The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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This RfC was closed as certified and endorsed without opposition. Gwen Gale (talk) 21:21, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Users should only edit one summary or view, other than to endorse.
Billy Hathorn appears to create a new article for every single obituary or newspaper story he reads. His deleted contributions list is substantial, longer than any other editor I can recall, other than acute POV-pushers. Billy is not a POV-pusher. His talk page shows a never-ending series of speedy deletion and AfD notices; a high proportion of these are deleted. Some are simply copy-pastes form external sites, occasionally with minor textual changes.
Some of his articles are good, or become good through the work of others.
Billy Hathorn needs to:
See for example Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Glenn E. Ratcliff, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Henry Wiggins. See also Billy Hathorn's talk page.
{list the policies and guidelines that apply to the disputed conduct}
Billy's Talk page is one long series of people bringing this to his attention, he does not seem to understand the problem.
DGG (talk) 18:05, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
As DGG says, Billy's talk page is a long list of warnings. Earlier this year, following a mass AfD nomination of a number of his contributions (not by myself), I (and many others) tried to point out what Billy was doing wrong, mainly on AfD discussions. However, while Billy was always polite, nothing that was said seems to have made any difference — other than that he ceased to post pure cut-and-paste copyright violations. In April Billy posted this discussion at AN/I, which sums up the problem at the time fairly well. Although it didn't seem to have any effect, following the AN/I debate I deliberately avoided nominating/tagging any of Billy's articles to avoid any appearance of wikistalking, and I believe the other participants did the same. Because those editors who were keeping an eye out for him in Recent Changes were leaving him alone, more of his articles "slipped through the net", which may have given him the impression that policy has changed. I agree with Guy that this RFC is necessary, although possibly for different reasons; as these circumstances have now caused a backlog of articles that almost certainly warrant deletion, at some point they are going to need to be cleared up and any unilateral mass-tagging by any editor is likely to restart the accusations of bad faith. While Billy is valuable to Wikipedia, as a bona fide expert in his field (the politics of Louisiana), he seems unwilling to accept WP:N and WP:V; his contributions still regularly cite "personal testimony" as a source. His articles as a whole would make a useful book on Louisiana history, but aren't appropriate for Wikipedia; I'd suggest that if he were to move to Wikibooks, he'd likely very rapidly rise to one of their leading political contributors. — iridescent 17:33, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
{Users who tried and failed to resolve the dispute}
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I say let the guy contribute his articles and give him a chance to back up his information with references. There are tons of articles on Wikipedia with no refernces at all that no one is ready to tar & feather into deletion. Now I will admit that perhaps Billy should slow down and reference each article properly before moving on to the next one. Sf46 (talk) 02:29, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
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