Does anyone have an overview of Said's claimed ascents at 9a or above? While some of them are contested, some others might not be? Thought we could do something similar to Richard Simpson's page, but there's a lot of information to sift through. Figured some of you may have tried to enter this rabbit hole before.
I had a look a few months ago and decided it wasn’t worth my (or anyone’s) time logging likely fantasy ascents or doing the detective work to verify them. I updated his bio to include some of the more notable claims, but ultimately I think our time is better spent elsewhere. Rich Simpson was probably the first case of an outright liar who conned everyone before it all came to light, so I can see why someone was motivated to log some of his claims, but I don’t think that should set a precedent.
It's a tricky one. Questionable claims inevitably cast a shadow over other stuff the climber has claimed, some of which could be stuff they actually did.
With Richard Simpson and John Gaskins the approach I've taken is to do detailed write ups on the stuff that seems most suspect, then hopefully that allows readers to make up their own minds on the other stuff based on the history of questionable claims. Downside of this is that you need to be looking at the climber page to get this context, so if you see an ascent out of context then it's not obvious how much trust to attach to it.
Just a technical point Agrajag but you'll see there's a text box called Exclude Reason on climbs/climbers/ascents. If you add text in here then that ascent/climb/climber won't appear on lists, and the text is shown in a yellow warning box underneath the notes.