Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SlimVirgin (talk | contribs) at 23:18, 27 December 2004 (→Necessity of NPOV notice?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hi,

Supporters of Lyndon LaRouche and other critics of Political Research Associates tend to post material here that is not merely critical but full of false or very outdated information. Please try to keep a balance of positive and negative out of fairness. Try to actually fact check criticisms before posting them.

Chip Berlet - Political Research Associates

Added NPOV note

Hi,

I am inviting a discussion of how to make this page balanced, while cutting the material that is not accurate. There are only a tiny handful of people who are critics of PRA. I am calling for a discussion about how to present this criticism fairly.

This page is now unbalanced in favor of PRA. Let the critics add material so that it does not contain false claims, and does not exceed 50% of the page. --Cberlet 15:15, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages has a policy that says claims should be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), clearly sourced and referenced. See Misplaced Pages:cite sources. There should be a Reference section at the end of the article. Each book, paper, newspaper article or website referred to by the author for a particular claim should be listed in this section. Throughout the text, as claims are made, a reference should be provided inline like this and then also listed in the References section. (Not all claims have to be referenced, of course: it's a question of commonsense, but if a claim is challenged by another editor, a reference must be provided.)

References should be reputable. The more contentious the claim, the more reputable the reference needs to be. Not all editors stick to these rules, but they are supposed to.

There has been a problem with several Misplaced Pages articles being edited by Lyndon LaRouche activists/supporters. They are Herschelkrustofsky, C Colden, Weed Harper and 64.30.208.48. (The latter two appear to be the same person; not sure about the others. Weed Harper and a notorious Usenet LaRouche activist called Ralph Gibbons have both posted on Usenet using IP address 64.30.208.48, and the same IP address has been reported for sending out pro-LaRouche spam around the Web.) Anyone who consistently tries to correct their editing is accused of being an anti-LaRouche activist. I first came to the attention of these people when I wrote the article on Jeremiah Duggan, which they heavily contested. See Talk:Jeremiah Duggan/archive1 and Talk:Jeremiah Duggan for details of the dispute. In the end, we agreed on a compromise version, which is what you now see on the page. It's a bit of a dog's breakfast but this is what happens to articles they get involved in. My own view is that these editors should not be editing articles that have anything to do with LaRouche, but that is just my personal view. There was an Arbitration Committee ruling against them, which you can find at Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Lyndon LaRouche/Proposed decision. The ruling states that they are not allowed to insert "original research" emanating from the LaRouche organization into any article that is not about Lyndon LaRouche or a related person or organization. The articles that are regarded as being connected to LaRouche can be viewed at Template:LaRouche. They would therefore not be allowed to insert "original research" from the LaRouche organization into the Political Research Associates article, unless there was something in the article critical of the LaRouche organization, in which case the LaRouche response could be quoted. What is meant by "original research" here are claims not verifiable without reference to the LaRouche organization.

If you feel able to, I would suggest you take the most biased version of this article you can find, and try to incorporate, into the current version, any of the claims you feel may have some validity, providing references for each claim, bearing in mind that the article must be written from a neutral point of view. Alternatively, it might make more sense if editors who are not involved with, and who are not opposed to, Political Research Associates do the editing. I hope this information helps. Slim 02:16, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

unsourced claim

There are some critics of PRA who claim the group, especially Chip Berlet, has a bias against persons and groups who see conspiracies as driving history and current events. Citation on this? DanKeshet 20:28, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

Necessity of NPOV notice?

Is it still necessary to have the notice about NPOV disputes at the head of this page? It looks perfectly kosher to me. If no one has any objections, I'd just as soon see it removed. Wally 03:11, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Herschel, can you provide a reference for the Brandt quotes or remove them? Also, I'm going to remove the Brandt link you gave, as it is absurd and mentions the silly PROMIS conspiracy story, which truly is the preserve of lunatics. Slim 23:18, Dec 27, 2004 (UTC)