Talk:James Sears

James Sears/Your Ward News

The Your Ward News website, and newspaper clearly for the last few months state they increased their circulation to 77,000. Thus my edit should not have been reverted, technically speaking. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.113.196.149 (talk) 22:41, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Do you have a link? The only reference cited in the article gives 50,000 and is supposedly a quote by Sears himself, so I had to go by that. As for the newspaper itself, I have a handy blue bin by my mailbox for it. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:44, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

DELIVERED BY CANADA POST TO 77,000 HOMES, BUSINESSES, AND APARTMENTS... 205.189.187.4 (talk) 23:32, 13 November 2015 (UTC)SomeAnonIP

I'm still going to leave it at 50,000. While we usually do consider innocuous self-published information provided by an article subject, Sears is well known for making grandiose unsubstantiated claims and puffing information to make himself look good, and he already contradicted himself in a quote in a reliable source. He's currently in a dispute with Canada Post about circulating his newsletter at all, so his claims as to his own circulation should be doubted.

I'm going to copy this thread to the article's talk page at Talk:James Sears so that it's available for others editing the article. If you reply, please reply there. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 14:25, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

all comments above were originally posted on my user talk page Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 14:27, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Political figure

Just wanted to further explain my decision to remove the label "political figure", and delve into the semantics of that title a bit. To be sure, his neo-nazi beliefs are controversial politically and he may be a notable Toronto character, but I don't think this equates to the title of Canadian political figure. Would anyone outside of Toronto recognize his name? I'm guessing no. Are some people influenced by his controversial political statements? Maybe - Although my friend Bob has influenced my political views, does that make him a political figure too? Sometimes we even meet up to discuss our similar political views just like James and his neo-nazi club does, does that make us important politically? Nope. In fact Bob and I could team up and head over to the print shop, we could print and deliver our opinions to mailboxes all over Toronto; would that make us political figures? I don't think it would. Lets look at the word figure, defined as someone who is "a significant and noticeable part of something.". Well that's a definite no if the "something" referenced is Canadian politics. I can agree to amend it to "neo-nazi figure", since he does seem to be prominent and hold actual significance in that community. - Cheers! Miss Mme (talk) 17:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Miss Mme, I've added a section header to break up this discussion from the one above. After thinking about it a bit I agree with you. While we could extrapolate that he's a political figure from the nature of his public anti-semitism, we should really have a reliable source describing him as a political figure if we are going to describe him that way here. "Political figure" implies a person of a certain stature and lasting influence, while Sears is just bat shit crazy. Thanks for your contribution. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 18:04, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

References

Your Ward News circulation claim

For background, please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 204#James Sears circulation claims.

There is only one reliably sourced claim of circulation which we can publish here. That is the Toronto Star article in which Leroy St. Germaine, the newspaper's publisher at the time, claims a circulation of "about 50,000 copies". Any separate claim published by St. Germaine or Sears himself is unreliable for this purpose. As far as I know there are no more recent sources available to adjust the claim, and likewise there is no justification for its removal. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 20:49, 8 June 2016 (UTC)