Talk:Stan Dragland

Note

I note that the article has been edited two times in the past three days to claim that Stan Dragland has died; the first time it was done with no source at all, and the second time it was with an unreliable source that isn't a real media outlet, while no reliable source media outlet anywhere in Canada has reported Dragland's death at all. It is occasionally true that sometimes people's deaths take a few days to actually hit the media -- people were claiming Margaret Gibson's death in 2006 at least three or four days before any source for it could be found, and François Protat's death in 2019 was up in the air for almost a whole week before anybody actually found a proper source to support the claims of inside knowledge that some Wikipedia editors had made. So it isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility that he's actually dead and the story just hasn't hit the media yet for some reason -- but even if that were true, it still wouldn't be our role here to denote him as dead until a reliable source reported his death, and relying on an unreliable blog of the "celebrity net worth" variety is not on your list of options. Bearcat (talk) 19:42, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't see much controversy on citing as a reputable source of his death a message posted by the University where he worked for 29 years. Denying his death seems absurd: https://www.uwo.ca/arts/news/2022/08_dragland_text.html

Not only news sources are the only acceptable sources on Wikipedia. Valenzine (talk) 20:09, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Nobody's "denying" anything here; you used completely unacceptable sourcing (either none at all or "SNBC13.com") the first two times, and didn't even offer up the employer post until after the page had already been edit protected. So it's not your prerogative to pull attitude on me — as of the time the page was protected, the completely invalid "SNBC13.com" source was the only one that you had even attempted to show at all. The employer post certainly changes things, but you didn't offer it until after the page had already been protected.

Death hoaxes from fake-news websites are a real thing in the world, and people editing Wikipedia to falsely claim that an article subject has died when they really haven't is also a thing that really happens — so claims of an article subject's death cannot be inserted into Wikipedia with no sources like you did the first time, or with unreliable sources like you did the second time, and you didn't even come up with the employer post until after I posted the above clarification and after I had to explain to you that even Facebook posts still don't cut it.

As I said on your talk page: it's more important that Wikipedia get these things right than it is that we jump on these things quickly. The employer source is better than anything else you've tried before, but one more time, you didn't even come up with that until after trying to throw a bunch of bad sources at the wall. So whatever this is, me being unreasonable isn't it — if you had come up with the employer post in the first place, there wouldn't even have been a problem to discuss. The problem was that the employer post wasn't the source you were using, not that anybody else was being unreasonable in not accepting a source that you didn't provide. Bearcat (talk) 20:44, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

You are absolutely right: the SNBC13 source was not a good one. My bad.

What I don't understand is why you went ahead and protected the page instead of asking for a source or even did a quick search first. I mean, you could have reverted the changes and simply asked for a better source instead of putting a giant lock on the article. Sorry for the misunderstanding, I should have been more careful. I didn't realise it was a bad source. Keep well. Valenzine (talk) 21:24, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, like I said, death hoax stories from fake-news websites and people falsely editing Wikipedia to claim that someone has died when they really haven't (see e.g. Talk:Hayden (musician), where we've been battling that for years) are both real things that really happen. So if somebody edits a Wikipedia article to add an unsourced or poorly sourced claim that so-and-so has died, and I can then find absolutely nothing on a Google News search to suggest that any reliable source has reported the same news, then I can't just assume that it's true and leave the statement there waiting for a better source to show up — it's absolutely essential that the claim has to be completely removed from the article until a better source does show up. It's the kind of statement we can never publish at all without rock solid sourcing for it, not the kind of thing we can just leave in the article waiting for a better source, because it's the kind of thing that actually causes harm to the article subject if it turns out to be wrong. Bearcat (talk) 21:46, 6 August 2022 (UTC)