Talk:Wilfred Reilly

Arbitrary heading

Dude obviously wrote this himself. He's quite impressed.148.77.35.49 (talk) 22:37, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

BLPN referral

I am uncomfortable with this article and not 100% comfortable even with what I have done to it today. I've referred it to WP:BLPN for further input because I am slightly out of my depth here. - Sitush (talk) 08:51, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

BTW, regarding notability. He's obviously been talking about things on radio etc and I am unsure how significant that may be. In the UK, where I am, having "rent-a-mouth" academics on such shows is quite common and doesn't necessarily mean much at all. I'm happy to see the tag removed, or changed, if others think differently. - Sitush (talk) 09:00, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

However, I have just reinstated that tag because I don't think the remover of it is best placed to make an informed assessment, sorry. I would prefer someone with no prior involvement with this article and who has not previously got into scrapes concerning BLPs. - Sitush (talk) 14:12, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

No justification for notability tag

He has publihed a book, and raised controversy by appearing on mainstream American national news media such as USA Today and mentioned by Washington Post, his appearances on conservative media alone make him notable. His status as conservative black pundit popular on conservative radio and media also makes him notable, yet tagger insists somehow that someone with national media visibility is not notable. Subject obviously passes notability, so this argument appears to be an attempt to remove coverage of the controversial subject matter who is an African American conservative who is a darling of conservative media.

WP:BIO People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other and independent of the subject.

Tucker Carlson Fox News US national cable network USA Today US national newspaper Washington Post US major metro newspaper, Commentary Magazine major US political magazine Bachcell (talk) 14:29, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, my query is whether he is a rent-a-mouth/talking head and whether, if so, that constitutes "significant coverage". Is it coverage about him?

Where I am from has no bearing on this, and your speculation about my motives borders on being a personal attack. I referred it to BLPN, as I informed you on your talk page, in order to get more input about the entire thing, not merely the notability aspect. Would someone with an agenda really take the potential issues to an open noticeboard such as that? - Sitush (talk) 14:46, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Bachcell, Notability is not that obvious per sources you cite here. What is wanted is coverage that are at the same time independent of the topic, reliably published and about the topic of the artitcle. So the usatoday and commentary pieces are not very helpful as an argument for notability. That said, he may pass the WP:PROFESSORTEST, but if anyone wants to try an afd, they can. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Presumably you are referring to #7 - "The person has had a substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity"? If anything, this article would have been better created as one about the book rather than the person - the bar of the notability criteria WP:NBOOK is notoriously low. A bit of a media storm whipped up around the time of publication does not usually make a person notable in their own right and may even fall foul of WP:BLP1E. - Sitush (talk) 11:35, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Scholarly publications

Why couldn't Reilly find a mainstream publisher for his earlier writings? I see that the vanity press stuff I removed yesterday has reappeared. - Sitush (talk) 06:47, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I have asked Doug Weller for his thoughts about these predatory publications because I recall his involvement in past discussions at WP:RSN. - Sitush (talk) 08:33, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Also, the version as of now, as opposed to after the edits of BubbaJoe, is mostly referenced to Reilly himself. And it includes original research in its phrasing, eg: it says Reilly "appears to be" and cites a Reilly publication for the statement. - Sitush (talk) 07:24, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

@Sitush: It's moved fast since then but is still unsatisfactory. Not enough independent secondary sources discussing him and none discussing his book, so that's all original research. The WaPo source doesn't back the text it's used for. I'm not clear what this means:"He uses this data to support his claim that a substantial percentage of all hate crime allegations must be hoaxes, given that, per his analysis, only about 7,000 hate crimes occur[clarification needed] in a typical year, and at most 8-10% of these receive significant reporting." Unsourced and again, we need secondary sources. Otherwise it's WP:UNDUE. Doug Weller talk 17:56, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, sorry about the moving on, Doug Weller, which has made my request for your thoughts on the predatory publisher stuff a bit of a waste of your time. There has been some back-and-forth in the last day or so. At one point it was tagged by me for notability and I'm increasingly thinking that it wouldn't survive AfD. - Sitush (talk) 18:11, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Ref bombing

This is ref bombing. We only need one source where he says that he is a centrist. - Sitush (talk) 08:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I removed "centrist", it was all YT-interviews. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:35, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. I thought it might be but my hearing is poor. Well, more or less non-existent, actually. - Sitush (talk) 09:37, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Hate crime numbers

The claim that only about 7,000 hate crimes occur in a typical year surely cannot be correct? UK figures, for example, are notoriously subject to variable reporting and selection criteria but are in the hundreds of thousands by any reasonable measure, eg: see this. That's for a population of 60 million in a country that, although far from perfect, I doubt is anywhere near as divided as the US (except regarding Brexit, haha). - Sitush (talk) 08:57, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Reading this website mentioned below, it seems to be a legal semantics/recording issue. I'm guessing that Reilly's book refers to the 7000 figure as being the FBI figure and that the FBI have an extremely different take on what constitutes a hate crime to the various bodies in the UK. If anyone can see the book then perhaps the tag I added can be removed by providing that clarity. - Sitush (talk) 10:16, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I've found the book on GBooks but only have a partial view. If that view is consistent throughout the book, the figure cited is 5850 for 2015 and I think it possible that we may be misrepresenting him in other ways, too. Eg: the 8-10% figure and ignoring what he speculates about the number unreported incidents. See around this page, if your view of GBooks is the same as mine. - Sitush (talk) 11:16, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

