Talk:Werner Erhard

Four million people

An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Not a badly-written autobiography by an unknown. I asked THP if it is true that "more than four million people have participated with the goal of establishing "the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come" and they do not make that claim and have no idea where it came from. Polygnotus (talk) 11:22, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

The new reference you added to the article in this section (The New York Times, HUNGER PROJECT AIMING AT GLOBAL COMMITMENT, Oct. 6, 1985), actually says explicitly that four million people had participated. Quoting from the New York Times, "Last month, a woman in Mexico became the four millionth person to sign a pledge declaring that the end of hunger is an idea whose time has come." MLKLewis (talk) 01:30, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@MLKLewis: You cannot use sources this way. The source says:

"Last month, a woman in Mexico became the four millionth person to sign a pledge declaring that the end of hunger "is an idea whose time has come."" and you use that as a reference for the statement

"In 1977, Erhard co-founded The Hunger Project, an NGO in which more than four million people have participated with the goal of establishing "the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come".

Someone signing a pledge is not the same as participating in an NGO. I can sign this pledge but that does not mean I have participated in that NGO... Do you not see the difference? Polygnotus (talk) 01:45, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Actually, yes, signing the pledge was how people participated with the goal of establishing "the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come". It says so in the article you found. Quoting from the New York Times, "the Hunger Project's most widespread activity is the circulation of ''enrollment cards,'' whereby an individual promises to make the Hunger Project ''mine completely,'' and to make ''the end of the persistence of hunger and starvation an idea whose time has come.''

The article goes on to say, "The Hunger Project is praised for its educational efforts by others active in the field. For example, Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, Republican of New York and a member of the House Select Committee on Hunger, said the group had ''done some good work in helping raise the public's consciousness on the need to end hunger.'' MLKLewis (talk) 02:10, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

They didn't participate in the NGO. They signed a pledge. Those 2 things are not the same. Misrepresented sources is a giant problem in this article. It is easy to convince people to sign a pledge because it is noncommittal, easy and makes them feel good. It is hard to get them to actually show up to a meeting at the NGO headquarters and do the actual work. Polygnotus (talk) 02:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

You obviously have great intentions and we are desperate for people who are willing to help with Women in Red stuff and as a feminist I really encourage you to keep going... but please be a lot stricter with sources. If you can't find a source that says what you want to say you are writing WP:BACKWARDS. And including a source that doesn't really 100% support the claim made in the article is one of the worst things you can do because it takes people like me ages to find/buy/download all the sources and carefully compare them with the claims made in the article. And in this article, many of the claims were not actually supported by the sources. Polygnotus (talk) 01:58, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Made up quotes

The article says:

"The Financial Times management editor Andrew Hill wrote that the course contributes to the field of business education and furthers academic research.<ref name="ft-lunch">{{cite journal|last1=Kellaway|first1=Lucy|last2=Hill|first2=Andrew|title=Lunch with The FT: Werner Erhard|journal=Financial Times|date=April 27, 2012}}</ref>"

Let's compare that with the source:

• The source says: "Werner Erhard and Michael Jensen look an unlikely pairing but their leadership teaching fits into a broad stream of business education and research about ethics and integrity."

• The source says: "Together they are writing academic articles and touring the world’s best universities telling audiences that everything they thought they knew about integrity was wrong."

Nothing about them furthering academic research or contributing to the field of business education. Polygnotus (talk) 22:52, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

OK. Let's rewrite the phrase in the article (and to be clear the phrase you removed was not formatted as a direct quote as your heading title here suggests). We can rewrite it to say, "The Financial Times management editor Andrew Hill wrote that the course fits into the field of business education and academic research" or make it a direct quote and say, "The Financial Times management editor Andrew Hill wrote that the 'leadership teaching fits into a broad stream of business education and research about ethics and integrity.'" Which do you prefer? MLKLewis (talk) 02:42, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

It originally said that he wrote something (a quote) he didn't write (made up). That is a made up quote. And in response to those proposals: neither makes sense. If you produce a car and you name it Example and I say "Example fits in a broad stream of car models built post-2020" its not really a quote worth including in the article. Andrew didn't say anything meaningful or worth repeating in an encyclopedia article (or if he did, not in those 2 sentences).

And I really need you to acknowledge that you can't use sources like that. It is very important that you understand that we have zero creative license and that we need to write exactly what the source said (without infringing on copyright). We can't just make stuff up that perhaps sounds a bit similar. Polygnotus (talk) 02:47, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

POV edits by MLKLewis

@MLKLewis: We talked about this. And instead of acknowledging and fixing the problems you are trying to re-introduce them into the article? Like I said above: "I really need you to acknowledge that you can't use sources like that. It is very important that you understand that we have zero creative license and that we need to write exactly what the source said (without infringing on copyright). We can't just make stuff up that perhaps sounds a bit similar.". Can you please respond to that? Polygnotus (talk) 08:40, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

