Talk:James H. Williams Jr.

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POV

As Thincat removed the POV tag on the basis of my not explaining why I tagged it as such, here is my rationale;

As thincat already noticed, using the word 'legendary' was the first thing, but there are plenty of other unencyclopaedic descriptions throughout the article, making it not read in the neutral manner expected.
The controversies section is completely not what it should be. Instead of being a section on controversies it is a section on a couple of events, "out of dozens" of things Williams did during his life.
From what I can tell there is a fair amount of WP:SYNTH in the article, with various sources pulled together to draw a conclusion on how great the subject is.
The last section cherry picks non-notable user reviews to show reception to his book. Samwalton9 (talk) 12:13, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have started to have a look at this and I think there may well be a problem. I have only considered the section "Crash of American Airlines Flight 587". It puzzled me that Williams is not mentioned in American Airlines Flight 587 nor in the references there. However, I have found this book which indeed credits Williams for criticising the rudder inspection procedures and says Airbus refuted this in 2002 (page 57). It is a pity this book is not being used as a reference. Then, in 2007, we find Airbus being told to do rigorous checks (given in a reference in this article[1]). So I expect Williams did indeed have a lot to do with the rethink. However, I haven't found a definitely reported connection although the article claims one. It could well be that Airbus and the authorities were wanting to cover over their failures.

I think the present article has too many rather trivial references and is lacking some crucial ones. At the end of the air crash section (rather over-peppered with references) there is the unreferenced claim "thus likely saving hundreds if not thousands of lives of current and future commercial airline passengers." This tends to make the reader rather doubt the independence of the commentary and so diminishes the article (and sadly the individual). Remarks like this should be referenced to a reliable source or they should be removed. Thincat (talk) 13:42, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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