Hindley he had sexually assaulted Bennett and strangled him with a piece of string

"gives an altogether different impression, of Brady freely admitting to his crime unprompted, whereas the original quite clearly says that he did not offer the information on Bennett's murder until after Hindley had asked him. This is just one example of the kind of nuanced meaning." So I thought, well let me just see what nuance the source really has. So I went to the library and here we are. The really sad part is, there really is something worth telling the reader along these lines; Topping 96, relating prison interviews with H, tells us "He never volunteered any information, she said, never bragged about what he had done." That's something worth transmitting to the reader but if that's what the first of the two text versions above (the "nuanced" version) is meant to do that, it sure don't do a very good job of it. There's much more to say but I gotta get back to work. EEng 17:39, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

@EEng: Funny you bring that one up, I was going to wait until after the AE closed and then suggest Brady returned alone, carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier, and, upon being questioned, told Hindley he had sexually assaulted Bennett and strangled him with a piece of string., having AGFed that the underlined portion was true.

Looking closer, there are clues in the references. This is one of the most notorious crimes in English history–it's been written about a lot. Yet, in the WP article, over 100 citations–almost half–are to two books that had one printing thirty years ago, one of which is an interview with Hindley, and the other is the police chief's autobiography. If those were leading works, they would have had multiple runs, they'd be more widely available. Meanwhile, books on bestseller lists, or with multiple runs over decades, or by leading subject area experts, are cited far less. There is also a noticeable lack of academic references. You'd expect the opposite to be true: you'd expect that interviews with the participants would be cited sparingly, for certain details or attributed statements, whereas the leading works in the field would be cited the most, particularly for statements in wikivoice, which should be the overwhelming majority of the article.

The details:

• 52 cites to an interview with one of the murderers: Jean Ritchie, Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess, Bay Books/Angus & Robertson 1988, apparently the only printing except for a 1991 run by specialty publisher Paladin Press. [6]
• 41 cites to the autobiography of the police chief: Peter Topping, Topping: The Autobiography of the Police Chief in the Moors Murder Case, also Angus & Robertson 1989, also apparently the only printing. [7]
• 27 cites to the Sunday Times bestseller, Duncan Staff's The Lost Boy: The Definitive Story of the Moors Murders and the Search for the Final Victim, Bantam 2007, 2008
• 17 cites to one of the leading Moors murders authors, Carol Ann Lee, One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley, Mainstream Publishing 2010, 2011 [8]
• 13 cites for an interview with Brady: Cowley, Chris, Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady, John Blake Publishing/Metro Books 2011
• 2 cites: Alan Keightley, Ian Brady: The Untold Story of the Moors Murders, Pavilion Books 2017 [9]
• 1 cite: Emlyn Williams (not sure if it's the same as Emlyn Williams), Beyond Belief : Moors Murders Macmillan Publishers 1967, Random House 1968, Book Club Associates 1970, Pan Books 1992 [10]
• Mentioned but not cited as a source:
  • The interview with Brady: Fred Harrison's Brady and Hindley: The Genesis of the Moors Murders, Ashton Books 1986, Grafton books 1987, and Open Road Media 2013 [11]
  • The book written by the chief prosecution witness and one of the leading Moors murders authors: David Smith and Carol Ann Lee, Witness: The Story of David Smith, Chief Prosecution Witness in the Moors Murders Case, Random House/Mainstream Publishing (2011) (Retitled in 2012 to Evil Relations: The Man Who Bore Witness Against the Moors Murderers) [12]
• Not cited or mentioned at all:
  • Detective Chief Supt. A. Benfield, The Moors Murders, The Police Journal 1968 [13], abstract: So many sensational accounts of the Moors Murders have appeared since 1965 that our readers will welcome this plain statement of the facts in the case by a senior officer who was principally concerned in its investigation.
  • T. Martin Cuthbert, A Portfolio of Murders, The British Journal of Psychiatry 1970 [14]
  • Carol Heron, et al., Studies in Crime: An Introduction to Forensic Archaeology, Routledge 1996, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2013, uses the Moors murders as an example in discussing locating and recovering buried remains. [15]
  • Moira Peelo, Framing homicide narratives in newspapers, Crime, Media, Culture 2006 [16]
  • J.M. Schone, The Hardest Case of All: Myra Hindley, Life Sentences, and the Rule of Law, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 2000 [17]
  • Claire Wardle, Monsters and angels: Visual press coverage of child murders in the USA and UK, 1930—2000 Journalism (2007) PDF
  • David Schmid, A Philosophy of Serial Killing, Blackwell Publishers 2010 [18]
  • Helen Pleasance, Lost Children, the Moors & Evil Monsters: the photographic story of the Moors murders, Image & Narrative (2011). PDF
  • M.Pettigrew, Myra Hindley: Murderer, prisoner, policy architect. The development of whole life prison terms in England & Wales, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 2016 [19]
  • Adrian Bingham, ‘Gross Interference with the Course of Justice’: The News of the World and the Moors Murder Trial, Springer 2016 [20]
  • MS King, et al., The strange Case of Ian Stuart Brady and the Mental Health Tribunal, New University Press 2016 [21]
  • Liz Stanley, Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism (Ch. 3) Ashgate 2013, Routledge 2016 [22]
  • Serene Makepeace, Child Killers (2017) [23]
  • Terry West, If Only: Living in the shadows of the Moors Murders (2018) [24]
  • Ian Cummins, et al., Serial Killers and the Media: The Moors Murders Legacy, Palgrave MacMillan 2019 [25] – Levivich 00:03, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's the same Emlyn Williams; it's sort of an In Cold Blood-ish work.

You and I are thinking along the same lines. I'm so dizzy finding all these V failures that I can't give an overview of apparent source reliability, but it was an early red flag that Topping is so heavily depended upon. Its hard to characterize but it's a secondary source just barely, in some parts, and not at all a third-party source. Lee is much better (at least it cites sources) but I think it focuses on H only (again, I'm too dizzy to take stock of this right now). We may, however, have to make the best of a bad situation if there really are no high-quality scholarly sources (though I haven't even begun to look at journal articles and such).

Something else which has been growing on me in the last 24 hours is how incomplete this article is. For example, there's essentially nothing on cultural and social impact -- even a quick thumb of the sources shows how much there is on this (and here journal articles are more likely to be useful, even if they're not a good place to look for sources on the narrative facts of the crimes, the investigation, and the trial). It's hard to believe it was ever considered an FA. Gotta get back to work now. EEng 00:39, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

I added to the list above, and that's not to mention the fiction works inspired by this: the books, films, and poems. Also found this 1966 letter, summarized as: "Dear Lord, Kindly shut the fuck up already. Yours sincerely, Balniel." – Levivich 01:45, 14 August 2019 (UTC)