Talk:William Harrison Binnie

Tidbit

A tidbit that doesn't fit into the article - at least one company that Carlisle Capital may have invested in is Apogent Technologies Inc.: http://www.secinfo.com/d143sr.1d.htm#1stPage --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 05:13, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Edits related to the Gustavus Meyers Award

Backcourt, you may have noticed that other user accounts besides yours edited that section previously and in fact added content trying to cast aspersions on Mr. Bacon and reduce his credibility as a source; some accounts, in fact, which were created exclusively for editing this article and no other.

Anyone looking into those edits and many others made to this and several other articles can see pretty plainly that someone who is a partisan of Mr. Binnie has been employed to come and edit this Wikipedia article to present him in a better light and to denigrate his detractors. This person has been very clumsy and has actually managed to reveal quite a lot of detailed information about themselves, information which might hypothetically include their real name and the name of the company they work for (a company which, hypothetically, also has a relationship with Mr. Binnie.)

I mention this not as a threat to reveal information about any Wikipedia user publicly, which would be against the policies, but as a way of pointing out that this sort of information would be available if any related editing disputes were escalated to Wikipedia admins (in fact, Wikipedia admins have access to more information than is available to the general public) or the broader Wikipedia community. I would also note that such an individual is still welcome to make edits here, as anyone is as long as they follow the policies and guidelines, but really needs to cut the shit with expecting anyone to believe that they're multiple, unrelated editors.

I'm sure you aren't involved in all of that Backcourt, I just wanted to point out what you may have been unaware of, that there is a coordinated effort to discredit Mr. Bacon both in general in the media and within this article itself. And that's a very good reason to retain any content establishing the credibility of Mr. Bacon and his book. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 10:00, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Views on political issues

In case Binnie becomes a candidate or elected political official in the future, a substantial amount of information on his declared political positions is has been compiled and written about from the 2010 campaign. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 18:49, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

A&E Plastics, Plásticos BajaCal

This section appears totally undue - many of the citations do not even mention the subject of the article - Binnies actual involvement in the issues seems minimal. Youreallycan 20:41, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

He was the CEO of the company who decided to set up operations in Mexico. The David Bacon book mentions him by name.

This was a major issue in his Senate campaign as can be seen in the citations to the newspaper articles discussing the issue, which definitely mention him. I can provide more links demonstrating that it was widely discussed if you would like.

Did you have a rationale for why the content that's currently there isn't depicting the issue neutrally, since you placed the template there? The text includes several statements from Binnie himself about the conditions at the plant.--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 21:02, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Oops, well, it just mentions two statements from Binnie at this point. There was more from him but it was recently deleted. We could put some of that material back in, if you think what's there now isn't representing Binnie's position on it well enough. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 21:09, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

I support the recent removals - I have little time to investigate MORE tonight but I will look more tomorrow. - Youreallycan 21:30, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay, hang on a second - isn't this meatpuppetry? Drmies, who just made extensive edits to this article, went and added a section to Youreallycan's talk page titled "UNDUE". If you guys think that the article places undue weight on this subject - which, from looking at the timestamps, is an opinion you didn't form by actually doing research on Binnie - why are you making complaints about whether or not the article is written neutrally instead of using one of the undue weight templates?

And also, that section in its current form takes up a larger percentage of the article because Drmies just deleted a couple of large sections of the article. That really doesn't seem kosher, to cut several of the other sections of the article away and then say that what's left and now takes up a larger proportion of the article has undue weight.

Another thing that's kind of aggravating is that the deleted stuff represents hours and hours of work on my part and others, so it is rather frustrating to look at the timestamps and see that Drmies appears to have spent a matter of seconds' thought over deleting it all - again, I am guessing, without having done much research into the topic itself.

If you don't like the balance of the article you should add MORE content to balance it out, not get rid of the work other people have done. There seem to be several Forbes articles about Binnie from the 1990's and I haven't had time to research any of the stuff he's done in the last year, so why don't you look into that? Deleting, for example, the section about him funding other races around the country through this Americans for Responsible Health Care PAC makes no sense at all when we're talking about a multi-millionaire political party official in charge of financing.

To be clear... I do agree with some of the changes Drmies made, like deleting that block quote from the Plasticos Bajacal section (though I might have liked to preserve a couple of the details from it) but I have concerns as stated above. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 21:51, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

• Youreallycan is hardly my meat puppet, haha. He is, however, someone whose opinion I value when it comes to BLPs: he is fair to a fault, I think. Now, to tackle some of your comments (in reverse order): the section "Americans for Responsible Health Care" was cut because no formal charges were made--in other words, it might as well not have happened from an encyclopedic point of view (we are not the news). There may well be Forbes articles, but it's not my responsibility to dig those up: my responsibility is to make sure that BLPs are fair. That you put in a fair amount of time, well, I'm sorry, but after a hundred thousand edits, many of which on BLPs, I can recognize what's done according to our guidelines and what isn't. As for the "undue" part: I think I've cut fairly, both promotional and unfairly critical stuff. The section which Youreallycan rightly marked is indeed undue: it's about the company, not about the person. That there is a connection to the person needs to be made clear with reliable sources--the way it stands now it should be trimmed to one or two sentences at the most. Thank you, and your accusation of meat puppetry I'll file under "hasty remarks". Drmies (talk) 00:39, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Drmies, you went and recruited Youreallycan to come edit this article with an explicit suggestion of what position to take. If you find the term meatpuppet offensive or something, I apologize, but please don't act as if I'm confused or mistaken as to what happened or pretend that the number of edits you've made anoints your actions with special fairness or responsibility. There are many responsibilities we all have as Wikipedia editors, not just you.

