User talk:Oliver Pereira/and0rod

Ben Hajioff: To keep or not to keep?

That is the question... Now, Ben is undoubtedly a fascinating chap; however, is his article worthy of being in an encyclopaedia? Since I've pretty much written it myself (rescuing it from something which could be classified as a "newbie experiment"), I'd rather like to see it stay. :) However, I don't want people to think I'm sneaking complete nonsense into the Wikipedia, so I'm hereby opening this up for discussion. So, first a summary of some of the relevant facts:-

• Google searches for "ben hajioff" and "benjamin hajioff" result in no matches. However, this is not surprising as he uses pseudonyms in his artistic life. (The article could perhaps be moved to and0rod.)
• A Google search for "and0rod" results in "about 22" matches. About five or six refer to his track "Piss House". The others all seem to be pages from his websites, and messages he has written himself.
• The existence of the tune "Piss House" by and0rod, and its inclusion on a compilation album, can be confirmed by following the external link to the "Discogs" site.
• Some information, such as his birthday, can be confirmed by trawling through his websites, although it is not certain if one can do this and remain sane.
• His date of birth could further be confirmed by ordering his birth certificate, which I am prepared to do if necessary. :) (Hey, I never claimed to be sane...)
• His family background and connection to the slightly more famous Dr. Steve Hajioff can perhaps be confirmed by asking the good doctor himself, and we can trust doctors, right? :) In fact, there are several doctors and other varieties of "respectable" professional people scattered throughout the Hajioff family tree, so no shortage of reliable people who may be persuaded to confirm things for us... :)
• If I put the article up somewhere else on the Web, and cited it as my reference, wouldn't that be as valid as many of the other online sources people use as references...? I mean, you all trust me, right...? :)

So, how about it, folks? -- Oliver P. 16:16 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)

I think no.

Yes, you can confirm some, limited information, but it seems clear to me that this article is always going to remain a stub. There's no area of human knowledge that this entry will help illustrate, except knowledge of Ben Hajioff. Are you even sure that you're talking about a single person here? I just feel that this kind of article is a distraction to building an encyclopedia.

If you think turnaround is fair, you might want to look at Luke Rhinehart and related articles. Luke gets 1,400 article, so is about sixty times more important than Ben. More importantly, to my mind, Luke's entry isn't a stub... Martin

• Well, it won't ever become more than a small stub. But hey, many things covered in any other encyclopedia are stubs, too. There are things no more than two or three sentences can be said about. This guy seems to be more "real" than e.g. Deeper Than Schmigit. Wikipedia is not paper. After all, keep it. -- JeLuF

Hello again. So, apart from me (and the article's original author, who is remaining silent), the score is now one all! I should confess a personal interest at this point. I have myself been to the forum mentioned in the article, and have corresponded with Mr. Hajioff by e-mail in the past. However, I have not used information from this private correspondence in the article, except in the sense that this private correspondence may unfortunately be the only extant evidence to tie together the names "Ben Hajioff" and "and0rod", and to confirm that the "and0rod" responsible for "Piss House" is the same person. I have confirmed his year and place of birth by checking in the Family Records Centre in London; the rest of the information either is, or has been, on the Web. Unfortunately, some of it has vanished from the Web, but I have it on my hard disc. (Argh, I'm not making a very good case here, am I?)

However, regarding adding to human knowledge, I think Ben Hajioff could play a part in the illumination of the social structure of the British Jewish intelligentsia. I'm not entirely joking here, either! Being descended from the Hajioff family (which contains a professional violinist, several doctors, and a rabbi) on his father's side and the Bermange family (which contains several artists) on his mother's side, Ben is an intriguing example of what happens when you mix the two. :) With enough articles on individual members of a social group, even if all of them are stubs, some general principles about the social group in question could perhaps be pulled out and added to a more general article at some point. Conversely, a general article becomes more informative if there are specific examples to link to. -- Oliver P. 07:12 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I'd advocate deleting Deeper Than Schmigit too. That stuff really is unverifiable.

