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Autobiography

The bulk of this article reads like an autobiography, especially the Career section. Indeed, many of the edits were made by User:Toure and the article was created by User:General Kizza whose contributions are mainly the Toure article. Many of the references are primary sources, including all the links to articles written by the subject used to cite a comment that the subject has written articles. Here is how I would reboot the Career section using independent, reliable sources:

(Add to Early Life)

While a student at Emory University, Touré founded the black student newspaper, The Fire This Time.

Career

Touré began his career as a music journalist, contributing articles to Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Village Voice, Vibe, and Essence magazine. He has written five books, including Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?, a collection of interviews, and I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, a Prince biography.

Touré has appeared on television as a pop culture correspondent for CNN, MSNBC, Black Entertainment Television and other networks. He currently hosts The Cycle on MSNBC.

Controversies

On March 29, 2012, Touré criticized Piers Morgan's interview of Robert Zimmerman regarding his brother George's shooting of Trayvon Martin on Morgan's CNN talk show, Piers Morgan Tonight, stating that Morgan failed to ask Zimmerman challenging questions, and provided a platform for mendacity on Zimmerman's part. Appearing on next day's episode of Piers Morgan Tonight the two continued their hostilities, with Morgan calling into question Touré's journalistic professionalism and Touré arguing that because Morgan was not originally from the United States and had only been working in the U.S. for a decade or so, he was incapable of "understanding America". The two continued to feud on Twitter after the show's taping. Toure later apologized for his conduct during the interview, saying that he got sidetracked into personal exchanges with Morgan, instead of focusing on justice for Martin.

On August 16, 2012, on The Cycle, Touré caused a controversy by stating that by calling President Barack Obama "angry," Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was engaging in the "niggerization" of the president. He apologized for using the word the next day.

Fnordware (talk) 18:32, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree the career section is a bit wordy and could be cleaned up, but I find your suggested "Career" section a bit too thin. But otherwise, it reads better. TuckerResearch (talk) 18:23, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to edit what I've put above. I just got rid of everything that didn't have a third-party reliable source. Perhaps there are more sources out there now we could add. But I think there aren't many sources because Touré just hasn't had whole lot of noteworthy events in his career so far. His co-host Steve Kornacki has a short article for the same reason. BTW, I'd also add that the Piers Morgan paragraph could probably be paired down to prevent undue weight, especially in light of shortening everything else. Fnordware (talk) 20:25, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

OK, I made the edit, prompted by what I believe are WP:NPOV, WP:BLP, and WP:WEIGHT violations with extensive references to this article in The Daily Caller. I left it in as a citation, so readers are free to check it out and decide for themselves. I think the career section could be filled in a little more, but everything added should have reliable third-party sources as per WP:BLP. Fnordware (talk) 17:18, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

OK, so I made the "reboot" edit that I had previously discussed here, but it has been reverted by Nightscream. Can we reach consensus here as to which version we should use? Fnordware (talk) 18:28, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

First, I'd like to apologize to Fnordware for incorrectly stating that you did not start a discussion prior to removing the content in your recent edits. I looked for something recent explaining the rationale for removing the content you removed, and didn't find it; I should've looked more closely at the top of the talk page.

Regarding the edits in question, you state at the top of this discussion that the bulk of the article reads like an autobiography, especially the Career section, and that many of the references are primary sources. But you removed entire paragraphs of material that have nothing to do with this. For example, the recently-added material on criticism directed at the Emory newspaper that Touré founded, The Fire This Time. Such material A. is not the sort of material one would expect from an autobiography, and B. is sourced to The Daily Caller and Yahoo! News, neither of which is a primary source.

You removed the passage that states that Touré dropped out of college in 1992, became an intern at Rolling Stone magazine, was fired after a few months and rehired weeks later. The source cited for that is a Rolling Stone article. That link is dead (keep in mind that removal is not the procedure for dead links, mind you), so I don't know if it's one of Touré's articles, or an article or profile on Touré, so it's unclear if it's a primary or secondary source. Do you happen to recall what that article was?

Moreoever, even if it turns out that it was an article written by Touré, and is therefore a primary source, that means that we should limit which information from it is in the article. It does not mean that we should remove it. We should not use primary sources for information that is contested, controversial, self-aggrandizing, self-serving or promotional. But there is nothing wrong with using a primary source for information on things like the fact that Touré's father died before he was born.

Why was the section on the books he has written removed? Works such as movies, books, etc. are their own primary sources for their existence and their content. There was no reason to remove that.

Why was the section on his television appearances gutted?

Hell, why was the photograph of him with DJ Spooky removed??? None of this appear to have anything to do with the concerns you raised above.

Also, a minor point, but the first citation of a source should be the one that carries the full publication information, but you placed the publication info on the second citation of it. Was this an error? Nightscream (talk) 01:04, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

My rationale is/was that the Career section has virtually no reliable sources. Much of it cites this biography on bigcitypix.com, but this is not a reliable, neutral, secondary source. Many of the other references are worthless, such as his appearance on the A&E Biography episode about Eminem which just links to the Misplaced Pages article about the show. And again, references pointing to articles he has written is not a good source for saying that he has written articles because that constitutes a original research using a primary source. We need to find an article about his articles, such as the Harvard Crimson one.

So what I suggested we do is pare down the article to only what we have reliable sources for and then build it up from there, which meant deleting most of the article. I think the result is in line with Touré's level of notability. Everything else that was there may be true, but it is not verifiable and there is no need to include it. As more reliable sources appear the article should be expanded as Touré's notability will have increased.

