Talk:Terry Smith (American football, born 1959)

Sources that should be of use for the re-write

• BBC: Report on when he was first looking to sell the club

• When Saturday Comes: Good summary of the events of 1999–2000

• Chester Chronicle: Not a lot in and of itself, but touches on a post-2001 sub-plot, which may be worth further research

• Telegraph: Brief details on those who took over from Smith. More exhaustive sources are probably out there

• BBC: Generic, but backs up some specific statements in the current article

• Soccerbase: Results while Smith was in charge

• Guardian: An alternative insight into how Smith was viewed mid-way through his spell as coach

Content removal

@SpartansHistory recently questioned content removal from this page. Several IP users have also reverted changes, so let's try to resolve the content dispute here.

• When I found this article, I judged that it was written in a way that fell outside of Wikipedia norms. First off, it seemed to have quite a bit of unnecessary detail on the subject's family members. 5 lines about a child's acheivements is not something you would usually see on Wikipedia and the detailed looked excessive to me, hence removal.

• I also saw a lot of information written in a non-neutral tone, inappropriate for an encyclopaedia. Sentences like "the benefits of their work for America and for the world will last forever" and "in order to recognize and show their great respect for all World War II American heroes". This work sounds very worthy, but we need to write in a neutral, encyclopaedic tone.

• A huge amount of text in the article is not sourced. For example, the stuff about racehorses has no citations at all. The Veterans Voice content has some sources, but not enough to backup each statement contained in the paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Perhaps I cut out a little too much from this section, so I will add a little more info from the sources provided. However, one is a dead link and one is a YouTube link, so thre isn't too much usable info there.

Hopefully we can come to a consensus here and work to get this article into better shape. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 09:50, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Even if you have a point about certain wording, you have removed far too much, including the removal of very large sourced sections about the Mountain Television Network and the Veteran’s Voice show. The result is that you have taken out so much that readers do not even know that the Veteran’s Voice was a show that had personal interviews with World War II and Korean War veterans. Your wording is meaningless to understanding anything about the show.

Likewise, all those years of owning the television station, and all the sports programming are factual and many of these thousands of shows can be found online.

People cannot find articles to support every little thing because articles are not written about everything.

And so knowing facts that are provable have to be able to be used.

Likewise, the subject is a football coach, and so his success coaching at Avery High School is relevant.

These are facts that everyone knows and can be found online, but not necessarily in uploaded articles because the internet and uploaded articles was barely being done in 2003 when he was coaching.

Likewise, there are not many articles written about where racehorses trained when they were young, but everyone in the industry knows where they trained.

If these horses did not train at his farm, then someone in the industry who knows would correct it.

But you do not know, and so it is not for you to correct it.

Let the people in the Wikipedia industry who know about this subject work together like it is meant to work.

You want to require an article for every tiny thing that has happened in the past two decades, but that is not realistic because articles are not written about everything, and even when they have been written then they are often not uploaded to the internet, especially before very recent years.

Therefore, at some point known facts need to be written about subjects, and if they are not true then people who know the facts can change them.

But you do not know any of the facts, and so you are eliminating and removing facts that everyone knows, and you doing that is not the way Wikipedia is supposed to function.

Go and read any Wikipedia article, and you will find all kinds of things stated about people that are not supported by a sourced article, but instead are factual knowledge that is known about the people.

For example, are you going to go on John F. Kennedy’s Wikipedia page and start eliminating everything that is not supported by an article on the internet?

If you did that, then his page would have most of it removed.

Therefore, if all editors did what you are doing to this page then every Wikipedia page would barely have anything on it.

Yes, people can write in an encyclopedic tone, but they need to be able to include both sourced articles and known facts.

If known facts are disputed, then editors who have personal knowledge of the facts can disagree with them and try to make edits.

However, you do not know any of the facts on this subject, but you want to be the person who decides what facts can be written on this page, and that is completely the wrong way to formulate a Wikipedia page, especially when you are so careless that you want to only leave the smallest amount of words, such as with the Mountain Television Network and the Veteran’s Voice that do not even allow a reader to know anything about them. SpartansHistory (talk) 15:28, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi Spartans History, I think you are under a misconception about how Wikipedia works.

All information should be sourced properly. Source articles don't necessarily need to be online, but they do need to be cited in the article.

You mentioned JFK's Wikipedia article but all information there is supported by a citation. These come from online articles but also offline newspaper pieces and books. There are 460 total sources in the article.

Repeatedly adding personal knowledge isn't going to work. You will need to find written sources to back up what you're saying. You will be able to expand the information about the TV show if you do this.

Please note that many editors over the years have removed content from Terry Smith's article, so it's not just me. Editors of all stripes edit all kinds of articles and do not need personal knowledge of a topic to do so. This is a foundational principle of this website. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 16:26, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I recommend taking a look at Wikipedia:Verifiability to better understand this issue. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 16:35, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Per WP:BLP - "Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced — whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable — must be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion". GiantSnowman 17:46, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

You are not correct about everything being cited on Kennedy’s page. The entire beginning sections that provide a summary have almost no citations, and the citations in the remainder of the page may mention something related to a specific paragraph topic, but the citations do not cover most of what is written on the topic in the previous paragraphs.

As a result, most of what is written on the page does not have exact citation sources.

For example on this page, there are citations about Mountain Television Network and the Veteran’s Voice, but you have removed everything written about the Mountain Television Network and about the Veteran’s Voice except for what the citations exactly say.

For instance, you refer to Ken Wiley as an author, even though he is a World War II veteran and hero who drove the LCVP landing crafts in seven D-Day invasions in the Pacific.

But you have removed all that, even though the articles cited even say this in them.

