Talk:Death of the Liberal Class

Secondary sources

If content lacks any secondary sources or evidence of notability, shouldn't we get rid of it? Or is that "Partisan suppression"? bobrayner (talk) 10:48, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm surprised that our anonymous reverter has the chutzpah to reinsert large volumes of unsourced and non-notable comment with a plea for discussion on this talkpage, but doesn't actually bother commenting on this talkpage. And then goes canvassing with more personal attacks. Political crusades have no place on wikipedia; I'm sure Hedges has plenty of other websites that will promote his polemics, but this kind of editing is not compatible with en.wikipedia's rules. bobrayner (talk) 19:48, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I contacted the main editor who has worked on this article over the past two years via the editor's Talk page so that editor could explain that work; unfortunately the editor has not responded yet.

Bobrayner, I believe what you are engaging in is Information suppression based on your political and economic orientation -- something this book itself is about. Have you deleted any fiscal conservative book summaries as non-notable or unsourced? Would you, say, go and delete all or most of the article on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom because it uses the book itself as a source or because it advocates a specific political and economic point-of-view? Yet, you deleted a lot of the Small_Is_Beautiful article the other day, and Participatory_economics before that, and Zeitgeist:_Addendum before that -- all works related to alternative economics. It appears to me that this deletion is just one more example of a pattern of bias and systematic information suppression by you that violates Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines.

On your claims regarding notability, whether the book itself may be a polemic or not is not at issue. Many notable works are polemics or in this case, jeremiads. It is a published work by a standard press and so is notable based on that and so deserves a summary.

As for your claims on lack of sources, the book itself is a *primary* source. The article is a summary of the key points there, as well as some incidental context substantiated by five references. I would agree the article would be better if as in the "Road to Serfdom" article the points outlined from the book were linked to specific pages in the book. But that is not cause for deletion of all the content as the points would be apparent to anyone who read the book.

If you think the book summary is inaccurate based on your reading it (have you read it?), then you should say so in this talk page. Otherwise, especially if you have not read the book, your reasons for deletion of all the content in this article are without merit based on the above, and fit with apparently a systematic bias violating the NPOV guideline. So, I am restoring again the original article's content before you deleted it and replaced it with a redirect to the author's page.

I suggest that another impartial editor be brought in to resolve this dispute before the article's content is deleted again by you.

Addendum: I have requested a third party review this dispute.

Response to third opinion request:

The article lacks sufficient sources to prove notability and also lacks sufficient references for content. Nobody is disputing that this book exists. The question are whether it warrants its own Wikipedia article and whether the material in this article are accurate. We don't have enough evidence for either at this point. There are hundreds of thousands of books published each year, and most of them don't warrant Wikipedia articles. To qualify, they have to have been referenced by multiple third party sources. This book has not. At this stage all we have is a single self-referential statement from the author. We don't even have evidence that anybody else has even read the book. That's not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. We also lack sources that confirm that the book's synopsis is accurate. The article should be removed until notability can be shown.Mark Marathon (talk) 03:43, 29 May 2014 (UTC) Mark Marathon (talk) 03:43, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for a third opinion on this. At least as far as showing notability, a search on Google on "Death of the Liberal Class" yields about 260 matches when clicking through to the last of them to get an accurate count. Among the top items are book reviews in the Harvard Political Review, the Huffington Post, the Socialist Worker, and a "Briefly Noted" in the New Yorker. The book currently has 93 customer reviews on Amazon, giving it an average of four out of five stars. Reading through some Amazon reviews, it seems clear the article could benefit though from a section at the end on criticism of the book, since it seems to have sparked various discussions there. To me, the various published reviews, Amazon comments, and the summary by the publisher taken together seem to substantiate the main points of the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.29.90.187 (talk) 02:51, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

All that is great, but those references are not included in the article. So right now the article lacks any evidence of notability and should be deleted. If someone wants to keep the article, they should add those references so they can be evaluated for RS status (HuffPo and Amazon reviews at least are likely to be challenged BTW). If editors can't be bothered to do add these references, they can't really complain if the article is deleted per Wikipedia policy. Mark Marathon (talk) 08:44, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your independent input, Mark Marathon. I agree; the article clearly fails our standards. bobrayner (talk) 19:33, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

• Comment This article shows no evidence of notability. It should be redirected to the author's article. Capitalismojo (talk)

This is funny talk page. Edit war fumings, overlong discussion for deletion that was never formally escalated with a now-banned user serving as a third party, all while the article sat around with three sentences for years. I expanded the article to include a summary, and put in more reviews. This book has about the same level of interest as Hedges' other books American Fascists and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. If deletion is seen as necessary here for some reason, those other pages can be consulted as well (though I'd argue American Fascists is pretty decent right now). I think this article should be kept for four reasons. Firstly, page views seem to indicate some small but very consistent interest in the page over the course of years. Secondly, and probably more importantly since page views suck as an indicator of anything, it would be undue to have information about this book on the main page for Chris Hedges because the length that may be involved, so a redirect or merge would not be adequate. Thirdly, obscurity is not a good basis for removing pages. Fourthly, the page does not fall into the trap of being an obscure promotional blurb, which is better than 70% of book stubs on Wikipedia. Mewnst (talk) 23:04, 9 April 2022 (UTC)