Thanks for switching to the "undue" template, Youreallycan.

One of the reasons that Mr. Binnie is notable is that he's a prominent and successful businessman, so what his companies did under his direction seems pretty relevant to me. If anyone can accurately, fairly, and clearly describe what happened with the Plasticos Bajacal stuff, the significance of the event in the campaign, and both sides of the issue in a couple of sentences, I'm open to that, but I really don't see that making it shorter will necessarily make it fairer nor am I seeing the BLP guideline that says anything like that. If you don't like the contemporary sources for describing the events themselves because they don't mention him, most of that information is probably also in the newspaper articles written during the campaign.

Drmies deleted the section on the political positions that Binnie has taken but I'd think that restoring it might reduce the relative weight of the Plasticos Bajacal stuff. It doesn't seem inappropriate or unfair to me to document the statements he has made on political issues - the guy is a Republican party official (though Drmies might not have noticed that at the time, I put it up in the lede too, later) and unofficial reports have said that he is considering running for governor this year.

As far as there being no formal charges in the Americans for Responsible Health Care situation, that note is something I added in the interest of clarity and fairness rather than something which was reported in the press; I could see no evidence of a lawsuit or FEC action so far. But I don't think there's any disagreement over whether Mr. Binnie did what was alleged - he formed a PAC that supported a U.S. Senate candidate in a neighboring state and ran in the race for the NH seat himself. If I recall correctly, what happened is that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stated that this was illegal, and Binnie rather than generally speaking towards the legality of a Senate candidate doing that mentioned that some specific things he did, like appearing in commercials, had been reviewed by lawyers. Since he's now in charge of finance for a state political party, I don't think that this is something that should just disappear and at the very least mentioning which PACs a financier/philanthropist/political party official is involved with seems pretty appropriate.

Anyways, despite disagreements, I welcome this article getting attentions from more regular editors rather than single purpose accounts. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 03:58, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Those political positions, for a has-run who never won office, is irrelevant, and adding it so that another section may be bigger is a. invalid and b. misses the point: the current section is simply not relevant enough. People's positions aren't relevant unless they are noted by reliable sources, and what you are proposing sounds more like synthesis than anything else. And yes, I find the term "meat puppet" offensive. Drmies (talk) 15:48, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

In that case, I'm content to leave it at the statement that you went and recruited someone to edit the article with a specific position, whatever that would be called.

I don't understand why you keep mentioning the reliability of sources. There are a handful of questionable sources in the article but none of your edits seem particularly concerned about them, nor do you seem to be interested in going out and getting better citations for any of the stuff in the article to improve it.

Mr. Binnie did run for the position of (co-) finance director of the state Republican party and won it.

Your assertion that having a section on his stated political positions may be an invalid form of synthesis just doesn't hold water for me. That seems like exactly the kind of information that would be in an encyclopedia or other reference work about people involved in politics.

Where are you getting these standards for "relevant enough" and "not relevant enough"? None of the information you want to exclude from the article appears to match the criteria mentioned in WP:UNDUE: these aren't "isolated events, criticisms, or news reports" or minority viewpoints along the lines of Flat Earth theory. Things like a CEO's actions as an officer of a publicly held corporation, public statements on political positions made to journalists or in public advertisements paid for by this individual, or creation and funding of PACs don't fall under the privacy concerns of WP:BLP and I don't see any language in there describing some standard of relevancy or prescribing some maximum level of detail or length. And I don't see anything in the article size guideline saying that articles length should be limited to covering the information that is "relevant enough". --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 22:32, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Searched further but I'm still not seeing any policies or guidelines articulating a standard of relevance. I think you're exercising a personal preference for shorter, less inclusive articles, basing your edits on how much time you personally want to spend on this topic, and calling in people who agree with you, under the cover of a special burden of fairness and responsibility that a high edit ranking somehow gives you along with a special innate knowledge of WP guidelines that supposedly backs up your actions. The handwavey talk about the reliability of sources you probably haven't even looked at and repeated platitudes like "we aren't the news" concerning documentation of events that happened between a year and two decades ago doesn't impress me either.

A genuine thanks for getting rid of some of the more egregious stuff that was in here, but it's obviously way, way quicker to delete swathes of content than it is to research the topic and try to repurpose or write new, better cited, more balanced content like I've been doing, so you win. I'm not going to spend hours researching and writing a comprehensive and thorough article (which is the basic definition of encyclopedic, btw) if you and the SPAs are going to come in and delete it after a few seconds' thought with a flick of your wrist. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 20:53, 16 March 2012 (UTC)