User talk:Gcdhsofficial

Welcome!

Hello, Gcdhsofficial, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! JohnCD (talk) 17:50, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed content from Philip Perry. When removing text, please specify a reason in the edit summary and discuss edits that are likely to be controversial on the article's talk page. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the text has been restored, as you can see from the page history. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. JohnCD (talk) 17:50, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

October 2008

The recent edit you made to Philip Perry constitutes vandalism, and has been reverted. Please do not continue to remove content. Thank you. Shell ^babelfish 17:51, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop. The information you are deleting from the article Philip Perry is properly sourced: if you want to change it, discuss your proposed changes on the article's talk page and try to reach a consensus. Also, it is apparent from your username that you have a conflict of interest in this matter: please read that policy carefully before editing again, and Wikipedia:Suggestions for COI compliance. If you continue you may be blocked from editing. JohnCD (talk) 18:12, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The material on the page is absolutely false and is written about me!!!. It is not sourced appropriately -- and to the extent that you rely on political attacks as "sources," you are republishing libelous material. When you are in a government post in Washington, people make up all kinds of silly things about you. There is no excuse for repeating them here.

First: I did not lead a vetting team for the VP selection. I participated. There was never a leak of a single page of material from that.

Second: I did not lobby ICE or any other Homeland component for Corrections as alleged, and the registration does not say I did. This is another silly attack.

And there are many many other falsehoods here, motivated by political bases

You can't in good conscience run down my reputation in this way. People actually read this silly stuff. I can ignore a left wing journal because people don't take it seriously, but when you republish it, you do me tremendous harm. It is libel.

If you consider that the article contains incorrect statements about you personally, see Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Help. JohnCD (talk) 18:25, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you JohnCD. Can I please solicit your advice:

I am sorry to bother you, but I discovered today that there are several seriously inaccurate statements on a page about me on wikipedia. I can give you a full agenda of the false statements if that would be helpful (which are intended as a political attack and not set out in any neutral encyclopedic tone). But there is also a larger problem here. To the extent that there is any sourcing for certain this information, it is to political blog/journalism that is intentionally false and one-sided like "American Prospect" (cite #8), Mother Jones (cite #9), and Washington Monthly (cite # 7). These are all left wing publications, engaged in intensely political activities. I was a public official, and did not for many reasons attempt to publicly contest every false statement published in each political blog/journal. The much bigger problem occurs when those politically oriented attacks are republished in a much more mainstream source of information -- like wikipedia -- without any underlying factual support or journalistic ethical review. This has the potential to seriously harm my reputation, and I need advice on who within your organization can address this.

Thank you for not engaging in an edit war: many people in these circumstances keep on deleting material until they get blocked. You will understand that Wikipedia requires a neutral point of view and so cannot let people edit their own articles as they might wish; but biographies of living persons are recognised as an area where particular care is needed. I'm afraid I have not as much time as I would like this evening - I live in a European time-zone - but briefly my advice is: read carefully the page WP:Biographies of living persons, and also the page WP:Biographies of living persons/Help which is specifically for people in your situation. Then prepare a statement of the changes you would like to see in the article, and the reasons, and post it on the article's talk page, which you can get to by clicking the "discussion" tab at the head of the article. Make your interest clear - perhaps head it "Changes requested by subject of article" - and make the statement as concise and unemotional as you can. Then see what comments are made by other editors. Wikipedia's normal practice is to try to achieve consensus. If that does not work out, we could post a message at the WP:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard which will bring in other editors to help. There are further steps, outlined at WP:Dispute resolution, if necessary. If you like, make a draft on this page and I will comment on it tomorrow before you post it.

Wikipedia technicalities: make your new post at the bottom of the talk page; make a heading for it by putting two = signs at each end, e.g. ==Changes requested by subject of article==; and at the end of the message put a block of four "tilde" characters ~~~~ which the system will convert into a "signature" of your username and the time and date - like this JohnCD (talk) 21:57, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

POV material in the article on Philip Perry

Gcdhsofficial, I stumbled across the article on Philip Perry some time ago, and finally made some revisions to the style of the article yesterday. In doing so I read the article over a few times and I did feel that much of the content was not written from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV). I personally feel there is no place for such POV text in an encyclopedia, especially when it is about living persons (Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons).

I am going to try and edit the content of the article for a short while tonight, and will post detailed justifications of my edits on the talk page of the article on Philip Perry, i.e., Talk:Philip Perry.

