Talk:Tom Smith

This page is a prime candidate for "speedy delete"

Notice, if you please, the pattern on this page. It is a 1) disambiguation page that 2) refers to only 3) non-existent pages or 4) pages with only one line of text and 5) an external advertising link.

I propose that there is not a single legitimate non-advertising justification for either this page or for its logical children. Hence, I propose that the following should all be candidates for "speedy deletion": 1) this disambiguation page and 2) all of its logical children.

Now let me hypothesize the motivation for constructing such a page and all of the logical children. If I am an agent of someone named "Tom Smith" and I want to advertise my "wares" that I have neatly displayed on my internet Website, I do a Google search on "Tom Simth." There are plenty of "Tom Smith" sporting and commercial pages in the fog of which I can fool the Wikipedia community into giving me--as well as all of my well-meaning namesakes--advertising exposure.

Just do a Google search on "Tom Smith." I will demonstrate how this Tom Smith page was constructed.

First, I construct a "Tom Smith" disambiguation page from the first few "Tom Smith" sites, and I insert my I ME ME MY "Tom Smith" commercial site near the top, giving me the following disambiguation.

Tom Smith (comedian), . . .
Tom Smith (I ME ME MY), . . .
Tom Smith (software engineer), . . .
Tom Smith (playwright), . . .
Tom Smith (exercise guru), . . .

Then for each line in the disambiguation page, I construct a logical child page containing a 1) one sentence description of the "Tom Smith" in the corresponding external vanity site and most importantly, at the bottom of the one sentence page a 2) link to the external advertising vanity site.

Voilà. L'argent roule dans moi.

At some point in the future, the mutating commercial agents will learn that they have to provide some "meat" in the logical child pages in order to survive the VfD process. But at this stage, the pathogens have little intelligence. :) I justify using the term "pathogens" here because, in my opinion, the "Tom Smith" variety of one sentence "stub" articles provide zero value and great harm to the development of Wikipedia. Of course, non-commercial, well-intentioned experiments by Wikipedia contributors trying inventive applications of "stubs" should be allowed and encouraged.

I suggest that the general pattern of the Tom Smith disambiguation page and all of its logical children are detrimental to the health of Wikipedia. And I propose that any page fitting the general pattern of the above-described Tom Smith blight be automatic candidates for "speedy delete." ---Rednblu 17:33, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thankyou for demonstrating how this Tom Smith page was constructed.. unfortunately what you say doesn't really match up with the page history. The fact that you haven't managed to actually point out the commercial external links lets your argument down as well. Can you also tell me why the pages should be deleted when they are in fact real people (see [1] and [2])? So far your argument appears to be "someone added their vanity page to this disambig page, it was removed, but in order to 'clean' wikipedia, this disambig page and all linked pages must be deleted as well, even if they contain valid content" -- Chuq 23:48, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Goodness, I didn't know it was possible to be that full of stuff which shouldn't be discussed on Wikipedia. :-) --SarekOfVulcan 00:10, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Tom Smith (noise musician)

Since when was "the article doesn't exist" a good reason for removing a link? FWIW, he is a real person, and has played with Andrew W.K. and members of Sonic Youth. I've reinstated the link, and have changed the dab page to point to Tom Smith (noise musician) rather than Tom Smith (musician), which is ambiguous in itself. If article existance is a problem, I'll write a stub -- Chuq 23:55, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)