Many of the other sections I pared down, such as the Piers Morgan paragraph, due to undue weight considerations given how much shorter I had made the career section. I don't think it need to be so detailed. People looking for more information can click on to the sources.

Finally, I think the stuff you added about the Daily Caller article should not be in there, at least until after there has been discussion. In its current form it strikes me as undue weight, and gets dangerously close to breaking WP:NPOV and other WP:BLP issues. The Daily Caller is a conservative website (i.e. not neutral) and you can't insert so many of their statements into the article and still stay neutral. That material is certainly contentious and should be discussed here first. Fnordware (talk) 02:19, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

The Career section has virtually no reliable sources. The Career section cites nine sources. Not "virtually none". Of those nine, you mentioned reasons for disputing two of them, but none of the others. As for those you did mention:

You removed the Big City Pictures citation from the list of publications that Touré is indicated to have written for, but you replaced with the Harvard Crimson cite, even though that story makes no mention of those publications. Why is this? I have removed the Big City citations from most of the passages (keeping it by the passages about his schooling and father), but added issues needed tags to where those various magazines are mentioned.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but your understanding of the Neutrality policy is a bit off. That policy requires material to not exhibit the point of view of the editor who adds the material, or an apparent point of view of Misplaced Pages itself. It does not however, mean that we cannot include relevant opinions attributed to reliable sources. If it did, we wouldn't be able to include the opinions of film critics in articles about movies. The Daily Caller is conservative? So what? Of course political sources have their own bent. Can you name a source for sociopolitical criticism that doesn't? Editors to be neutral in their wording. Articles have to exhibit neutrality so as to not express an opinion in Misplaced Pages's voice. That does not mean that sources need to be neutral, which is ridiculous, and just plain impossible. But if you can name an example of a "neutral source" that can be cited in matters related to controversial sociopolitical issues, please do so. You also did not explain why the Yahoo! News source was unacceptable, even though I mentioned it above.

So what I suggested we do is pare down the article to only what we have reliable sources for and then build it up from there, which meant deleting most of the article. I think the result is in line with Touré's level of notability.  ?????? Source reliability and notability have nothing to do with one another. Notability is the test for whether a given topic merits its own article. Reliability is entirely different matter.

As for the rest, in considering your paring down of the books paragraph and the Piers Morgan paragraph, I think maybe you were right to do so, so I restored the pared-down versions of those paragraphs. Nightscream (talk) 03:39, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for working on this article, Nightscream.

Re: Neutrality, you'll notice that articles about movies maintain neutrality by having different review sources, some positive, some negative. If you only reference reviews one direction or the other you have made the article non-neutral, perhaps inadvertently. Of course you are accurately and neutrally writing about what was said by The Daily Caller. Anyway, I find it to be undue weight more than anything. I think it should simply say "While a student at Emory University, Touré founded the black student newspaper, The Fire This Time. The Daily Caller criticized the publication, saying it 'lavished praise on famous anti-Semites, black supremacists, and conspiracy theorists', but Touré defended it as 'as an important media voice in the ecology." I still cringe at leaving the anti-Semitic accusation unanswered in a BLP though. Another problem with having such a long article about someone not notable enough to have their rebuttal published.

I don't see why it needs to be mentioned that he appeared in The Best American Sports Writing, but at least there is a citation. The entire paragraph describing his television career (before the controversies) is lacking any good citations (it does have the single bad one). This is the part that really feels like an autobiography. I used sources in my two-sentence version.

BTW, the "his father died before he was born" part is inaccurate. The bigcitypix.com bio says it was Toure's grandfather that died before Touré's father was born. I'd just delete it as a unnecessary detail myself.

I don't think we're really that far apart on this. Delete the un-sourced television paragraph and trim the Daily Caller paragraph and I'm happy. Fnordware (talk) 05:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Death of father before he was born?

I'm curious about the mention that his father died before Touré was born. In his book, Who's afraid of post-blackness, Touré writes repeatedly of interactions he had with both his parents. That would contradict the claim that his father died before he was born. Is there a citation for this claim?

Cmcguinness (talk) 02:12, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. Seems to have been added with this edit. No source and possibly wrong, so go ahead and take it out. Fnordware (talk) 17:52, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

1. Mary J. Loftus (Autumn 2009). "News makers". Emory Magazine. Retrieved 25 April 2012.
2. ^ Menz, Wonders, Petey E., Jeannie Sui. "Critic Touré Reveals Prince's Religious Roots". The Harvard Crimson. www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved May 7, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
3. Mattei, Al. "Book Review: Visionary Choice Mark 2001 Edition". www.topofthecircle.com. Retrieved May 7, 2012.
4. Lewis, Miles Marshall (August 25, 2011). "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Black". Huffington Post.
5. "Community Surface". Tennis Channel. accessed May 24, 2011.
6. Lauerman, Kerry (June 21, 2012). "Kornacki an MSNBC host, too". Salon Magazine. Salon Media Group. Retrieved June 22, 2012.
7. Christopher, Tommy (March 30, 2012). "Piers Morgan And Touré Finish Their Twitter Feud On CNN’s Air". Mediaite.
8. Stableford, Dylan (Apr 1, 2012). "Toure apologizes for Piers Morgan meltdown". Yahoo! News.
9. ^ Wemple, Erik (17 Aug 2012). "MSNBC's Touré apologizes for 'niggerization' remark". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2012-09-21.

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