Also, I am a researcher in a scientific field. Due to the nature of my work I am very strongly against articles, on Wikipedia or otherwise, that are inaccurate, and/or poorly referenced/sourced.
- idunno271828 (talk) 23:36, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like Idunno271828 has done a lot of work cleaning up the Philip Perry article. I just wanted to drop you a line and make sure you had seen the latest version and ask if there were any further areas of concern in the article. Thanks. Shell ^babelfish 04:08, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your concern and assistance Idunno, Shell and other interested parties. There is much invective in the Washington political press with no foundation, and several such non-neutral statements found their way into the article. I can get citations if necessary for the dates of my tenure as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security -- which are a matter of public record -- to address one issue in the article: Specifically, the original poster was attempting to insinuate that I was corrupt by suggesting that I had been a key lobbyist for a company during 2005. That was not true, and is actually impossibe, since I was employed as GC of Homeland Security during 2005 and was recused from any such matters. Many other clauses and statements in the article seem to have been added for similar non-neutral purposes.

Thanks again, and I appreciate your assistance.

Again, pls let me know if there is something else I should be doing here.

Sourcing Concerns

Hi,all. This is a truly and profoundly distressing situation, if the sources in question on this page are all publishing falsehoods. There is no deeper violation of someone than to publish what is not true. I do not wish to participate in violations of the truth. Since some of these postings from these sources have been mine, I will try to verify them w/ more neutral sources. Perhaps I erred in thinking that Washington Monthly and Mother Jones wish to avoid libel suits and therefore vet their work? Phoebe13 (talk) 15:54, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the quote from the Gellman book re. the 2000 v.p. search: "Cheney hired lawyers at Latham & Watkins to sift teh thousands of pages thus produced on each of the candidates. The supervising partner was Philip J. Perry, Liz Cheney's husband." (p. 10) This writer is a Pulitzer winner, and a good deal of this book was run in the Washington Post before being collected in this book, so if a Pulitzer writer is lying, then this world is in worse shape than we knew. If the WaPo and the Penguin Press are libeling someone, this is a serious, serious matter and should be made publicly known ASAP. What are the Wikipedia rules on confirmation of sources or deletion based on source reliability? If we can provide a different printed source that contradicts the Gellman source, that would seem to trump the Gellman source? Perhaps if someone could refer me to that source, I can access it.Phoebe13 (talk) 15:55, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can you re-check Perry page?

Hello...I used Idunno's list of concerns to re-source any material I originally posted on this page, with the exception of the Washington Monthly material, and would like to see if you can spot any other innaccuracies on my part, or anyone else's. Ideally, we would need sources that refute the bad ones. So if you can refer to other accessible, accurate, neutral sources, that would help immensely. If the Washington Monthly material is not factual, that material should be excised, and those people should be exposed. Phoebe13 (talk) 18:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again, folks for your attention to this. I appreciate your desire to ensure that the information is accurate. On the VP vetting issue: I don't know who Gellman interviewed to write that in his book, but he apparently talked to someone who was speculating about the vetting process and did not have personal knowledge. I didn't lead the team (I wish I could take credit for that, but it isn't true), and my lawfirm wasn't hired or paid to do any of the vetting. Everyone who did it was a volunteer. Of course, the VP vetting process was confidential, so I can't give you the details and nobody with actual knowledge of that process should talk to the press about it at any level of detail. Gellman's book can only be as good as his source, and his source didn't have first hand information. In court, for example, this type of information is called double hearsay and inadmissible because it is recognized as unreliable information.

I can try to find a number of publicly available sources for other information. For example, there is no doubt that I worked at the Department of Homeland Security from 2005-07. I'm not sure I'm sufficiently proficient to plug those sources into the article. I will try to turn to that job as soon as I can but am in the middle of a complex legal issue for a client today and tomorrow. Thanks very much again for your attention to this.

More on Gellman

I just left a long post on the general discussion page, agreeing w/ you that the Gellman material should remain deleted about the vetting thing. 1)He himself does not source his statements or attribute them to anyone. That alone is grounds enough to rule the source out, but even worse, the writer appears to have a history of having his factuality and quoting disputed when he has interviewed government employees. If he can't prove something, he should not say it. This has been a real eye-opener. Thank you for speaking up.Phoebe13 (talk) 22:43, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

== Concur w/ proposed deletions to Philip Perry page ==

Hi, me again. I think the whole problem will be solved when Idunno deletes the unsourced material and the politically motivated source material. You did a good deed when you pushed for truth. IMHO, you shouldn't have to spend your time tracking the remaining sources down if they are scheduled for deletion anyway, so I wanted to try to catch you here before you go through that. If the admin makes the overall delete, it can be done w/out touching off an editing war. Admin folks are magic. So if you don't mind, check the page again after Idunno's deletes that are scheduled for today, and if you ever see other politically-driven material on this page, pls let me know how I can help you, via my talk page. I will try to look in on the page now and again.Phoebe13 (talk) 15:20, 30 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]