Talk:Milton Leitenberg

Referencectomy, unnecessary aesthetic rewrite of the Bibliography

Even though I am a very experienced contributor here I won't claim to be a great writer. So, in general, I don't insist on my favoured wording.

However, this article has undergone a complete referencectomy. BLPs have to be referenced. They are candidates for {{blpprod}}, if they lack references. My initial draft used over half a dozen wiki style refences, and they have all been removed.

That's alarming.

Leitenberg acknowledged making one edit to the article. Technically this edit lapses from WP:COI, all but one passage strike me as innocuous, so I have no problem letting them stand. The one passage that strikes as problematic is:

what	passage	notes
original wording	"In 2012 Lietenberg co-wrote "The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: a history", which stirred controversy.	I mispelled his name. Sorry. The phrase "stirred controversy", seemed fair, neutral, to me. Maybe more detailed examination of the references would trigger a more nuanced description of the reaction to the reports, but my wording still strikes me as neutral. I cited a reference. If Leitenberg, or anyone else, thinks this reference shouldn't be used they should explain why, here, on the article's talk page.
Leitenberg's wording	"In 2012 Leitenberg co-wrote "The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History", which received nearly uniformly strongly complimentary reviews.	As above, Leitenberg should have explained why he cut the 2012 Microbe reference. Leitenberg's description of the reaction is unreferenced. At the very least that opinion has to be referenced. Even if a contributor who was not in a COI relationship with Leitenberg spent more time with the references than I have, and they reached the personal opinion that the report did receive "nearly uniformly strongly complimentary reviews", they would be lapsing from policy to insert that conclusion into article space. That conclusion is so strong it requires referencing. If one of the top people in Arms Control, or a related discipline, explicitly wrote a conclusion like that, our article could say, "Henry Kissinger wrote Leitenberg's report received strong complimentary reviews." But if all we had to use were several strong complimentary reviews we could quote or summarize complimentary passages from those reviews. We could not use the phrase Leitenberg used.

I rewound to just after Leitenberg's edit. Geo Swan (talk) 00:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

A request, apparently from Milton Leitenberg

Here is an exchange, from my user talk page, where I tried to explain to an IP about WP:COI and OTRS. Geo Swan (talk) 03:35, 13 August 2020 (UTC)