On 7/14/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:36:34 -0400, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Original research. we don't know (either way) because there are no reliable sources.
Actually, the person who claimed to be the guy's brother and started that rumor about the nurse admitted it was a hoax. I sent you the link earlier today.
You're missing the point. We don't know either way, there are no reliable sources. we don't have a court transcript, a report from the paper, a statement, nothing.
So you think the guy's brother was telling the truth, and then he retracted it for some reason? Or you think some random guy made up a hoax story which just coincidentally happened to be the truth?
I think it's pretty clear that the story about the nurse was a hoax. Maybe not clear enough to put in the article, but certainly clear enough that one shouldn't call this a minor technical offense.
The point is, this has so little neutral coverage that we almost certainly won't know. If we ever get a contemporaneous news report which details what happened and to whom then we might arguably have enough to go on, but honestly there is nothing here on which to base a biography.
As I've said, I disagree. I think there are enough neutral sources to have a short article, maybe two paragraphs long, which would be far better than having nothing.
We disagree here in two fundamental respects.
First, I don't think that there are any sources neutral enough, given that virtually every source we do have is related to the "who's a pepper?" thing. There are no reports unrelated to that, other than the primary sources (eSORN etc.) and they are monumentally uninformative.
There are primary sources, there is at least one newspaper article, there was at least one television news report, and there is snopes.
Second, I think that having a short article ''is'' worse than having no article, because we have no idea what else the guy has done with his life. Maybe he spent his entire childhood rescuing drowning kittens. We oimply have no idea. All we know about him is he pleaded guilty to an attempted felony, and he looks "kinda weird". We can reasonably infer that he is disabled, but even that is probably original research. We really know next to nothing about the guy, so we have no way of presenting a neutral biography.
Frankly, I think an article which said that we know nothing about the guy would be better than no article at all. At least then someone interested in knowing about this Brian Peppers guy would know there probably isn't that much more to know. So this, I suppose, is a fundamental disagreement.
That said, we do have several pictures of him, we know that he pled guilty to two counts of attempted gross sexual imposition, a fourth-degree felony, we know his victim was a child female over the age of 13, we know he spent 30 days in jail, we know his birth date, we know where he spent time in prison, we know that he served his probation without violation, we know he lived in a nursing home, and that he still lives in a (different) nursing home, we know his approximate height and weight, we know he was in a wheel chair, we know the name of his prosecutor and his defender. Maybe that isn't all interesting enough for the article, and maybe some of it would have to be attributed, but for one of the hundreds of thousands of people who does a google search for "Brian Peppers", if they happen to click on the second link for that search, I think they'll be more satisfied than receiving a notice that "this page has been deleted by Jimbo Wales, and should not be re-created until 21 February 2007 at the earliest."
But, again, I suppose that's a fundamental disagreement between the two of us. I think a little bit of information is better than nothing.
If someone writing a book on memes goes out and researches properly and comes back with some actual substance maybe I'd change my mind, but right now I think that these two facts - conviction and appearance
- do not, between them, constitute sufficient material for a WP:BLP.
Guy (JzG)
Anthony