The 7,000 figures seems to actually be a high-end estimate for the number of hate crimes which occur in the USA in a typical year, as based on the number of felony and misdemeanor reports sent to the FBI by all the country's police departments. The FBI actually sends out a press release about this every year (https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2017-hate-crime-statistics-released-111318). As far as I can tell, the figures were 5,850 for 2015, 6,121 for 2016, and roughly 7,000 for 2017. This doesn't seem to be too controversial, from a US perspective. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.131.55.89 (talk) 17:47, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

But his book, or at least the bit I can see of it, uses the 5850 figure. We can't use his own figures for some things and more recent figures from somewhere else for other things when the entire point of his book seems to be related to the proportionate number of alleged hoaxes. It would be comparing apples with oranges. - Sitush (talk) 18:08, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Why not just say something like "since less than 7,000 hate crimes occur in a typical year?" That would seem to gel with Reilly's estimates, and with all - or all but one? - of the FBI figures. Again, this doesn't seem to be very disputed. Reilly's figures essentially have to come from the FBI's public database. If anything, he is being conservative in his estimates of hoax numbers, if arguing for 500 (or whatever) out of 5,800/10 rather than 7,000/10. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.131.55.89 (talk) 19:33, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Because it throws out the other numbers and compares apples with oranges. Why not just say whatever it was he said in the book? That seems to be the purpose of the paragraph anyway. - Sitush (talk) 19:35, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry but I still cannot wrap my head round this, which means either our text is a poor explanation or Reilly has it wrong. An anon changed the figure from 7000 to 5280, although the figure I saw in the book snippet was 5850 and that is also the figure quoted above from the FBI. That aside, I don't see how he can take 409 examples from a five year period and, using figures from a single year, calculate that 8 - 10% of reported instances are hoaxes. He should surely be calculating one year's worth of examples with the reported figures for that year, or adding up five years' of reported figures and calculating using the 409 examples. This is so obviously problematic that I doubt very much we are correctly representing what he has done. Either that, I am being particularly stupid in my reading of things, or the dreadful methodology explains why his studies are being published by predatory presses etc rather than the mainstream academic outfits. And I still think we need to briefly explain the US definition of a hate crime because the FBI figures are ridiculously low by European standards - UK, France, Germany etc all report many multiples of it in their own territories. - Sitush (talk) 05:43, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

It does sound like there's some strange methodology going on here, though this clearly seems to be someone who has some political bias. Still, we shouldn't analyze his methodology, but just report it (and report RS analyses of his methodology if there are any). As for the actual figures, I think we should state the figure he gives in his book, but state it as his claimed figure rather than as factual. For example, something like "...he states only 5,280 reported hate crimes" (using whatever number he gives in his book). As an aside, on the actual number of hate crimes, I wonder if there are significant reporting and classification differences between different countries? Go back 30 years in the UK, for example, and most people would never have heard of a "hate crime" as we simply weren't classifying crimes the way we do today. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:12, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Boing! said Zebedee. I agree that we should be just reporting but I am concerned that we may not be reporting accurately and that it may be our misrepresentation (seemingly as with the 5280/5850/7000 data) that is causing the problem rather than Reilly's methodology. Failing that, it is in the "bizarre but verifiable" category that we use to justify mentions of fringe theories etc.

I also agree regarding the differences in definition of hate crime etc across jurisdictions but I think to anyone from western Europe the figure of 7000 (or whatever) is so low as to raise eyebrows and for that reason alone I think we need to find some way to clarify it. We're a global project, not one read solely by people in the US who are familiar with the definitions etc that apply there.

That said, it is just my opinion and my main concern is that someone has access to the book and can confirm/deny/adjust as appropriate what we say about his claims. - Sitush (talk) 09:21, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

And there is something else that I don't understand. We say He uses this data to support his claim that a substantial percentage of all hate crime allegations must be hoaxes, given that only 5,280 reported hate crimes took place in the "fairly typical" year (2015) which Reilly uses as a baseline for data analysis, and at most 8-10% of alleged hate crimes receive significant reporting (my emphasis). Is the "reported" meant to indicate an official log of the incident and the "significant reporting" intended to refer to news coverage? Or are there different levels of logging? Or - unlikely - is the reporting in both cases a reference to stuff in news media etc? It's gibberish, as is the 8-10% figure. - Sitush (talk) 09:41, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I was reading it again and I can't understand what this article is actually saying about what he says. As you say, we need someone who has access to the book - or some RS that reviews the book. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:45, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Although he may display partisan bias, Reilly's methodology seems fairly clear. He says that there are 5-7,000 reported hate crimes in the USA per year (in interviews, he usually uses 7,000 as an upper end estimate, and works with that number). Then, he estimates that 8-10% of these - so, 500 to 700 per year at the upper end - receive national reporting or a significant amount of regional reporting, so that he would be comfortable including the crime and its later exposure as a hoax in his data sets. If you take a five year period, 400 or so proven hoaxes out of 2,500-3,500 cases would indicate a confirmed hoax rate between roughly 12% and roughly 16-17%. That is, arguably, very substantial. It might also be worth comparing these totals to the actual conviction rate in hate crime cases in the States. Some numbers for California (?) were posted to this article earlier in the discussion, and that that seems to be about 7%. A fair amount of this is actually discussed in the Intro to the book, from pages xviii to xxiv.

