User:Onefortyone

As a regular contributor to Wikipedia I am very interested in popular culture, gender studies and the biographies of celebrities, for instance, the open and closeted lives of Hollywood stars. As an Elvis Presley expert, who read lots of books and articles on the singer and the rock 'n' roll era, I did much research in order to improve the Wikipedia article on Elvis Presley, which was, and still is, a frequent target of vandalism and is in parts dominated by stuff that has only been produced by fans in order to sing the star's praise.

One of the biggest European fan groups set up for the celebration of the Elvis Presley cult is situated in Duisburg There are important Elvis meetings every year in Duisburg organized by "Friends through Elvis" and supported by EPFCI. The fan magazine regularly reports about these "important" events. In the January 2006 issue, for example, there is an account of Bill E. Burk's visit to Duisburg on the occasion of the Elvis Xmas meeting of 2005. His appearance showed that this guy is primarily interested in self-promotion. He claims to have been a friend of Elvis Presley but to my mind he is only a big fan of the singer who runs a fan site and wants to make money with self-published Elvis magazines.

In my opinion, the Wikipedia article on Elvis Presley should not be dominated by fans who only support 'favorable' views of the singer and endeavor to suppress any critical remark published in primary and secondary sources. In an article by Professor Wall there is an interesting discussion of radical policing strategies implemented over the years by Elvis fan clubs and organisations. The article clearly states that one of these strategies is

'community policing' to achieve governance at a distance and typically effected through the various fan clubs and appreciation societies to which the bulk of Elvis fans belong. These organisations have, through their membership magazines, activities and sales operations, created a powerful moral majority that can be influenced in order to exercise its considerable economic power. Policing by mobilising the organic ‘Elvis community’ – the fan and fan club networks – has been achieved in a number of different ways, for example, when Dee Presley, nee Stanley, Elvis’s former step-mother, wrote a supposedly whistle blowing account of Elvis’s last years. The fan clubs refused to endorse the book and condemned it in their editorials. The combined effect of this economic action and negative publicity was ... the apparent withdrawal of the book. With a combined membership of millions, the fans form a formidable constituency of consumer power." See David S. Wall, "Policing Elvis: Legal Action and the Shaping of Post-Mortem Celebrity Culture as Contested Space."

Similar things happen with other publications that are not in line with the opinion of devoted Elvis fans, such as Albert Goldman's critical book, 'Elvis' (1981), of which Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post says that it is a "nasty book, written in spectacularly execrable prose, but the view of Presley that it expressed dovetailed in many instances with my own, and in spite of itself I found things in it to admire."

I am of the opinion that critical remarks concerning a subject should not be suppressed and that all contributions to a Wikipedia article should be well sourced and, if possible, supported by several independent publications (books, articles, reviews, newspaper reports, university studies, manuscripts, web sites). In order to back up their contributions, all users who are adding new material to an article should add some direct quotes from published sources they have used. These may include primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources are documents or people very close to the situation you are writing about. Examples of primary sources include eyewitness accounts, photographs, historical documents such as diaries and letters, interviews with people who knew a celebrity well; but also artistic and fictional works such as poems, scripts, screenplays, novels, motion pictures, videos, and television programs. Secondary sources are summarizing other material, usually primary source material. Such sources are papers and books by academics, journalists, and other reputable researchers. Wikipedia articles should rely on reliable, published secondary sources wherever possible. This means that a Wikipedian should cite the opinions of reliable authors.

However, the reliability required with respect to popular culture may not exclude all material that can be characterized as celebrity gossip, as it is unrealistic to expect only peer-reviewed studies. Therefore, as far as biographical articles on celebrities are concerned, when a substantial body of material is available — e.g., that shown by a google search for a specific topic — the best material available is acceptable, especially when some comments on its reliability are included.

A usual way to show your work is not original research is to provide one or two reliable secondary sources supporting the same argument as you. The most reliable sources are published books and journals, particularly books and journals published by university presses; mainstream newspapers; and books, magazines and journals published by known publishing houses. Material that is self-published, whether on paper or online, is generally not regarded as reliable enough.

