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Moved from the article page:

I aattempted to rewrtie this misrepresentation of my theories,, my research and the facts. My editing disappeared before I could finish it. I request the editors to let me edit it or remove it. Many oeople have contacted me to tell me that such misrepresentation violoales Wikopedia;s own policies on bopk of living perdons. It reflect's badly on the repuration of the editors. Ken Goodman

(moved by FCSundae ∨^☃ (talk) 06:35, 20 May 2009 (UTC). Comments were made by User:Kennethsgoodman.)[reply]

Wait, is this really something that Ken Goodman himself wrote? It's riddled with odd spelling and punctuation errors...reading about this man's research made me suspect that he could barely read himself, but if this is truly a quotation from him, it confirms his poor literacy. JF726 (talk) 17:08, 15 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Based on his discredited theories of literacy, I'm not joking when I say that it would actually make perfect sense that he'd genuinely write like that without word processor assistance (spellcheck et al) and editorial proofreading/copyediting. ~2025-34623-63 (talk) 22:10, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how to really raise this, as I'm certainly not the right person to do it, but I think the article as currently written needs some amount of an overhaul.

It has a short summary at the top stating Ken Goodman's former role, birth and death date, and describes him as "best known for developing the theory underlying the literacy philosophy of whole language", which is wordy without much substance. The Biography section is three paragraphs that exclusively cover his time in academia, and the Theory and Achievements sections together amount to not much more.

The entire remainder of the article is what seems to be an overwhelmingly comprehensive bibliography of the man's work across all mediums. Is such complete a list appropriate?

There is no mention whatsoever of the controversy around his theory of reading development (checking the article's edit history, previous attempts at doing so were reverted by an anonymous editor without comment) and no mention of the body of evidence discrediting / supporting criticisms of his work. The article does link to the Whole Language article, which does immediately state that the theory is widely discredited, but to read Ken Goodman's article by itself would give the casual reader the impression that the theory is, at worst, the subject of a small amount of academic disagreement at the time of its publication, and not the subject of decades of subsequent research and developmental studies disproving it.

How would I flag these concerns on the article? Maffsie (talk) 17:02, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I did a first pass, but like you say, it's hard to do anything useful with the article as it stands, as it's wrong (against MOS) in its entire structure, and written like a peacocking essay from start to finish. Ending with a massive text dump that has no right to be there, and while verbose, isn't actually referencing or sourcing its contents correctly either. Furthermore, the article actually manages to say too little on the impact of these theories. Three cueing doesn't even come up, for example. There's a comprehensive body of research falsifying his theories, from the level of his first principles, to neurology results, to educational studies and actual observational studies on reading comprehension as a result of his theories being widely employed for decades (to this day). Perhaps the abysmal literacy rates of today have less to do with Covid/iPads/AI and more to do with (functionally) not teaching kids how to actually read and write for decades? ~2025-34623-63 (talk) 22:28, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've reworked the summary and bibliography (most of which seemed to have basically been copy and pasted from an obituary - I've now added the correct source in. I've deleted the extensive (and entirely un-cited!) publication list - perhaps someone who is more of an expert in the field than me could add a selected bibliography? `I concur that it's strange that whole language is not mentioned as being discredited - I think this should be mentioned in the opening section. StBoltoph (talk) 02:31, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]