Talk:Walter Mebane

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Note from a COI editor

I will not be editing this page because I have a colossal COI in that the article subject is my PhD supervisor, but most of the edits committed to this page in the past few days have been flagrant violations of WP:NOR. If you have a disagreement about the text of the article -- and you are trying to edit about a difficult topic, so it is totally reasonable to disagree about the right framing to include in the article -- you should be seeking a WP:CONSENSUS here on the talk page. I won't even get into the depressingly slow reversion of diffs like this one which POV push under absent edit summaries ... - Astrophobe (talk) 04:19, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it: per WP:PRIMARY and WP:PRIMARYCARE, it is not the job of Wikipedia editors to make subtle decisions about how exactly to summarize a complicated Primary Source. If characterizing a primary source correctly would require you to make novel and sophisticated judgments about what is true and what is not true (in other words, to conduct original research), then you need to either come to a consensus here or wait for some actual WP:RS to adjudicate the question for you so that you can simply summarize those sources on Wikipedia. - Astrophobe (talk) 04:50, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Secondary references for notability

Technically speaking, it's not enough that Mebane has published peer-reviewed articles on elections, WP:PROF requires something like either holding a professorial chair, or being mentioned in WP:SECONDARY sources. So here are some secondary sources that should sooner or later be integrated into the article:

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-deviation-from-benfords-law-does-not-prove-election-fraud-idUSKBN27Q3A9 - a few paragraphs commenting on his expertise;
a 2017 election forensics guide published by USAID;
this secondary academic type source (though the source itself is probably not yet WP-notable as a journal);
two of his publications are listed by electionlab.mit (this is just a listing, it's only circumstantial evidence of notability);
Smithsonian Magazine on the 2009 Iranian presidential election first-round;
Kenyan election in The Elephant, which seems to be a Kenyan news source that is itself not (yet) WP-notable.

Feel free to use {{s}} to strike through any of the entries above if you add one or more of them to the article. Boud (talk) 15:54, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

South Korea 2020 paper

The South Korea 2020 working paper was removed with an edit summary commenting that it's a dead link, which is not a good reason for deleting a source that may have been shifted because of an update at the Uni of Michigan web servers, and is properly archived. The wording used to describe it was misleading, because Mebane clearly states that "frauds" according to the eforensics model may or may not be results of malfeasance and bad actions. How much estimated "frauds" may be produced by normal political activity, and in particular by strategic behavior, is an open question that is the focus of current research. The wording can be easily fixed. However, we already have several items of content about Mebane's work, without any WP:SECONDARY sources showing that they have attracted media attention. This article is about Mebane, not about the SK2020 election. Having a media item showing that the analysis attracted mainstream media attention would make it better justified for adding to this article. Boud (talk) 16:12, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]