Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Edward Dutton (author)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Consensus is for deletion. Malcolmxl5 (talk) 15:33, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Edward Dutton (author)

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The article fails WP:PROF and WP:GNG. To the untrained eye the article looks very well sourced however when you actually look at the sources most of them are promotional, self-published, hardly mention Dutton or are off-topic. If you actually remove all the primary or unreliable sources hardly any of the article would be left and the man is not notable. He is not a notable academic or a professor. His books are published by Washington Summit Publishers a white nationalist publisher not taken seriously in academia. The only detailed source that seems to mention Dutton's views is a piece written by Aiden Bridgeman [1], a student newspaper from the University of Aberdeen but this source has often been debated on the talk-page.

Sources 12-18 do not mention Dutton, they merely mention that the Mankind Quarterly is a racist journal. References 8, 24 (YouTube), 28, 29, 32, 35, 42 are all published by Dutton and are clearly primary sources added to "pad" out the article. In regard to reference 1 published by Zúquete, J. P. (2020) apparently this is a failed citation and was not properly published, there has been a conversation about that on the talk-page.

Likewise the Mankind Quarterly is also cited twice on the article, as is the white nationalist website Red Ice (references 37 and 38), Richard Spencer's Radix Journal (reference 22). These are all primary sources.

References 42, 43 and 44 are just books which Dutton contributed to. There is no reason they should be references. There are many other unreliable references on the article for example [2] a review of Dutton's book on race in "prescottenews" written by white supremacist Jared Taylor (reference 23). There is also a reference by "Egyptology student Julien Delhez" (reference 31) published in a peer-reviewed journal, looks good right? The truth is Julien Delhez is actually a close friend of Edward Dutton and writes for the Mankind Quarterly which Dutton edits [3]. This is not a neutral review. Some of the other sources are newspapers but they only mention Dutton in brief.

