Talk:Sean M. Burke

Speedy

I have lived in Ketchikan for a long time and I have never heard of this person. Furthermore, this article was created and primarily edited by wikipedia user Sburke, which appears to be the same name as the subject of the article, which is in violation of wikipedia policy. Nominate for speedy deletion. Cajolingwilhelm (talk) 17:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Not speedy and not deletion. Burke is a notable Perl programmer. Writing about yourself is not a violation as long as the info is verifiable. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:21, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Burke is a published mainstream technical author and prolific contributor of publicly-available Perl modules. He is notable. Joseph N Hall (talk) 15:59, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Neither being a published technical author, nor being a prolific contributor of modules makes him notable, only reliably-sourced information on the topic of the article. See the general notability guidelines for more information. JoshuSasori (talk) 03:53, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Vanity article

The style of writing under the "career" section is very clearly that of a "vanity article". It seems that the people who wrote the article were aware of Wikipedia's policies on reliable sources and decided to "bend the rules" to write a list of peacock terms and justify this by adding citations. The fact that the end result of this was that the career section is virtually incomprehensible as a piece of prose seems to have escaped them. I strongly suggest rewriting the career section so that it does actually describe this man's career, instead of being a sort of self-promotional advertisement. JoshuSasori (talk) 03:51, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

FINALLY, I'm glad it's not just me who's baffled by what happened. Between when one Veteran Editor calling DELETEAMIRITE and another Veteran Editor saying KEEPKTHX and the whole discussion being shut down, things indeed got creepy, and I'm glad someone (you) has suggested some felicitous scalpeling to that section— in a while, because I go under a literal scalpel in T minus 11 hours 39 minutes, because what's not to love about a holiday season with several trips to the periodontist? (Although for all I know, being codeined out of my mind might make me type 150wpm and develop a writerly sense second to none. Or: I'll spend an hour looking for the "a" key. Time will tell! If the article develops "Hblhblh buelhublhbelh ablbhlbhghgh" as a new heading, well,...) —sburke@cpan.org (talk) 09:22, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Say, can you show me a technical-author-and-programmer's entry that you consider ideal, so I can see how the RS system applies best (vs applies suboptimally)? —sburke@cpan.org (talk) 10:18, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Sean, you need to read and understand our policy on writing about yourself. The tl;dr version is that you really shouldn't.

Anyway, I've completely restructured the article.

The problem here largely stemmed from some misunderstandings of how citations and sources work on Wikipedia.

1. References need to be made to secondary or tertiary sources; you can't mention a thing - in this case, a Perl module - and then link to the thing itself as a "reference".
2. Much of the material in the article that related to book material also didn't refer specifically enough to the modules as the explicit and specific subject of that material. That is to say, a chapter whose explicit subject is the module in question: worth using as a reference. A chapter that uses the module in question in code examples as part of coverage of a topic: not worth using as a reference. The paragraph about MIDI::Perl failed this test, for example. I don't own copies of the books mentioned in the article, so if I'm wrong on the specificity of the coverage, please say so. I retained some of the mentions. The same goes for the "Crystal strings" part, which was a trivial mention.
3. I took out the bits quoting Perl.com, because it doesn't meet our guidelines as a reliable source, so can't be used as a reference. Regarding Damian Conway's comments about Class::Classless - he was using the word "revolutionary" as contextual humor. The sentence describing the module as "revolutionary" misrepresented the source, and that just leaves a description of how to use the module. It's self-published talk slides, as well, which is shaky ground, even if Conway is an expert on the topic area. It just doesn't gel with my editorial instinct about good references.
4. If something's been mentioned in a book, we don't say "X was the topic of chapter Y in book Z"; we talk about the thing itself, and then cite chapter Y of book Z as a reference.

Minor notes: all the section anchors were unnecessary. Also, the reference tags were formatted very strangely in the source. — Hex (❝?!❞) 14:55, 21 December 2012 (UTC)