Likewise, you have taken out everything that describes what the Veteran’s Voice television show is about. You do not even mention interviews with World War II and Korean War veterans.

Likewise, you mention nothing about the Mountain Television Network, where it is, and what programming it provided.

If someone did the same thing with Kennedy’s page, then most writing on the page would have to be removed because the citations cannot possibly cover everything word for word that is written about Kennedy.

Take a look at a page that is not going to have as much historical information as a former president. For example, the Wikipedia page about Eddie Robinson, one of the best and most famous college football coaches in history.

There is almost nothing on the page that is cited. Instead, facts are written that people can check on and dispute if they wanted to.

Are you going to go on Coach Robinson’s page and remove everything that does not have a citation that is word for word exactly what is written on the page?

Because if you did, then almost the entire page would be removed.

There are even sentences on the page that are personal and are not written in encyclopedic wording.

You need to realize that facts need to be included on pages even if there are not articles that exactly say them because it is impossible to have uploaded articles on the internet about every single word written on a Wikipedia page.

It is impossible because very few articles were uploaded to the internet until about a decade ago, and many articles, especially from smaller town newspapers and magazines, are still not uploaded to the internet.

Wikipedia existed before most articles were being uploaded to the internet, and so the Wikipedia pages through history have always been written with facts and not with just citations for every word allowed.

If facts are incorrect, then editors who know the facts, can edit the wording on the page.

But editors who know nothing about a subject, like you with this subject, should not be removing facts that you do not know by you incorrectly saying that every word on a page needs to have a citation.

If every word on every page had to have a citation that specifically said those exact words, then all Wikipedia pages would be very short of factual writing. SpartansHistory (talk) 17:51, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

The quote about contentious material does not apply because the material removed is not contentious.

The definition of contentious is if people disagree about it or argue about it.

These are facts that are not being argued about.

An editor who knows nothing about the subject is just removing material if there is not a citation that says the exact word in it. SpartansHistory (talk) 17:56, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

If editors removed everything on pages that did not have an exact word for word written on a cited article, then the information on all Wikipedia pages would be very sparse.

This editor is looking at the Wikipedia rules incorrectly. SpartansHistory (talk) 17:58, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Intros to articles summarize what is written in the rest of the article and therefore do not carry citations.

As for Eddie Robinson, that article looks to need excessive trimming due to lack of citations. There are plenty of badly written articles on Wikipedia and they need cleaning up too.

You yourself say that I am following Wikipedia policy when you state:

"You have removed everything written about the Mountain Television Network and about the Veteran’s Voice except for what the citations exactly say."

As for the point made by @GiantSnowman, this material is contentious because other editors disagree on whether it should appear in the article. Even if not, the onus is on you to get consensus for its addition. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 18:21, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Also @SpartansHistory: see WP:TLDR. Your long walls of text are disruptive. GiantSnowman 18:24, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

How can anyone ever get consensus on material when you as one person think you can remove anything you want to remove.

There was consensus on the article because the things you removed had been on the page for a long time.

In fact, most of the information about Smith’s children had been on the page since 2017, and had stayed on by consensus for all these years through many edits.

But you as one person removed it all even though by consensus it had been on the page for six years.

Consensus is not just you as one person removing whatever you want.

Following your removal of factual material, we attempted to compromise and we rewrote and condensed in a more encyclopedic tone what had been written before in order to take into consideration what you had said, and in order to show respect to you and your opinion.

But instead of you showing respect and compromise back to us, within minutes you just removed everything that had been put on without you trying to compromise at all.

You even removed wording that was word for word exactly shown in the cited articles.

In addition, Eddie Robinson’s page does not need editing like you claim.

What you need to realize is that about 99.99% of all the facts that have ever been are not written in newspapers articles uploaded to the internet. And so Wikipedia pages need to have facts written on them that are not published in newspaper articles or else only .001% of the world’s facts can ever be used on pages.

You are not allowing consensus to happen when you think you have the authority entirely on your own to remove whatever you want to remove, even if consensus has had it on the page for six years. SpartansHistory (talk) 19:12, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Numerous editors have removed similar content from this article in recent years, most recently @DreamRimmer. I am not going to continue trying to explain Wikipedia's core policies to you as we are going round and round in circles. As I've said, you need to provide citations for everything you say on Wikipedia, that's all there is to it.

I've reverted your change for the reasons already explained but I've added that Wiley is a veteran since that information was in the citation provided. If you work with us to gather more sources about the show and television station, we can potentially add more info to the article.

By the way, where does your personal knowledge about Terry Smith come from? Are you a friend or relative perhaps? If so, you may need to declare a conflict of interest. MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 19:51, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

As an example, there are three cited articles regarding the Veteran’s Voice, but you edited the entire subject to only a few sentences as if anything written on the page has to be word for word included in the cited articles.

That is not correct. And would be impossible to put together a Wikipedia page like that.

For example, as previously discussed about the Kennedy page, that page may have a citation following a paragraph, but there is far more wording and information in the paragraph than just the small issue covered in the cited article at the end of the paragraph.

The Veteran’s Voice subject has three citations following it, far more than many sections of the Kennedy page, but you removed and edited the subject of the Veteran’s Voice so much that you reduced three cited articles to one sentence each.

That is not factual, it is not allowing consensus to form because you remove everything that anyone else tries to add, it is not compromising, and it is not respectful to other editors who actually know the details and facts about a subject. SpartansHistory (talk) 20:02, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Only one of those three sources works. One leads to a "bad request" and one is just a YouTube link which can't really be used for most of the info. Do you have access to other sources? MarchOfTheGreyhounds (talk) 20:03, 22 August 2023 (UTC)