Talk:Craig Newmark/Archives/2017

Removals

It would seem that someone has decided that all matters related to controversial activities should be removed. Not surprising considering the status of Mr. Newmark with Wikimedia, but all the sources are good and there is no “spam” put up by me. Nicmart (talk) 08:42, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

By "spam" I meant the various mentions of charitable and/or political donations that Mr. Newmark would apparently like to see in the article (see above) but that were not supported by secondary sources, or the "Nerd in residence" award for which the only source was the organization bestowing the award. I have no idea who put it up but I don't think any of that belongs. Since you mention "all matters related to controversial activities", I assume that removal isn't what you're unhappy with, but rather the sentences from the career section about complaints against Craigslist. There were a couple of problems with those sentences:

• The source was not a reliable third-party source but a press release by Craigslist's CEO.
• The source did not mention prostitution at all, and sex trafficking only in the context of "cynical misuse of a cause as important as human trafficking as a pretense for imposing one’s own flavor of religious morality". It thus did not in any way confirm the content it was cited for.
• Neither the content I removed nor the source mention Newmark; thus the "prostitution on Craigslist" issue might be relevant to our article on Craigslist (if we had better sources, that is), but unless reliable sources explicitly connect Newmark with this controversy, it doesn't belong here.

So in summary we had "controversial" content that was simultaneously irrelevant to Newman and not supported by the reference which wasn't a reliable source anyway. That's a violation of WP:BLP and arguably a WP:COATRACK. For these reasons, particularly for trying to associate a living person with sex trafficking without even the shred of a reliable source backing up the connection, I'll again remove that content. I'll also again remove the spam and fix the reference that you broke again when you undid my edit. Huon (talk) 18:14, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

What I wrote above goes for User:Cnewmark too, of course: The content that was just re-added was not based on reliable secondary sources. It violates Wikipedia's policy on a neutral point of view by presenting Craig Newmark in a more positive light (well, except the "sex trafficking" that was also restored; see above for details on that) than is warranted from what independent sources report. Huon (talk) 15:50, 5 June 2017 (UTC)