@Polygnotus: Your wholesale reversion of my edits indicate that you did not read through the edits I made. I did not fully revert the changes you made, instead I incorporated some of those edits in good faith. Your arguments for removing reliably sourced material above are specious and your choices reveal a bias against the subject. In regard to writing exactly what the source said, we aim to summarize what sources say in a neutral unbiased manner, which is exactly what I did in the matter what the Financial Times management editor Andrew Hill wrote. MLKLewis (talk) 18:51, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I did read it. And no, what you did is not WP:NPOV. You re-introduced WP:SYNTH errors, WP:NPOV problems, WP:PROMO problems and factual errors. This is an encyclopedia; we do not promote people here. Look at the article of someone almost universally regarded as a good person. Mother Teresa got a criticism section. MLK jr got a criticism section. You can probably write a criticism section for Ghandi. Do you have a COI to disclose? Have you ever done an est/Landmark course? Polygnotus (talk) 19:00, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

@MLKLewis: Please stop it. You can't misrepresent sources like that. What you are doing is basically vandalism. I received the book from Amazon. Please don't make me waste more time here. Polygnotus (talk) 00:35, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

About those sources: I was about to remove the first part but Polygnotus beat me to it. Here's my edit summary, however, because it's worth assessing those sources: "/* Soviet Union and Northern Ireland */ the hilton reference lacks a title and page numbers. committee and the institute seems to be some kind of think-thanky organization at best, possibly a quaker outfit, with odd issue numbers, weird title, missing page numbers, missing author. FT article--who is the "me" in "Erhard tells me"--what is this?" Those sources, in short, are just incredibly problematic, and I hadn't yet gotten to the second part, which is also very iffy. Drmies (talk) 02:52, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies: Should we just request a block for MLKLewis from all pages related to Landmark? How? They keep editwarring and they are not here to write a neutral encyclopedia based on reliable sources. They think that despite their COI they should be allowed to make POV edits. Landmark sock- and meatpuppets have wasted an insane amount of time of Wikipedians. Polygnotus (talk) 03:20, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies: Predictably, this happened. Polygnotus (talk) 03:25, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

About that edit... I recognize one of the sources that was restored from a previous discussion, back in 2019:

• Oran, Suzan; Conard, Scott (2014). The Art of Medical Leadership. Wheatmark, Inc. pp. 7, 8. ISBN 978-1627871778.

As I said at the time, the cited pages are a passing mention of a specific course. Even if the book is broadly reliable (which is debatable), it provides nothing of value to this particular article. To edit war to restore this source (from 2014) to support claims about "A major part of Erhard's current work" is frankly bizarre. Grayfell (talk) 03:29, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Oran is also not a neutral independent 3rd party who just happens to mention him in a reliable source, but someone who works for Erhard. Quote: "I (Suzan Oran) honor Werner Erhard for his influence on my work and in my life. I had the privilege of working with and being trained to lead seminars by the staff at Werner Erhard and Associates.". Polygnotus (talk) 03:48, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Polygnotus, Grayfell, please take it to AIV and ask for an indef block--I gotta run and get this day started. The user is NOTHERE to improve our beautiful project. Drmies (talk) 13:04, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

• Never mind! Drmies (talk) 13:07, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

"Author" in lead.

While reviewing the above, back in 2018 at Talk:Werner Erhard/Archive 3#Erhard's later work I said:

An author is generally going to be understood as someone who has written books or plays. The article currently does a poor job of supporting this. To make sure this isn't an oversight, I looked at WorldCat. I had a very hard time finding good examples of works by. There is a lot of search noise, but I found very, very few books which list him as the sole author. All of those appear obscure and short. OCLC 186984316 for example, is only held by a single library, in Sweden. (Most of the rest of the results are for a different person with the same name) From this, I am not confident that Werner Erhard should be described in the lead of the article as an "author". We shouldn't take this kind of thing for granted.

Since there was no response, I have removed "author" from the lead. It isn't clear that reliable, independent sources describe him as an author. It would be misleading to imply otherwise. Even with sources the current article fails to support this in the body, so it is premature in the lead. For context, every single one of the listed works is short and co-written with one or more additional writers. I would be somewhat surprised if the OCLC link above wasn't also coauthored, based on this history. Grayfell (talk) 05:21, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. We need to follow what reliable sources say. Polygnotus (talk) 05:48, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

@Grayfell: Does he fail WP:NAUTHOR? Is the subject actually notable for anything. If not I plan to send it to Afd. scope_creep^Talk 07:30, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't think AfD is the way to go yet, but I guess I could be convinced otherwise if you wanted to make the (very difficult) case for WP:TNT. I believe Erhard has been substantially discussed by multiple independent works, so he meets WP:GNG, but the current article is such a mish-mash that it's hard to identify what is useful and what isn't. Grayfell (talk) 07:42, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

That settles that. I wasn't sure and don't plan to make a case for TNT, for sure. I agree its rather too large for what's covered. It could be half that size, be much more succint, more accurate and be better for it. scope_creep^Talk 07:47, 11 April 2024 (UTC)