Btw, Reilly uses the standard 5,850 figure for HC on page xxiv of the book. I may make that change to the text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.131.55.89 (talk) 17:58, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

The Bulwark (website)

This article [1] had some interesting commentary, but is it RS enough to use? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:50, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Might be best to ask at WP:RSN. As intimated previously, I am not massively familiar with sourcing in this context + there is a lot of stuff I can't look into at all. - Sitush (talk) 09:57, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Alt-right etc

This paragraph

"More broadly, the focus of Reilly's research appears to be conducting empirical testing of claims made by the political Right and Left - about, for example, the existence of widespread "white privilege" - which are often very influential but rarely well-supported by scientific data.[citation needed] His graduate dissertation,[clarification needed] later published as a book by the controversial small publisher Scholar's Press,[1] tests the claim made by left-wing intellectuals such as Andrew Hacker that the average white American would have to be paid tens of millions of dollars to become Black, and that this figure illustrates both the intense racism of most whites and the value of white status in an "institutionally racist" society.[14] Reilly countered this claim, surveying several thousand people and discovering that (1) individuals of all backgrounds are very reluctant to change core traits like race and sexual orientation and (2) minorities like Blacks and Asians are more attached to their race than whites.[15]"

Is not very WP-useful. Unless there are some decent secondary sources that cover and comments on Reilly's work, this is out of our scope and should be removed. Also, editors who cite books should include pagenumbers. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:14, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Agree. Something similar has been removed previously by me but I didn't want to edit war about it. WP:ESSAY/WP:OR is an issue - we're editorialising. - Sitush (talk) 11:19, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Media mentions

I have no idea where the "conservative media" came from, nor whether he is of that persuasion, but we do not need masses of citations to things that mentioned him. Some finessing may be required, provided it does not make assumptions, but a long list of sources is not. - Sitush (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I think the issue here is that the guy appears to have done a ton of media, but the links which remain up are all to hard right sources (Glenn Beck, etc.). The description in the piece is literally "Reilly has made many conservative media appearances." Why not leave up the NY Post etc. and just say "media appearances?" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.131.55.89 (talk) 17:50, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I can't access a lot of US media so cannot really take it any further. All I do know is earlier today someone using your IP address was claiming (without sources) that he is centrist and that the article has mentioned "conservative" for a while. - Sitush (talk) 18:06, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

It is even worth mentioning that he has appeared in media? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:55, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, if it isn't worth mentioning then he definitely is not notable. - Sitush (talk) 18:04, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Generally, from an American perspective, appearing on Fox News, in the NY Post, in the Detroit Times, in Commentary, in USA Today, etc over 3-4 months. would suffice to categorize someone as "notable." My primary question here was actually just why mentions of his appearances in liberal/moderate sources seem to keep getting taken down. At one point, a sentence in the bio read something like "has appeared in many mainstream (Detroit News, NY Post, Epoch Times) and conservative (Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, _____) print and television sources." That was edited, apparently more than once, so that only hard-right sources remain. This seems to give an impression of Reilly as a strong conservative, which is probably not empirically accurate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.131.55.89 (talk) 19:44, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia has specific criteria for what adds to the notability of a subject. The criteria applicable to this case are WP:GNG and WP:NPROF. There may also be something at WP:BLP1E that applies, given that everything seems to relate to his book. - Sitush (talk) 09:43, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

• Ah, I see this is a thing I stumbled into.

I removed links to Counter-Currents, as this is not a reliable source for any factual claims, and shouldn't be cited in a BLP without a very good reason. After this was reverted for flimsy reasons, I looked closer and see several problems here.

We generally don't merely catalog work by someone without providing context as to why it matters. It's not enough for an editor to claim that he's conservative, for example. Nor is it enough for editors to include every appearance, or every opinion written, without any context. Even dividing media outlets in to conservative and non-conservative sides is a form of editorializing. This is why WP:INDY is always best. The most that could be said is that he's written for Quillette, Spiked, etc. Any attempt to summarize this work should be based on reliable sources, and we should use those sources to indicate to readers why these particular articles matter in the long-run. Grayfell (talk) 01:59, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Is it relevant to write that Reilly "is African American"?

Apokrif (talk) 14:47, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it should be relevant to the biographical record.TuffStuffMcG (talk) 17:43, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

References?

The first footnote in this article is never cited or marked in the article itself? Should it be eliminated or the article edited for a citation for that note? James Nicol (talk) 19:15, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Assault allegations

Please do not restore the assault allegations without consensus. There is currently a thread on WP:BLPN about this. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 00:38, 10 February 2022 (UTC)