The Hope Not Hate profile pieces on Dutton are only a few lines, they are not complete biographies. The Edward Dutton article has repeatedly been edited by anonymous IPs and accounts associated with Dutton to remove criticisms. If you weigh up the fact that most of the sourcing on this article is promotion and unreliable and the fact that Dutton wants his Wikipedia article for Google traffic I believe the article should be deleted. The same thing happened with Dutton's colleague Michael Woodley [4]. These articles are being written fraudulently from a promotional POV by fans of Dutton to get him Google hits when in reality the man is not notable outside of his alt-right racist community. Psychologist Guy (talk) 14:04, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Not a lot else we can do with muck like this for sourcing. XOR'easter (talk) 14:15, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete For the carefully explained reasons of Psychologist Guy, especially Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Woodley (2nd nomination) — two peas in a pod. Mathsci (talk) 14:25, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Academics and educators, Authors, and United Kingdom. Shellwood (talk) 14:33, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete ID be lying if i claimed to have looked at all the references in this article, but Psychologist Guy's take is what i noticed as well, a lot of citations, but not many, if any good ones. If anyone is interested in trying to save this article, i would like to see a lot of the garbage refs culled, at a minimum. Bonewah (talk) 15:12, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Subject definitely fails WP:PROF. Has popped up in news coverage of varying quality from time to time, but none appears to constitute significant coverage of him –– other than the student newspaper article which has been described above, and it is not at all clear that this source is reliable enough for BLP purposes. As with other WP:FRINGEBLPs, the struggle with the current article is in threading the needle between BLP violation and using Wikipedia as a platform for laundering the public image of a charlatan. And as with previous cases like this (the recent Woodley AfD mentioned above and also this one from 2020) the best solution to the problem appears to be deletion. Generalrelative (talk) 16:07, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The Edward Dutton article has repeatedly been edited by anonymous IPs and accounts associated with Dutton to remove criticisms. Is this true, or are we just assuming that they're associated with him? Those are two different things and I think it's important to be clear. Pyrrho the Skipper (talk) 16:11, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I cannot answer for Psychologist Guy, but for context Dutton has encouraged meatpuppets to edit his BLP on Twitter: Computer types: My wikipedia page seems to be under assault from leftists determined to write in POV and use Marxist sources. They've even deleted the 'History' to cover-up their changes and who has made them. [5]. Generalrelative (talk) 16:18, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Pyrrho the Skipper I have seen some off-site evidence that one account heavily editing this article is associated with Dutton. I cannot publicly link to that but if you go through the history of the article from January 2021, there has been non-stop edit-warring and vandalism, I have not seen any other biography quite as bad as this that is why it was locked. Single purpose accounts and new IPs kept showing up to remove criticisms. Dutton has often complained about his Wikipedia article on his podcasts and his supporters clearly have edited it so yes my statement that accounts/IPS associated with Dutton I believe to be true. As for the meat-puppetry, yes this has happened. Lute Currie who has written for Mankind Quarterly has edited Dutton's article. After he left Wikipedia on his main account he used many IPS. This user has publicly admitted to having autism and an obsession with "race realism". It might explain his obsessive edits on many IPS. There are many others Saxon Celt (banned). HiramWikiMan looks like an account who personally knows Dutton, Wikiwall32 is clearly another close supporter and probably a sock. All these accounts make some edits then never edit again. I suspect that two of the IPs editing heavily are associated with Mankind Quarterly. Yes this is my own research as admins do not link IPs to accounts so an SPI would be pointless but I have filed many successful SPIs in the past and I have been in private communication with people about certain accounts on the article and they agree with me. There was also a long-term vandal editing the article [6] full list of their IPs collected by Beyond My Ken [7]. In conclusion, the editing history of the article is a mess. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:30, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, I see what you mean. Thanks for providing that. Pyrrho the Skipper (talk) 19:50, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. If someone can pull a really convincing WP:HEY on it, maybe it would be worth revisiting (I think there's a decent chance someone could argue for WP:NAUTHOR), but threading the needle between BLP violation and using Wikipedia as a platform for laundering the public image of a charlatan is right. Thanks to Psychologist Guy for showing your work so clearly for the rest of us. -- asilvering (talk) 20:18, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: a plausible alternative to deletion could be a redirect to Meeting Jesus at University, in which case biographic information, if any, should probably be limited only to background information relevant to the book itself, lest it become a coatrack or shadow biography dominated by content unrelated to the book. --Animalparty! (talk) 21:47, 2 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - As is so often the case with this group of fringe academics, a biography of Dutton without the necessary context would be a bad parody of a resume. Without that context, he fails notability guidelines, but the sources are just too thin. So we can either rely on extremely weak sources or we can delete the article. Grayfell (talk) 21:07, 3 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment, sometimes when an author is up for deletion i look to WorldCat to see whether their books have been noticed by librarians (the higher the number, the more likely that there are reviews somewhere), trawling thru Dutton's tomes Meeting Jesus is held by around 130 libraries, most of the others are in a miniscule no. of libraries ie. low 1 or 2 digits, a couple of exceptions though are The genius famine (held by around 500 libraries), and Culture shock and multiculturalism (in over 700 libraries), surprising that there arent reviews available for those books. Coolabahapple (talk) 14:39, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. Culture Shock and Multiculturalism is from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which has a checkered reputation. I don't know how that might translate into wider holdings (deals with libraries to take a whole shelf at a bulk rate?), but it could have something to do with an apparent gap between holdings and interest. XOR'easter (talk) 18:22, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
One wonders if they're gifts...? Academic libraries tend to buy off of press lists rather than review lists (by the time an academic review comes out, you probably already want the book in your library), so the gap between holdings and reviews isn't as weird as it might look. But if you can move 700 copies of your book to a bunch of academic libraries basically by flooding them, you think you'd also be able to get some press attention by the same means. -- asilvering (talk) 20:27, 4 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Good question. Worldcat lists Culture shock as a physical book, but its genre is 'Electronic books' and (as far as I can see) every single library is an academic library. This seems like it might be some sort of bulk e-book deal for academic libraries. When limiting to physical editions, there are only about 50 physical copies in Wordlcat's libraries. Grayfell (talk) 01:24, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oh that's very interesting! I had no idea that worldcat stats tracked library holdings when it came to e-books and didn't think to check the metadata. That's almost certainly what's going on, then. -- asilvering (talk) 04:36, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch! XOR'easter (talk) 14:49, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.