Talk:Mandi Perkins

COI edits

My concerns about notability have thankfully been allayed, but this does nothing to solve the fact that this article was born and bred by someone who appears to have a conflict of interest in Perkins's career. The article's tone and sourcing have long been influenced by this, most notably in the dogged insistence on removing referenced information about Perkins's early career. The willy-nilly removal of sourced information is not acceptable, nor is the removal of conflict-of-interest tags by interested editors, and the use of multiple IP edits in the service of long-term edit warring similarly contravenes Wiki guidelines. Is it quixotic to hope that such editing will not continue? Chubbles (talk) 18:57, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

User:Arider88 continues to remove this information; a cycle of this has happened several times over the past few months. Arider, you may have created this article, but you do not have final control over its contents, and I have provided sources to answer your (in my opinion unreasonable) demands. A complete discography of Perkins's output is desirable and verifiable, and I have done so, and do not understand your dogged and unexplained wishes to have them removed. Chubbles (talk) 06:26, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

COI edits part II

A long-term war has been waged on this page over sourced information that someone (a new SPA) claims shouldn't be there. Perkins's online biographies have noted that she self-released some materials in 2003, but a new account claiming to be Perkins herself (please note that the account that wrote the article was also an SPA) has removed this saying they "don't exist". Reliable sources verify that they do, and a full discography is a reasonable thing to have on this artist page. It's not clear to me whether the artist (or the fan masquerading as the artist) is embarrassed about these releases for some reason or has some contractual obligation to pretend they were never made or what, but the removal of rigorously sourced information is not appropriate. The text from Allmusic reads, "Perkins self-released three EPs during this time, selling them at live shows, Mandi Perkins and The Mandi Perkins Band, both in 2003, and Broken Window in 2005." I'll note that they used to have discographical links to these releases as well on AMG (at [1] and [2]), which I had linked previously in this article as sources, but they've been scrubbed from the site, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have copies of them, to my chagrin. (Google Cache had snapshots of them previously at [3] and [4], but these have also disappeared.) Turns out you can remove information from the internet... Chubbles (talk) 17:09, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

The AMG reference has mysteriously disappeared, but luckily archival sites have preserved it. I have restored the properly sourced information. Chubbles (talk) 02:00, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

User:ChubblesIs referencing material that does not exist or has been deleted. The All Music posting they reference does not mention certain albums and history of the artist that they are for some reason maintaining. Reputable sourcing has been provided that reflect the artists’ history via a reputable source, Pop Matters. It is apparent from reading this thread that perhaps User:Chubbles has some sort of close connection to the artist, perhaps wishing to push a false narrative of Perkins.Mpmusicwiki (talk) 03:10, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Other editors, please note: I was just accused of being a COI editor by an editor who said "My name is MANDI PERKINS, THIS IS MY WIKI PAGE" and "I am mandi perkins". I have no idea if the editor is telling the truth about being the subject of the article, but the dishonesty of the tactic is palpable. The source I reinstated reads, and I quote, "Perkins self-released three EPs during this time, selling them at live shows, Mandi Perkins and The Mandi Perkins Band, both in 2003, and Broken Window in 2005." The referenced material does exist, does mention the albums, and constitutes reputable sourcing. Chubbles (talk) 04:16, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

User:Chubbles You are referencing material that is not active, how can you authenticate material that exists only in an archival captured by you and no longer exists on the actual site you are referencing. Your continued additions and edits of this page without proper reference is troubling. You should only be providing edits to valid referenced and active, sources in order to have a factual representation of the subject matter. You are also trying to disclose the name of a user. Your actions are quite troubling and verge on violations of the terms of the site. Mpmusicwiki (talk) 05:15, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

As I have just demonstrated, this user has self-identified multiple times as a WP:COI account using a real name. I've no way of knowing if it's true or a stooge, but I'm not doing any outing, here. As for the referencing, I find myself in a rather Orwellian vortex, where every time I find a reliable source to substantiate encyclopedic information, it magically disappears from the Internet. Linkrot is a persistent Internet problem, one which we solve through archiving tools such as the one I added; sites that go defunct can still be reliable sources. Chubbles (talk) 05:26, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Chubbles, to solve your link rot problem here, I would use either the Internet Archive Bot Management Console, which allows you to manually add archives to citations (using your account, not InternetArchiveBot's), or archive.is, which allows you to manually archive sources (unlike the Wayback Machine) so anyone can find them later (exactly like the Wayback Machine), or some combination of both. — Gestrid (talk) 05:46, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