If there was a general article and if it linked to this article as a specific example, and if that example was beneficial, then I might consider the article worth keeping. Sure, in that context there could be some benefit. But that's not the case here, is it? Martin

No, not at all. And making a case for Ben Hajioff based on the fact that he happens to have a few relatives who work in respectable professions is rather poor, I must say. ;) On reflection, I suggest we leave Hajioff out of the Wikipedia until he's done something a touch more noteworthy than 'Piss House'. Birchtree 07:02 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)

Very well. However, I have quite developed quite a sentimental attachment to the article now. May I be allowed to keep it in my own user area, say at User:Oliver Pereira/and0rod...? :) -- Oliver P. 00:54 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

There's absolutely no reason to delete this entry. It's perfectly acceptable. -The Cunctator

Thank you for your support, Cunctator. :) However, note from what I have written above that although I have documentation to support what is in the article, much of it exists now only in the form of saved webpages on my hard disc. Firstly, I'm not sure that it's fair on the world's population to ask them to just trust me on this; secondly, for me to republish the saved pages on my hard disc would be an infringement of copyright. I've suggested above that one could contact relatives of Mr. Hajioff to confirm some details, but I'm a little hesitant to do so, as they would think I was very odd... :) -- Oliver P. 07:06 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)

Certainly - move it over there with the move tool - I'm even happy to leave this entry redirected to the one in your namespace. :) Martin

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Summary of the page-moving business

Okay, it appears that there is some need to clarify what happened to the Ben Hajioff article, since its fate is apparently being used as a precedent for some highly suspect goings-on at Daniel C. Boyer.

1. At 16:53 on 3 Mar 2003, I added the Ben Hajioff article to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. I stated at the time, "I don't really want this deleted, but I would like other people's opinions on whether it could be allowed to stay or not."
2. There was then some discussion at Talk:Ben Hajioff (which is now this very page), in which Martin argued for deletion, and JeLuF argued for keeping it.
3. At 07:02 on 5 Mar 2003, Birchtree - who started the article in the first place - came along to the talk page and suggested that we leave Ben Hajioff out of the Wikipedia after all.
4. At 00:54 on 6 Mar 2003, I agreed, and asked if I could keep the article in my user area.
5. At 01:00 on 6 Mar 2003, I stated the agreement on VfD, and asked the same question there. I added, "The resulting redirect in the article space would still have to be deleted, of course." (I thought the reason was obvious - it is important to maintain the distinction between the article space and the user space.)
6. At 06:43 on 6 Mar 2003, The Cunctator arrived to voice his support for the article, but didn't counter anyone else's arguments about why the article was not acceptable.
7. At 07:06 on 6 Mar 2003, I replied to The Cunctator to explain that I thought that the material was not verifiable by anyone other than me.
8. At 21:54 on 6 Mar 2003, I moved Ben Hajioff to User:Oliver_Pereira/and0rod. This was my most dodgy act. I should have waited until the page had been listed on VfD for a week. However, note that if anyone had protested, I would certainly have been happy to move the page back to where it was until their complaint had been sorted out.
9. At 21:57 on 6 Mar 2003, I moved Talk:Ben Hajioff to User_talk:Oliver_Pereira/and0rod. Notes as above.
10. At 22:10 on 6 Mar 2003, I informed the readers of VfD that I had moved the page into my user space. I also said, "The redirects in the article space should probably be deleted, though, to prevent Wikipedia articles from linking to it." I'm not sure why I said "probably".
11. On 7 Mar 2003, I became a sysop. I probably didn't need to mention this, but I just thought I'd bring it up anyway. :)
12. At 02:39 on 8 Mar 2003, I replaced the Ben Hajioff discussion on VfD with a note asking someone to delete Ben Hajioff, which was now just a redirect from the article space to my user space.
13. At 16:26 (or 17:26?) on 16 Mar 2003, I deleted Ben Hajioff, the redirect. This was, admittedly, a violation of the deletion policy, as I was the one who nominated it for deletion. But it had been on VfD for a week with no objections, and nobody else had bothered to delete it...
14. At 17:01 (or 18:01?) on Mar 16, 2003, I deleted Talk:Ben Hajioff. Notes as above.
15. At 17:57 on 16 Mar 2003, I removed the Ben Hajioff entry from VfD, since it had now been deleted.

There. So you see although there were a few minor violations of policy, I didn't move Ben Hajioff out of the article space until I thought there was a consensus that it was a non-article. (JeLuF and The Cunctator, the only two people who had made objections that had not been withdrawn, had gone quiet.) We should certainly never move pages out of the article space if there is no consensus that they are non-articles. The distinction must be maintained between articles (in the article space) and non-articles (elsewhere - e.g. User, Talk, and Wikipedia pages), because different rules apply in the different areas. Pages in the user space are not required to be encyclopaedia articles. They are not required to follow the policies of NPOV, verifiability, or pretty much any other policy for that matter. To move a page into the user space is to state that it is not a real article, and that anyone can do pretty much anything they want with it. I only moved Ben Hajioff because by that time I was confident that it was a non-article. I would certainly not move a contentious article out of the article space, and I strongly recommend that no-one else do it either. -- Oliver P. 19:54, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for putting up this page. It would be nice to have a definitive list of work by a0d, and a few examples.. As much as I hate sounding sycophantic or glib, what he did was to me, some of the only Internet art that really had any authenticity to it.