Talk:Joe Don Looney

If he's no longer alive, his date of death should be in the main article.

I heard a quote about his eccentricities: "Never has there been a person with a more appropriate name." I'll try to find the source.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 198.86.234.170 (talk • contribs) .

Rewrite

This article needs a complete rewrite. Much too breezy and gossipy. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:40, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I did a minor rewrite, mostly of statements that could only be verified by Looney himself. All of the quotes need to be sourced. Use of footnotes would be helpful. So to make it clear that very few of the quotes have a verifiable source, I placed the {{fact}} tag next to them. I also combined the External links and the sources section into one and formatted it. It now looks a tiny, tiny bit better.TheRingess 04:05, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure how to "use" this source

The motivation/inspiration for me making this entry into Wiki was a newspaper article done by a guy named Mike Shropshire titled "The Looney Legend--Joe Don Looney was a great halfback. He was an even better maniac" in October of 1980 in a Dallas newspaper. Apparently this guy has done so much research on Looney that he's actually got a book coming out about him this September. However, admittedly I am no technical writer and don't really know how to quote the newspaper article.

I guess my main quarrel with all the revisions that are being done to this thing is that all the "teeth" to it that make it a decent read and that really show what a character this guy was keep getting removed. The whole article ends up getting rather bastardized as a result as without the flavor to really show some insight into this guy, he comes off as just your run-of-the-mill spoiled football player. My original thought was to place in the article and then, along with others, expand on it and to let someone who *is* into technical writing and fact-checking handle that part of the article, add some source notes, etc. Instead, most of the recent edits have been to more just take the easy way out and gut the article just for the sake of expediency. Kinda kills it. As it reads is definitely not how my vision for the article was when I created it. None of what I placed into the article is factually disputed amongst the masses in the slightest--the problem is that since it never received a whole lot of attention, there's not a whole heck of a lot of documentation on it. I actually glossed over a bit in that first draft just for the sake of getting a rough copy 'put to paper' so to speak.

I deleted the extra stuff, since it has no source, it does not belong on the discussion page either. Plus you involved someone who, at least as far as google is concerned, seemed not to have any connection with Looney.TheRingess 01:06, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Don't edit my discussion to your "liking". That's just rude. You're essentially A) censoring what I'm saying and B) trying to project what I'm saying by picking and choosing what it looks like I said (and as is the case here, did not say). And your basis for doing so was just plain lazy. Google does not own the world or have every possible search listed as it should be. You can see old scans of the article at http://www.forttours.com/pages/jdlooney.asp. User:Samoyed 28 June 2006.

There's a *lot* to put in this article to really describe this guy. A watered down rather drab glossing over of things doesn't really do it a proper service.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by User:Samoyed (talk • contribs) .

Some starting guidelines for you to read might be Wikipedia's guidelines on verifiability and Wikipedia's guidelines on neutral points of view. BTW, please remember to sign your comments using ~~~~'s.

A few thoughts:

• Don't rely upon someone else to do the fact checking. Take charge, when you create an article, make sure that all the facts are easily verifiable.
• Quotes, should always be followed by a footnote listing the original publication details for the quote. So that, an average reader, can easily double check the accuracy of the quote from themselves. Also, the source listed for the quote, should be the primary source, not the secondary source. Take for example the quotes in this article. Obviously, the original author of the newspaper article heard/read them somewhere and should have supplied the publication details. If not, the quote is unusable. Remember: verify, verify, verify!!!
• Also, I think if you read the guidelines, facts and quotes should always be easily verifiable, whether or not they are disputed.
• Keep in mind, that you might have had a vision for the article, but that vision is not necessarily shared by all editors on Wikipedia. Present the facts and the details and let the reader make up their own mind about Looney.

TheRingess 00:42, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Major Rewrite

I have gone ahead and removed most of what I thought were opinion statments that were non neutral, and quotes that did not have primary sources. It's just my opinion and viewpoint, as a fellow editor, that all quotes should be sourced, whether disputed or not. TheRingess 00:52, 28 June 2006 (UTC)