Talk:Nick Rainey

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Jevansen in topic Dealing with negative information

Dealing with negative information edit

This is a bit of a sticky situation. We're definitely interested in getting accurate facts in articles, but we have a preference for reliable sources over unreliable sources, which sometimes mean it is difficult to keep an article fully accurate.

In addition, we have a "bias" in favor of excluding negative information if it cannot be solidly confirmed.

This article has an allegation that the subject "failed to return the money to his backers". It is backed up by a published source although I don't know enough about the source to know how reliable it is.

The subject has provided us with some links that cast doubt on the claim, but unfortunately the links are to a forum which is probably not viewed as reliable.

Here are some of the links, although there are more:

I would like a discussion among editors on how best we can handle this. I have suggested to the subject that the ideal situation is obtaining a correction from the reliable source but we all know that's not an easy thing to get any may take some time. Does anyone have any thoughts on how else we might handle this?

I don't think it's fair that a very negative statements such as this should remain simply because the counterarguments are less reliable than the claim but I don't know how best to handle this within policy.--S Philbrick(Talk) 23:58, 4 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for stepping in on this one.
Regarding the edit summary accusations for harassment/stalking, I just wanted to assure Nick that I was merely working through a list of tennis players for creation from my sandbox and researched the subject accordingly. There is no vendetta. I can certainly understand why he would have these feeling of persecution given the existence of certain unfavorable forum threads/websites which display prominently on google, but none of these were used in the creation of this page, nor am I affiliated with them.
The site PokerNews does seem reliable. The article however does rely largely on posts made in the public forum which you have posted, which brings up questions over how the claims made in the article were verified. It's a difficult situation in that we have no reliably sourced update, but for all we know everything could have been resolved straight after the article/s were published. I thought of rewording the section in question to reflect this but I'm not sure how this can be done. Similarly while getting a "correction" from a reliable source would help this situation, he may also not want to seek such publicity. Something else to consider, and I don't know if policy helps us here, but the subject's notability comes as a tennis player (he wouldn't qualify for an article due to poker). With all that in mind I would be open to either rewording this section in the article or simply removing it. Jevansen (talk) 01:25, 5 September 2017 (UTC)Reply