Talk:Elliott Broidy

Work needed

This article was a complete mess. It was disorganized, repetitive, and looks like it was written by his publicist. I have done a complete reorganization of the career and activities information. The controversies section is much better, being recently added by non-COI editors, but it will need ongoing updates and clarifications. We also need to decide what to put in the lede - his political activism? His legal troubles? Those seem to be the things he is best known for. Certainly not for the charities whose boards he has served on; I have deleted that sentence. --MelanieN (talk) 17:22, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Fixer, Michael Cohen

Payoff needs to be in personal section. Wikipietime (talk) 06:04, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

This might also fit under "Political and government activities", since the revelation of the affair led to his resignation from the RNC. Still, I suspect "Controversies" remains the best choice. --Robert.Allen (talk) 06:52, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Of interest to anyone here?

Speculation that Broidy was fronting for someone else

In the section "Hush money payment to Playboy model", two different people have added references to speculation that Broidy was not actually the person who had the affair, that it was actually Trump, and that Broidy is fronting for Trump. I removed the material once, but since it has been re-added I will leave it for now and will ask at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard whether it is appropriate or not. Any comments can be made there. --MelanieN (talk) 14:26, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

I have improved the refs; one was used twice. Seems to satisfy WP:PUBLICFIGURE, as it's clearly labeled "speculation", and there are multiple RS. If Trump has denied it, then that should also be included. He is a RS for what he says, although not for the reliability of what he says. The difference is significant. We just document his statement(s), if any. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 20:00, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

"Selling of internet mining tools"

I question whether we should include this section - about Broidy trying to sell (no assertion that he actually did sell) internet mining tools to repressive governments. It is sourced only to The Intercept, which describes its philosophy as "advocacy journalism" so I don't know whether they can be regarded as a neutral reliable source. It is significant that no other publication seems to have picked up on their report. Furthermore, the Intercept article itself says that they have not been able to verify the authenticity of the documents on which their report is based. This all seems to me to be rather shaky for inclusion in a BLP. Not to mention that the information is reported in a tone suggesting this would be a terrible thing, maybe even a crime - offering to sell perfectly legal, publicly available software to countries the writer does not approve of. I think we should delete the section. What do others think? --MelanieN (talk) 17:49, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Agreeed, this is WP:POV "advocacy journalism". WP:UNDUE as well. R333ct0r (talk) 21:08, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Edit by User:Annmorgan24

User:Annmorgan24's recent edit summary says: "Current version is approved and verified by Wikipedia moderation", yet no link is provided to any discussion of the BLP issues, nothing in the user's contributions indicate any participation in a discussion concerning BLP issues, nothing about it appears on this article's talk page, and no mention of who "moderated" it or how. With all these major back and forth changes to this article, who else would want to make changes to it, since new edits are likely to be lost. Shouldn't the editors making these major changes provide more detailed explanations on this talk page (well beyond what is found in edit summaries)? User:Annmorgan24 has only made changes to this article, the earliest of which were apparently copyright violations. Is there a case to be made that User:Annmorgan24 should be blocked? I don't see any warnings on the user talk page other than an entry on 28 November 2018 about the copyright issue. --Robert.Allen (talk) 18:32, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Robert.Allen, I've left a warning on User:Annmorgan24's talk page for the continued flagrant violation of WP:BLP and WP:NPOV policy. Annmorgan24 also continues to attempt to add a copyrighted image to the page. Annmorgan24 has not edited any mainspace pages except this one, which is concerning. R333ct0r (talk) 20:58, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Annmorgan24, Dear Robert.Allen, User:R333ct0r My revisions and edits to Mr. Elliott Broidy Wikipedia page are based on accurate, current, and reliable sources from highly trusted American and international media such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Politico, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, Esquire, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Times of Israel, OCCRP, and many others. Additionally, there are public records available in open source that support the revisions I have made. Material about Elliot Broidy has been written with the greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality, and avoidance of original research. At the same time, respectfully, your edits are aimed at hiding important information about the life and professional benchmarks of Elliott Broidy; your revisions are outdated, incorrect and misleading as to information about the areas of his business and life. No source confirms that he is or was a philanthropist and venture capitalist. Therefore, attributing to him this fake activity is pure PR, and an attempt to hide the truth.Annmorgan24 (talk) 01:49, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

Annmorgan24, I am going to revert your recent addition, and then I'l go through and figure out what can be retained. For starters, you cannot call him a "disgraced" former lobbyist in the lead sentence, and that alone is enough to cause me to doubt your good faith in editing here. Also, you keep wanting to add unnecessary negatives like "conviction" and "criminal" to the section headings, and editorializing sentences like "Broidy's career has been mired in controversy and scandals." When you bulk-restored your previous edits you even did things like restoring the “curly quotes” which had been corrected to "normal quotes". So, a lot of your stuff is going to be removed or corrected so that it actually does follow the rules of "verifiability, neutrality, and avoidance of original research." You are new here and you haven't really absorbed what those things are about, particularly neutrality. So, I'll revert you and then look to see what of your material can be restored. Others here will chime in as well since my online time is limited. -- MelanieN (talk) 02:15, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