@Gestrid: Thanks for that. Sadly, the link I want to restore has been reverted by the above editor, so it is not on the current revision of the page (I'm trying a little WP:BRD here). It's viewable in my last edit to the article page, or quoted a couple of messages above here. Chubbles (talk) 05:51, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Since you're trying WP:BRD, I'm not gonna interrupt it by reverting to your revision yet, but I'll keep an eye on this page. I was going to ask if you let them know about WP:3RR (which no new or inexperienced editor would ever know about), but I checked their talk page instead. The WP:GAME's afoot! If you look back through that other user's contribs and believe that they are pretty much indistinguishable in most ways from this new user, I would go ahead and file an WP:SPI report, by the way. (And I'm ok with mentioning that here since they already seem to have found User talk:RHaworth.) — Gestrid (talk) 06:08, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Actually, some of the language used in their edit violates WP:NOTPROMO (ex. "long time Bob Dylan manager/publisher"), Chubbles, and some of the rest looks like whitewashing to me, but I'll leave it up to you about what to do. — Gestrid (talk) 06:19, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

COI edits part III

User:Chubbles and User:Mpmusicwiki I have no idea how Wikipedia works and I signed up just to post this note, so excuse me if I’m not doing this correctly, just trying to follow what you have above. I was alerted about what has been going on with my client’s page. I implore both of you to please get this worked out and stop messing with her page. I have people telling me it changes all the time. I’m assuming Mpmusicwiki is a fan of Mandi’s and clearly seems to be someone that follows her career closely, which is great. Passionate fans are an amazing thing. The changes I saw yesterday I’m guessing, were in response the recent interview Mandi did with Produce Like a Pro where she mentioned how there were random demos posted on her Wikipedia page that were never really released. Chubbles, you appear to be someone that works diligently on Wikipedia and are undoubtedly a big asset to the Wikipedia community from all the postings I saw that you have done on here. Both of you are clearly passionate people. For the record, since I have worked with Mandi for a while now, those early recordings were certainly not releases, which is one reason they were taken down from All Music, which I see you guys have both mentioned. They were home recordings done when she was still in school and given out during that time. Some fans, and people have subsequently sold those on eBay and Amazon, sometimes for ridiculous prices even, asking for over $100. Nonetheless, these were never released on sites like iTunes or Spotify or sold by her physically on Amazon in hard copy or in stores. I can attest she only really began a career in music around 2007, since that's when she did her first proper recordings for an album to release. Like many artists covered on wikipedia, you almost never see a list of random school year recordings in their discography section, which I can guarantee you all artists have many of since I own many of these myself from some big artists. In any event, I’m surprised that this had generated so much back and forth, and maybe this is a sign of great things to come, but I’m assuming time can be better spent elsewhere for both of you than fighting over this.Dnovomuse (talk) 17:09, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

So, assuming that this is true, and you do work for Ms. Perkins, it confirms what I had suspected has been going on for years; that there was a concerted campaign by someone sympathetic to her to stop the material I had included from being added. One by one, my sources kept being drilled off the internet: first the album pages on Allmusic, then the Google caches of those pages, then the MTV biography, and finally the Allmusic biography; insanely, even the Wayback Machine link has now been taken down (did you make a copyright claim against a Web archiver???). I've never seen information get so successfully quashed before in my life. Last week, when I edited her page on another website, Discogs, to include mention of the three early EPs, it was changed by user "Denovomusic" within three hours; at that point, it was undeniable.

Since I first started working on this page - which was almost a decade ago, right after it was created - I sought for the page to have a simple, comprehensive accounting of her musical career. I had reliable sources, probably drawn from interviews or promotional material issued by Perkins herself during the cycle for Bleeding the Line or Alice in No Man's Land, that showed she had released early independent material. Demos are often included in discographies, certainly when they are substantiated by reliable sources, which I was able to provide. But then they kept getting removed. And then the sources started disappearing. Why? There was no good answer, so I fought it. For years.

It's amusing that Wikipedia has apparently impacted Perkins's reception as an artist. Perhaps it has caused her some frustration, but the fact that she had independent releases (that maybe, in hindsight, she wasn't all that proud of?) is - I should say, was - a matter of public record. We do not censor pages and we do not remove reliably sourced and uncontroversial statements of fact because they result in pesky questions to public figures. Ms. Perkins does not own the page and it is not here to act as a promotional tool for her benefit. But, of course, I don't own it either - I'm just the only one here because no other regular editor ever does work here. I am very tired of fighting this battle, and I don't really know how to do it now, since almost every last scrap of evidence I had has been assiduously wiped from the face of the earth. But I'll tell you this much - I would gladly pay a hundred dollars for one of those demos on Ebay, just to prove once and for all it really exists.

Sorry about the text wall. I had a lot to say. Chubbles (talk) 06:59, 21 May 2017 (UTC)