• For instance, Peter Guralnick, a writer and music critic of some reputation, has published two substantial Elvis biographies of 560 and 767 pages, which were published by a known publishing house in Boston. Therefore, this author is certainly a reliable source. His two volumes, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994) and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999) may be quoted in the Wikipedia article on Elvis Presley. For example, on page 415 of his book, Last Train to Memphis, Guralnick writes on Elvis's alleged affairs with girls,

He was still seeing Yvonne Lime occasionally, but he was dating Anne Neyland, a former Miss Texas whom he had met on the MGM lot, and Venetia Stevenson, too, when a rumor that he was about to marry Yvonne in Acapulco broke at the end of May. "When I get married," he told the press, after the Colonel 's official denials, "it'll be no secret. I'll get married in my hometown of Memphis, and the whole town'll be there." He wasn't really serious about anyone for the time being, though. He was enjoying the single life, and when he got bored he just had to tell the guys to hunt up some girls in the lobby of the hotel. He would have them brought up to the suite, offered one observer, "and Elvis would go in the other room, he'd go in the bedroom or somewhere, and then when they came back with the girls, the girls would sit there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and finally one of the cousins would go in the bedroom and come out himself and another ten minutes would go by - and then in would come Elvis. And there would be like a silence, and then the cousins would say, 'Oh, Mary Jane, this is Elvis,' and the girls would be totally gone." For the more experienced girls it wasn't like with other Hollywood stars or even with other more sophisticated boys they knew. They offered to do things for him, but he wasn't really interested. What he liked to do was to lie in bed and watch television and eat and talk all night - the companionship seemed as important for him as the sex ...

So it may be a good idea to include the following quote in the "Relationships" section of the Elvis Presley article:

Guralnick writes that for "the more experienced girls it wasn't like with other Hollywood stars or even with other more sophisticated boys they knew." Although they offered to do things for Presley, "he wasn't really interested."

This short quote is a good summary of Elvis's attitudes toward girls, and in the Wikipedia article we don't need to go into all the other details mentioned by Guralnick.

• On the other hand, publications by Bill E. Burk are not reliable enough for an inclusion in an Elvis-related Wikipedia article, because these are all published either by Burk Enterprises, Memphis, TN, or by a Memphis publisher called Propwash, i.e. Burk's own publishing company, which only publishes fan books and magazines about Presley, some of these "books" no more than 50 pages in length (incl. illustrations). Burk's recent book, Elvis Aaron Presley: A Candle In The Wind (2005), for instance, is illustrated with many attractive full-page photographs of Elvis in order to feed the fans' ravenous appetites for anything related to the perfect image of the mega star. It is on Elvis's generosity to others, includes "first hand accounts" of his relationships with early girlfriends and relates what the singer's female co-stars thought about the nice guy Elvis. Other topics include: Elvis with the King and Queen of Thailand; Elvis with three Scandinavian princesses; Elvis's first four-wheeler; the day young Tanya Leny met Elvis, etc. etc. There are no critical voices to be found in this and the other books written by this author, who also runs an internet fan site on which he endeavors to disparage all those who have published critical material on Presley.
• And what about the content of unpublished manuscripts by authors who may be called eyewitnesses or lived together with the close relatives of a celebrity for a considerable period of time? In my opinion, these sources are not unimportant, especially if the claims about celebrities they include are also mentioned or discussed in published secondary sources. For instance, there is an unpublished manuscript by Elvis's stepmother, Dee Presley, entitled "The Intimate Life and Death of Elvis Presley" (see [1]). It claims, among other things, that Elvis had an incestuous relationship with his mother Gladys, which had resulted in her drinking herself to death, and that Elvis's father Vernon had known about this. The manuscript further says that Elvis had raped his wife Priscilla upon learning that she was leaving him for good, ostensibly to prove that he was still a man, that Elvis had a homosexual affair with his friend Nick Adams; and that the singer had committed suicide because he had been suffering from bone-marrow cancer. Finally, Dee Presley reveals how Elvis had coerced a teenage fan into a three-day orgy, and fed her an entire bottle of Hycodan on which she had overdosed. The content of the manuscript is well known as a summary of these accusations was published in the National Enquirer in 1993, and parts of the claims have also been mentioned in Greil Marcus's book, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000) and by Professor David S. Wall in his critical article on the world-wide Elvis industry. The latter has demonstrated how Elvis fan groups have suppressed Dee Presley's book. See [2]. Therefore, in my opinion, it may be O.K. to mention this material in a Wkipedia article. However, a few other editors are of the contrary opinion, so I have decided not to include it again, though I am not sure if this is the right decision.

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. Therefore, only facts, assertions, theories, ideas, claims, opinions, and arguments that have already been mentioned and discussed by other authors in books, articles, etc. may be included in a Wikipedia article.

The prohibition against original research limits the possibility of an editor presenting his or her own point of view in an article. Therefore, it is important to include verifiable research produced by other authors. Thus multiple points of view may be included in an article if the sources are given, as in many cases there are different views of any given topic. In such cases, no single position is authoritative, and it is important that editors situate the research and may provide contextual information about the different points of view, thereby indicating how prevalent a position is, and whether it is held by a majority or minority. If your viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with several quotes from mainstream texts. If your viewpoint is held by a minority, then it should be backed up by some references to published sources, including the exact page numbers.

It could happen that some other users question your contributions. Therefore, any material that is challenged by another editor needs a reliable source, which should be cited in the article, at least in a footnote.