LaymansLinguist

Welcome!

Hi LaymansLinguist! I noticed your contributions and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.

As you get started, you may find this short tutorial helpful:

Learn more about editing

Alternatively, the contributing to Wikipedia page covers the same topics.

If you have any questions, we have a friendly space where experienced editors can help you here:

Get help at the Teahouse

If you are not sure where to help out, you can find a task here:

Volunteer at the Task Center

Happy editing! – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 18:36, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

hi! I was wondering how to recommend an analysis by moderators of whether a page's references are accurately represented or even exist because there are some rather notorious hobbyists in my field that keep remaking their pages when they get deleted, re-add broken links, and cite unrelated or unreliable references as evidence for their statements. LaymansLinguist (talk) 07:14, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Is this about Barry Popik? If you don't believe he's notable (i.e. doesn't satisfy WP:Notability requirements due to lack of coverage in reliable sources) then you can nominate the article at WP:AFD again - the article was already nominated for deletion once and the discussion ended with a "no consensus" close. I agree the sourcing on that article is terrible and have tagged it accordingly. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 08:08, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Barry got pretty upset with me for pointing out that he's not actually an author of the books he referenced, but honestly he's been doing that for so long at this point that he actually did manage to manufacture a reputation for himself in the field for better or worse. Tbh I personally find him annoying and pompous but he at least has SOME experience in relevant fields.

No I meant Steve Kaufmann; he's been getting nominated for deletion, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, over and over and over again for many years now. Sometimes it works but he and/or his son just recreate it. The major issue is that Steve has no experience in any language-related field and he's not fluent in any of the languages he claims to be an expert in (besides English and maybe Japanese); this is a hobby he started later in life, which is awesome, but doesn't require a wikipedia page imo. He's just a wealthy retired politician from NYHC who calls himself a polyglot (see others' comments on the Talk page refuting that). I have quite a few screenshots documenting this, as well as of their edits/defenses/creations of some very... controversial pages. He is widely mocked if not despised by those in language/education fields because of his blatant exaggeration of his "polyglot" skills, which lends unearned legitimacy to his very expensive language learning app. If you're also curious about the theories he and his son espouse on the social media accounts that they frequently cite as references on here, I can send you those screenshots as well. Thanks! LaymansLinguist (talk) 10:23, 20 September 2023 (UTC)