Talk:John McVicar

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London or OU?[edit]

This, which is presumably an official biography, says McVicar did an external London degree in prison, and doesn't mention the OU. A quick google shows confirming evidence for that, and none that he did an OU degree. --ajn (talk) 13:20, 15 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the information on McVicars degree is likely to be incorrect. Firstly, according to the OU's own web page here [1] a BSc. award was not offered until 1992. Secondly the OU did not offer named degrees until the late 1990s so he could have obtained a degree from the faculty of Social Sciences but it would not have specifically been named as a "Sociology" degree. Blythtyneboi (talk) 15:30, 4 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm thinking the entire sentence "He subsequently took an Open University degree in Sociology and was awarded a BSc first class" should be removed. The source is a WP:UGC blog post and does not seem reliable. A search of the open.ac.uk web site finds three mentions of John McVicar:^[2]

http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/History-of-the-OU/?p=1050 February 15th, 2011 blog post by Daniel Weinbren.
http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/historyofou/story/the-ou-prisons Submitted by Rachel Garnham on Thu, 22/09/2011. This post links to the John McVicar Wikipedia article indicating it may not be independently sourced from this article.
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/History-of-the-OU/?p=2119 January 23rd, 2012 blog post by Daniel Weinbren. Apparently another OU student was influenced by the film McVicar.

It all seems to hinge on Daniel Weinbren who did not provide his sources and seems to conflict with what Andrew Norman and Blythtyneboi have discovered and noted above. --Marc Kupper|talk 18:39, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel Weinbren replied back to an e-mail query I sent to him. He can't find a WP:RS for what he wrote about John McVicar and has deleted mention of McVicar from his blog post which we had been using as the citation for McVicar's degree from OU. Daniel Weinbren also wrote "In the biographical note on the Amazon page for McVicar's autobiography it states that after 'achieving an external degree from London University was released in 1978' see http://www.amazon.com/McVicar-Himself-John/dp/1903906059. In the book itself he doesn't mention the degree, though he does refer to the classes taught by Laurie Taylor to him (and others) in the prison in Durham." I have deleted the sentence that he attended and was awarded a degree from Open University and removed the article from Category:Alumni of the Open University.

I don't think we can include anything in this article about London University as it only appears in an Amazon biographic summary and it seems it would fall under WP:SPS. --Marc Kupper|talk 19:22, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel Weinbren did a follow up e-mail where he wrote "In Richard Ramsay, 'Policeman', AuthorHouse 2015, p110 it is reported that McVicar studied at the OU, but of course the author might have got that information from my blog." I have sent a message to Richard Ramsay via http://www.policemanrichardramsay.com/contact/ asking what his source was. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:01, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

'Personal experiences'?[edit]

His second book on Dando is "purged of the chapters recounting 'personal experiences' which McVicar claims were the product of poetic licence for the most part."

What do his personal experiences have to do with the Dando murder? If he felt free to use poetic licence in a crime investigation, what credibility does his second book have? Shades of Christine Keeler. Valetude (talk) 14:53, 3 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The whole sentence has the unmistakable reek of bullshit. --OhNoPeedyPeebles (talk) 23:25, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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