User talk:NigelHarris

Gerd Sommerhoff

You appear to have a WP:COI with the subject of this article and so should not be editing it, especially when that editing is in contravention of numerous Wikipedia WP:PAGs. Bon courage (talk) 18:54, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

• Note: I have raised at query about this at WP:COIN#Gerd Sommerhoff (1915-2002). Bon courage (talk) 19:30, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  If you look at the talk page for the article, you will see that Alan Macfarlane never heard any obloquy about his teacher until decades later. I think there is sufficient danger that Stuart Neilson is the sole origin of this moral panic, and that further checks should be conducted before publishing obloquy about either Gerd or the schools. I accept Stuart's right to be a critic, but not his right to amplify his critcism by inventing other critics. If I, as a wholly hetereosexual man, am barred from an interest in the Wikipedia Page because I knew him unfailingly to behave like a gentleman between 1996 and 2002, then anyone who is ignorant of the Law of England & Wales on defamation should likewise be barred from editing the Page, lest they cost Wikipedia and themselves the price of tortious conduct. NigelHarris (talk) 19:44, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  The dead cannot be defamed. You on the other hand have made several accusations against living people in your editing career. The purpose of an encyclopedia is merely to summarize what pertinent sources have said about subjects, and the allegations against Sommerhoff are a matter of record. Bon courage (talk) 19:47, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  A newspaper that has withdrawn its articles is not pertinent. NigelHarris (talk) 20:01, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  Nobody other than Stuart Neilson has put his own name to an accusation. NigelHarris (talk) 20:02, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

  These are not allegations, in the legal sense; this is one statement of complaint and one civil law claim. Some unnamed person (who may or may not truly exist) says that Gerd Sommerhoff made a (lewd) verbal request which was refused, and then proceeded to provide a hearty breakfast, not compulsion. This writer's tone is jokey, which is exactly the healthy-minded heterosexual response to a poof in the 1970s casually trying it on. The only extant online record is https://stuartneilson.com - prove to me that the print editions for the (no longer online and now) defunct Severnoaks Chronicle newspaper have not all been pulped. The private agenda (on his own personal website) of one self-naming critic does not make anything a matter of record. Did Kent Police ever say whether they find his statement persuasive? Is Stuart Neilson even his birth name? Has anyone even done that due diligence? No, because everyone fantasises that there are no legal penalties for breaching the presumption of innocence of a dead man. To which I remind you Ignorantia juris non excusat. NigelHarris (talk) 15:53, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

  The referral to Alan Turing is necessary to describe the context of those years. In the modern age, Gerd Sommerhoff would have married another homosexual man and never needed to converse with any schoolboy for alleviation of solitude, but back then adult with adult homosexuality was unjustly criminalised. If he did talk with self-confessed autistic Stuart Neilson, then he exposed himself to risk of misrepresentation. Much better, then, that he had enjoyed conversations with only other gay men, in a modern day gay-bar. NigelHarris (talk) 19:58, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Legal threats

Your recent edits to Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard could give Wikipedia contributors the impression that you may consider legal or other "off-wiki" action against them, or against Wikipedia itself. Please note that making such threats on Wikipedia is strictly prohibited under Wikipedia's policies on legal threats and civility. Users who make such threats may be blocked. If you have a dispute with the content of any page on Wikipedia, please follow the proper channels for dispute resolution. Please be sure to comment on content, not contributors, and where possible make specific suggestions for changes supported by reliable independent sources and focusing especially on verifiable errors of fact. Thank you. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:35, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for WP:RGW, yet one more anonymous editor, Horse Eye's Back. You demonstrate my point perfectly and undermine your own position. Gerd Sommerhoff was never accused in his lifetime. It is the accuser and his mouthpieces who are trying to "right the great wrong", not I. I am merely trying to return Wikipedia to the status quo ante, a page about the man's work and beliefs connected to that work; not scurrilous tittletattle. To develop the page further in that direction, his attitudes to his own life and its encroaching end bear strong connection to his work on theoretical neuroscience and consciousness. NigelHarris (talk) 16:49, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

What you call contributors, what we might neutrally agree to call editors, some of those are repeatedly through their own voluntarily-chosen actions reverting the Wikipedia Page to an unlawful state. So will the legal repercussions of that be suffered by Wikipedia? It will obviously seek to offload blame onto the hubristic editors as a few rotten apples in its otherwise saleable barrel. NigelHarris (talk) 17:03, 31 December 2022 (UTC)