Talk:Charles W. Harkness

Early comments

How Standard Oil $ help (1) create a new society at Yale, (2) funds the Harkness table pedagogy and (3) sustained the Commonwealth Fund is remarkable, and deserves entry in Wikipedia.SLY111 (talk) 21:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)SLY111

Now I'd suggest the article be deleted. The only Harkness worthy of entries are Edward Harkness and his father. Please delete at your leisure. SLY111. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.88.88.50 (talk) 23:22, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

POV

Snide material not belonging in a biography is removed. Person seems sufficiently notable, to be sure. Collect (talk) 14:34, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

I guess you have a point about my entry being "snide", though it was also quite factual (or do you disagree?). But your statement that he "seems sufficiently notable, to be sure", on what do you base that? I find it less than obvious, as, clearly, did another editor, above. 98.82.196.213 (talk) 00:33, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Article can't be prodded twice

A note to User:98.82.196.213: You proposed this article for deletion (in Wikipedia slang, you prodded it) and I removed the prod. You then reverted my edit and restored the prod. You can't do that. Proposed deletion is only for cases where no-one objects. If even one person objects, it means that the article can't be prodded again; see Wikipedia:Proposed deletion. If you still feel that the article should be deleted, it must go through a AfD discussion and gain consensus; see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. Thanks for your interest in maintaining Wikipedia standards, and we agree to disagree about whether this guy is notable or not. --MelanieN (talk) 15:58, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't know that, and won't do it again. I'll have to learn more about this AFD stuff before I can do anything there. In the meantime, you're right, we'll be civil and agree to disagree.98.82.196.213 (talk) 00:30, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Notability?

Melanie, you say that this edit adds some significance. All it says is that he was a really rich guy. How is that notable? Did most Americans know of him and follow his moves, as they did Rockefeller and Carnegie? That would be significant even, but I see nothing here but a vacuous rich kid. 98.82.196.213 (talk) 00:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

It's true that you can't relist it for "proposed deletion" if anyone objects, but you CAN nominate it as an "article for deletion" - which means that his notability will be discussed and decided by consensus. If you can't figure out how to nominate for deletion (the process is kind of cumbersome), you can ask any other Wikipedia member to do it for you. Come to think of it, you will have to get someone else to do it, since you are posting anonymously using your IP address rather than enrolling yourself as a member of Wikipedia. I believe that anonymous posters are not allowed to nominate articles for deletion. I'd encourage you to go ahead and create a username for yourself here in any case. Editing Wikipedia is fun, and you get to do more things if you are a known user. See WP:User access levels#Regular user levels.

To see what an AfD discussion looks like, see here.

This guy may well have been a vacuous rich kid (although the sources imply that he outgrew that phase of his life and became responsible and productive after his father died). But the Wikipedia criterion is that he be "notable", or in other words famous, with things written about him by outside sources. The Wikiedia criterion is NOT based on what he accomplished personally, or how valuable a contributor to society he was - only that he was notable for whatever reason. There are many cases where a person who achieved nothing in life became notable because of what was done in their memory after they died. See, for example, Leland Stanford Jr., or the various murdered children who had laws or organizations named after them, such as Jessica Lunsford (Jessica's Law) or Amber Hagerman (Amber Alerts). In this guy's case, I believe that having major stuff named for him at Yale and a major museum makes him notable - whether he "deserved" it or not. --MelanieN (talk) 02:23, 7 September 2010 (UTC)