Love's Labour's Won

Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction)

Editor Dzied Bulbash is dishonest and cannot be trusted as an editor. On September 30, 2008, I placed the following comments on his talk page:

The deletion of these categories (painting, narrative forms, health fields, and feminism and health) is arbitrary and only indicates that the individual who deleted them personally thinks that the Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) series of paintings, which does happen to represent a feminist narrative about various health fields, is not deserving of placement in these categories. Such arbitrary editing is reckless and will be reported as vandalism if it occurs again.

Is there actually anything wrong with the tone of the article or does the editor simply not like the topic? It appears that this particular use of this cleanup tag is a form of censorship. Therefore, this cleanup tag is being removed in order to protect free speech. If you place this cleanup tag on this article again, you will be reported for censorship.

This cleanup tag is erroneous because every claim is verified in the notes and bibliography.

This article itself does not include original research. This article reports on an original work of art that has an exhibition history and cites published sources. Please see other articles on original works of art in order to learn to differentiate between an article written about an original work of art and the original work of art itself.

The article itself does not offer an opinion other than that the Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) series of paintings is a valid topic for an encyclopedic article. While the article does report on opinions that have been expressed about the series in various lectures, this article does not endorse any of those opinions on which it reports.

These above comments no longer appear on Bulbash’s talk page because one can only surmise that he has removed my comments. How can I trust that he will not remove my comments from this very talk page? This dishonesty gives me grave concern because it leaves me to wonder just how much editorial dishonesty occurs on Wikipedia in efforts to censor ideas and suppress free speech.

Furthermore, he reports that his tags for cleanup (censorship) were placed on the article for a month. This is yet another lie. If one looks at the Revision History of Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction), one can observe that he first placed the cleanup tags on the article on September 23, 2008. As I am writing, a full month has still not passed since that date.

Yes, while he admits that he is not an expert in the arts, he still feels justified to go forth with his efforts at censorship. In this way, I am reminded of the former mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani spreading negative information about the exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Giuliani focused his campaign of censorship against one painting in particular titled The Holy Virgin Mary by black British artist Chris Ofili, winner of the Turner Prize. With no expertise in the arts and without even attending the exhibit himself to see The Holy Virgin Mary or to see the other works to which he objected, Giuliani felt that it was his prerogative to threaten the Museum by pulling funds and even threatening to evict the Museum from the building. Editor Dzied Bulbash has not read all of the dialogs or viewed all of the paintings, yet feels so important and justified in mounting a campaign of censorship. Why?

Editor Dzied Bulbash makes the statement that the articles cited in the article do not discuss “the painting” [Sic] in any way. (He means to say the series of twenty paintings.) Of course they don’t. When works of art are discussed in an art historical sense, the discussion includes references to published writings that were of influence to the artist(s). Of course these articles do not make reference to the artist’s work! Would articles about Tahiti in the day of artist Paul Gauguin make reference to Paul Gauguin? Of course not! But if Gauguin was influenced by said articles, they are worth mentioning in a discussion of his work.

Editor Dzied Bulbash’s statement that the article is nonnotable is, in my opinion, simply further evidence of his dishonesty. Perhaps he uses the term “nonnotable” as a euphuism for “obscene” because of his politics. Is editor Dzied Bulbash launching this campaign because he is fighting the women’s health movement? If so, why? Does he wish to deny the historical biases of the medical establishment that the Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) series brings to light? Because of his history of editorial dishonesty, I am sure that we will never know the true reasons for his hostility to the Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) series of paintings.

Perhaps Editor Dzied Bulbash is misogynist? Why does he completely fail to mention Keith Fox’s female collaborator who interviewed female patients over a three-year period? This above information is cited in the notes. How is this particular information in the notes irrelevant? Once again, editor Dzied Bulbash is being dishonest and distorting facts.

Editor Dzied Bulbash also sees fit to have removed the category of Feminism and the Arts from the article on Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction). This category was placed there by editor Dakinijones on August 18, 2008. Why would editor Dakinijones place the article on Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) in this category if anything that Dzied Bulbash says is true?

For a series of paintings to receive more than half a dozen hits on Google is actually significant. Once again, Dzied Bulbash is on a disguised censorship campaign for personal or professional reasons and has no business deleting articles that clearly fall outside of his area of expertise.

Andrew Lenahan’s comment is ignorant. Will this editor please read books on the history of art before nominating articles on works of art for deletion? Books, historical events, scientific discoveries, new works of literature—all of these can be mentioned when discussing a work of art because these have some influence on the artwork under discussion. Again, such ignorance combined with a petition to delete a well-researched article seems to raise the questions about the motives of the editor? Is this really censorship?

Editor DGG seems to have some knowledge about articles about art. However, why doesn’t DGG read the entire article to see that there are biographies of the artists of this series near the end of the article? Also, the concerns mentioned by DGG actually do involve a discussion of the article and how to improve the article. But why does DGG quickly elect to delete the article? Why can’t DGG contact organizers of the past exhibits in order to ask about reviews written by third parties? Instead, DGG is swift to elect the article for deletion/censorship. Why?

Why does editor Drmies basically state that Wikipedia does not work with art appreciation articles? Wikipedia has many articles of art appreciation! Again, his comments about notability on the topic are baseless. Any article or idea of significant influence to the artwork at hand is notable when trying to understand a work of art. Once again, I would like to ask why yet another editor of Wikipedia who demonstrates ignorance in the field of art nominates himself or herself to delete articles about art? The answer must be censorship of ideas that are not in line with the world view of the editor(s).

Joseph Levi (talk) 14:14, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Gyn Talk (Visual Fiction) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

This article attracted my eye as strikingly differing in style from the rest of wikipedia. Since I am not an expert in arts, I placed a number of tags for cleanup and deleted redundant categories. The author reverted these edits several times. For a month no one else was interested in fixing the page. Therefore reluctantly I decided to do something by myself. I did a bit with the top, but when I proceeded further, I was surprized to notice that apparently thorough references do not discuss the painting in question at all ! Instead, they support general discussions about arts, gynecology, etc. Neither the long bibliography has any relevance. So I used google and was further surpized to find that "gyn talk" -wikipedia "keith fox" gives a mere 7 hits. Therefore I conclude that the page must be deleted as rather nonnotable. Dzied Bulbash (talk) 16:21, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

• Delete in all but the rarest of cases, creative works (songs, fanfiction, artworks, etc) by non-notable people are not notable enough for articles. Also, it takes no great effort to debunk the article's claimed "sources" either, as pretty much all of them are books published long before these paintings even existed, and thus are highly unlikely to discuss the paintings themselves. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 16:29, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
• Delete an elaborate essay based loosely on a non-notable artwork. Essentially OR, & this is not the pace for it. It could happen that someone enters an article on an artwork before they think of entering the one for the artist, though--that's not all that unusual, & we usually suggest reorganizing the article to be about the artist. Butthere is not the least indication that either of these are notable. There would need to me major exhibitions or third party published reviews .DGG (talk) 18:35, 9 October 2008 (UTC) r
• Delete--yes, the bibliography does not confer notability on the topic. Not a bad term paper for an art appreciation class, but that's not how Wikipedia works. Drmies (talk) 01:50, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

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