@User:Annmorgan24. I haven't done much editing on this article other than to restore text that got garbled by the reversion of your ealiest edits that were identified as copyright violations and were removed. I think you may be referring to work done by other editors. I have not attempted to evaluate the claims of violations of the criteria for BLP articles, and I believe those editors reverting your additions should specifically discuss all alleged violations on the talk page with you and other editors as they revert them, and should do this item by item addressing each specific instance that they feel is a violation of policy. The mass reversion of all your additions could possibly be regarded as disruptive to the editing process. I suspect that the assumption has been made that because some of your additions have been violations, all must be. The only instance in which a specific addition [made by you: actually I seem to have figured out this was not added by Annmorgan24] is discussed is in the section on this page labelled "Selling of internet mining tools", in which case two editors felt that the addition was inappropriate. --Robert.Allen (talk) 01:56, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

I also felt your edit summary (mentioned above) was misleading and might bring your integrity as an editor into question. --Robert.Allen (talk) 02:26, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

Annmorgan24, I have looked through your proposed edits and have restored several that were cited and relevant. In most cases I rewrote them for clarity and brevity. Things I restored included the status of his CPA license, and his attempts to sell his influence to foreign governments. -- MelanieN (talk) 04:41, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

@User:MelanieN Dear, MelanieN thank you very much for all your editing adjustments and help, if you don't mind could you say me which paragraphs and information from MY previous version should be corrected so well that it passes moderation, once again I want to repeat the fact that my revisions and edits to Mr. Elliott Broidy Wikipedia page are based on accurate, current, and reliable sources from highly trusted American and international media such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Politico, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, Esquire, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Times of Israel, OCCRP, and many others. Additionally, there are public records available in open source that support the revisions I have made. Material about Elliot Broidy has been written with the greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality, and avoidance of original research. At the same time, respectfully, your edits are aimed at hiding important information about the life and professional benchmarks of Elliott Broidy; your revisions are outdated, incorrect and misleading as to information about the areas of his business and life. No source confirms that he is or was a philanthropist and venture capitalist. Therefore, attributing to him this fake activity is pure PR, and an attempt to hide the truth. I suggest indicate like: scandal-tarred or engulfed in numerous scandals and investigation.Regards Annmorgan24 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:13, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

I'll take another look at your additions, but I can tell you right now that things like "disgraced", "scandal-tarred", etc. are not going in the article. And if you don't understand why (hint: See WP:Neutrality), you probably should not be trying to edit biographical articles. I remember that you put in some unsourced statements about him no longer doing this or that, and I will re-evaluate that type of quasi-factual statement to see if I can find any source. Without such a source, it is WP:Original research which is not allowed at Wikipedia. -- MelanieN (talk) 17:03, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

OK, with regard to your recent additions:

• You changed the lead sentence from “American venture capitalist, Republican fundraiser, and philanthropist” to “former lobbyist, Republican fundraiser, engulfed in numerous scandals and investigation.” That has already been partially reverted by others, as well it should have been; “engulfed in numerous scandals and investigation” was completely inappropriate for the lead. I will research the appropriate designations to describe him. You disagree with “venture capitalist” and “philanthropist”; I disagree with “lobbyist”. He did a little lobbying on behalf of the UAE and Saudi Arabia but IMO it was not his profession. We might want to mention his security business in some way; I will give that some thought.
• You added “Criminal” to the section heading “Ukraine investigations”. I agree that the source says it was a criminal investigation, but that doesn’t need to be in the section heading; I will add it to the first sentence of the section instead. -- MelanieN (talk) 17:23, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

"No source confirms that he is or was a philanthropist and venture capitalist." Do you not like the LA Times? ("Los Angeles venture capitalist and philanthropist"). Calling well-verified (and real) activities "fake" really calls into question your credibility/neutrality. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:54, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) OK, after some Google searching and a review of what is in the article:

• Al Jazeera describes him as a venture capitalist. The LA Times describes him as “founder and chairman of a private equity fund”; Private equity is pretty much the same thing as Venture capital financing. So venture capitalist is accurate.
• Pretty much all sources describe him as owning a global security firm.
• Sources do not generally call him a lobbyist; they are more likely to say that he employed lobbyists or was on the board of a lobbying organization.
• AlJazeera calls him a “notable philanthropist”. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in naming him to its board, called him a “major philanthropist”. However, Forward says his reputation as a philanthropist is overstated. Anyhow, philanthropy gets only one small section in this article. I am going to leave out “philanthropist”.
• All references describe him as a major fundraiser for the Republican party; most mention his tenure as deputy chair of the RNC.

Bottom line, I think his description should be “American venture capitalist, owner of a global security company, and major Republican fundraiser”. -- MelanieN (talk) 18:00, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Redirect of Robin Rosenzweig Broidy to this article

This is a discussion to evaluate, and either concur with or disagree with, User:Galobtter's recent action making the newly written article Robin Rosenzweig Broidy into a redirect to this article. I personally agree with the action, but I think we need some kind of documentation with community input. Consider this as a kind of Merge Request after the merge has already been done. -- MelanieN (talk) 18:17, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

• I Support. She is not independently notable. Virtually all the references supplied were really about her husband, or else they were non-reliable sources like IMDb and LinkedIn. -- MelanieN (talk) 18:17, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
• Of course, I Support - everything in there was either material about Elliott Broidy and is largely already covered here, or biographical material about Robin Rosenzweig sourced to Linkedin and IMDB which is obviously not the sources we want. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:20, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

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