Talk:Alberto Garcia (VNR spokesman)

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I see where bob removed the brackets for the name Alberto Garcia on the CFR personnel list.

In this instance, when we have a "real" person, the Alberto Garcia known to be related to an organization for instance, and a most likely "fictitious person", i.e. the "reporter" used in the dummied-up DHHS video, what is the best way to handle this?

IMHO the "Alberto Garcia" of video fame is purely fictional, a figment of the imagination ... a character in a play, so to speak ... and is there any value in creating an article about it? Given that "Alberto" has been outted, is there any likelihood that he will be appearing again anytime soon .. particularly since it could create a future conflict in the SourceWatch with a "real" Alberto Garcia ?

Also, keeping in mind the fact that so many folks, like us, do Google searches, aren't we aiding in the creation of a persona which, most likely, does not exist .. thereby creating our own echo chamber?

3/20/04 06:15 (EST) AI

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AI, the problem is that on the information available there are two Alberto Garcia's -- the Garcia of VNR fame is, as far as I know, real -- the NYT's article doesn't claim that the Garcia is an invented persona only that they pose as a reporter when they aren't. Unless there is something other than the NYT article to go on we are dealing with two people with the same name -- faced with this it seemed the most appropriate thing was to remove the brackets from the CFR Garcia until that page is created or some distinguishing feature between their names discovered -- bob

The Wikipedia deals with cases like this with strategies for disambiguation. Here, for example, is the URL to their page for Titanic (movie). The word "Titanic" by itself could refer to either the ship or the movie, so they've added the word "movie" in parentheses after the word to indicate that this is a page specifically about the movie. But actually, four different movies have been made titled "Titanic," so this page itself is a disambiguation page, which states that four movies have been made and points to four additional wikipedia pages, named respectively, "Titanic (1915 movie)", "Titanic (1944 movie)", "Titanic (1953 movie)", "Titanic (1997 movie)".
Following this model, I would suggest titling one page "Alberto Garcia (VNR spokesman)" and the other "Alberto Garcia (CFR researcher)", with the page "Alberto Garcia" serving as a disambiguation page. If you look at the CFR personnel page, you can see how I handled it there. --Sheldon Rampton 19:59, 20 Mar 2004 (EST)