Talk:James Sayers (physicist)

Merger proposal

I note that it has been suggested (by Canadian Paul)that this article on James Sayers be merged with the article on the cavity magnetron. As his daughter I have strong objections to this and am quite happy to provide a neutral biography on my father who was a scientist of note who made a very important contribution to the development of short wave radar so vital to the allies in World War II. I have an actual prototype magnetron made by him in my house.Carol.cooper5 (talk) 17:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Greetings Ms. Cooper. There are, unfortunately, two problems with the solution that you have outlined, both of which concern our policies here at Wikipedia. The first is that your writing an article on your father would be a conflict of interest as defined by our policies. An individual so closely related to the subject of the article, it would be difficult for you to write a biography that conforms to our neutral point of view requirement. I do not mean to imply that you are incapable of writing a neutral article, but you may be inclined towards some conscious or unconscious biases. Secondly, all material on Wikipedia must be verifiable, which means that we cannot accept original research. Everything on Wikipedia must be cited with material that has already been published by independent, third-party reliable sources.

What you CAN do, however, is point myself and other editors to exactly that sort of material. Searching for information on one subject is difficult; searching on a whole range of subjects is next to impossible. If you could point us to some articles, book etc. etc., anything published by a reliable third party, then there would be no need to merge this page anywhere. If there are, say, several articles and a book or two discussing, at least in some non-trivial part, his life and work, then that would be more than sufficient for a biography. Trivial mentions, however, such as "He did this and this" will not work. As it stands, this biography has no information that could not be effectively transfered into the article for his invention, and I could not find any sources that would expand upon what is already here. If you know of some, please let me know and I would be glad to incorporate them into this article and work with you to make it a decent Wikipedia page. Cheers, CP 20:47, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Since there has been neither a response to this, nor any other opposition, in months, I am going to perform the merge. I will, however, leave the talk page as it is (aside from removing the banner) so that if new information or sourcing arises, it can easily be converted back and the discussion can be followed. Cheers, CP 16:43, 7 December 2008 (UTC)