I think what Minos was looking for was a "You're right, sir, I'll get right on that" response. He had no good reason to expect that, and should have assumed ahead of time that he wasn't speaking to or being read by idiots. The first sentence of his first post-AfD comment is: "I am absolutely appalled by the poor judgment and carelessness shown in your actions with regard to this article." Its perfectly fine to disagree with Lar. I don't think the close was wrong, although it might have benefited from being relisted for more discussion. I do think, based on the article you linked, that Lynch could have an article on Wikipedia. Note that Minos didn't link to any articles - only to search results. The first article actually about Lynch in the Times results is the 13th result, on the second page.
Calling search results on Google deceptive is routine - if your search isn't refined enough, almost any search for a common name returns tens of thousands of results if not more. The search terms ["Gary Lynch" SEC] return that sort of result, and this was his point. Minos wasn't being deceptive, Lar wasn't calling him deceptive - he was merely pointing out that the *results* were deceptive.
We can disagree about the outcome of the default for no consensus discussion on WT:BLP, and disagree therefore on the reasoning Lar used at the end of his rationale on this AfD. What we should be able to agree upon is that a reasonable administrator could have come to Lar's conclusion, and that an increasingly incensed series of posts to and about him are not going to accomplish any particularly useful goal. Since his experience with Lar has caused Minos, apparently, to stop editing and has prompted Enchantress to post it as emblematic of some systemic problem at Wikipedia its useful to note that they themselves caused the only problem here.
Nathan
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
Its your prerogative to think that a close made without a proper effort to check the validity of the only substantive argument is likely to be meekly accepted by most people - especially when what looks to me like a more than reasonable set of linked articles are considered "deceptive." If I was told that an argument I had made was deceptive, I'd be pissed too, even if I didn't take it 'personally'.
More to the point, Lar didn't restate the WP:BIO guideline in different wording. He changed the default of consensus=keep. He did so knowingly, and also knowing that consensus doesn't exist for it. That's why the first response is so incensed - he can't understand why a particularly strong standard is being applied to an article that is beyond the normal level of marginal notability of a BLP.
"Not all intelligent and knowledgeable people in this world will find success editing Wikipedia". Yes, but nobody so far has made a case for why this particular person shouldn't, which is why I'm still in this conversation. Unless we, at least mentally, give people who appear to know what they're talking about some leeway, we lose too many. That is the actual mistake made here. Lar is unfailingly polite in my opinion, much more so than I would have been perhaps, but what that chap was looking for wasn't a polite "this is the way forward" but a "this is how you make your valuable but un-WP-like argument clearer so that people don't miss it if they're in a hurry".
RR