Talk:Guo Jun

Protected edit request on 25 October 2017

The user G0700597 has tried to whitewash the scandal of Guo Jun; I do not understand why my edits have been removed. This is extremely disappointing that Wikipedia is used as a tool for covering up. scholarbank (talk) 19:41, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Not done for now: There are valid concerns about the sourcing of this controversial content. I will need to see consensus among editors that the source is sufficiently reliable to present these claims. If you are unable to get enough input on this talk page you could try WP:RSN. Regards — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:49, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Current Court Case section edit is baised and speculative. Number of issues raised. Seeking a fairer and factual edit.

I want to raise a number of issues here and also request for amendments to be made in the current Court Cases section of Guo Jun’s wiki page. Wiki living person biography page should only allow correct and respectful content about the person. It should not be a platform for disseminating rumours and speculations that Lee believes in.

There are two sides to a story. Both parties already got to state what they believe in court and a judge has made a ruling based on the evidence. It is ironic and prejudiced to disallow court documents about the very cases that this section is written about. Instead, relying on Lee’s personal opinions and speculations made to the tabloids.

Please note: There has been a long history of deleting edits in this section. I believe that the Editor that deleted alternate edits claiming whitewash seems to be quite biased towards Guo Jun from the very start. You will find below the issues raised as well as my proposed changes. It is my hope that a fair edit will be made to this section that respects the living person and based on facts, not gossip.

In first para: - Lee is not a current trustee so it should say former trustee. - Guo Jun’s title, President of MBM management committee, should be included.

Lee had also filed a Corrupt Practice Investigation Bureau report against the monk Delete this sentence. Filing a report has nothing to do with court cases. Secondly, anyone can file a report against anyone. Purposely stating it on Guo Jun’s living biography page is insinuating. This isn’t Lee’s diary, it doesn’t matter what he has filed. As can be seen, Lee has it in for GuoJun and doing everything he can to taint his reputation.

…where Guo Jun had allegedly implied that Lee’s company was in financial difficulties and questioned if his cancer relapse was affecting his judgement and decision-making. Delete this sentence. The sentence preceding it already made it clear what Lee believed had happened. The court document clearly concluded that BOTH parties settled without admission of guilt in the end. Why is Lee given such a large space dedicated to his embellished version of what happened? It is extremely unfair.

Lee claimed that Guo Jun discredited him as he had uncovered the monk’s alleged impropriety. Delete sentence. Again why is Lee’s gossiping and speculations given a platform here? It only serves the purpose of insinuating Guo Jun in a bad light. And it is completely untrue. Link 13: tabloid biased reporting of what Lee had told them. Lee fabricated the story that Guo Jun is soliciting male companions online. Which is completely false and biased. Link 14: mentions Guo Jun sighted going into a hotel in plain clothes. He was there to meet an old friend who happens to be staying at the hotel and they were going to do gym together then catch up. Completely innocent activity twisted into a story line in support of the lies in link 13. Unacceptable.

On 23 October 2017, a settlement was reached, with Guo Jun offering to pay $30,000 to Lee Boon Teow to settle the lawsuit, without admitting to any defamation or guilt. Replace with ‘On 24 October 2017, a settlement was reached, with Guo Jun offering to pay $30,000 to Lee and without admission of guilt by both parties.’ Both did not admit to any wrongdoing as stated in the three pages court transcript. Don't know how to attach the court doc. in word format here. Need Help.

During the proceedings, Guo Jun disclosed that he has at least A$3 million in assets in 2009… This is not true. He said he had $300k in 2009, not 3mil. The exact amount aside, the sentence should be deleted, as this was not what the court case was actually about. Instead, the sentence should be appropriately replaced with the verdict of the case. The judge in the end dismissed Lee’s claim and ordered him to pay disbursement cost to Guo Jun. This is important as it is directly related to the case. Add Court Judgement link:

…he has a “different interpretation” of Buddhist concepts of austerity; he believes he should manage his own financial assets and expenditure, without disclosing them to the monastery or its management committee. a. Quotation marks should be deleted. Its purpose being there is to sway the audience into thinking there is something really wrong here. Inappropriate and biased. b. He also said this as quoted in link 14: “This has nothing to do with wealth, but how you use it and your mentality towards money. You are only the guardian of money.” This sentence should be included because he offers his reasons as to why he thinks that way.

Finally, I would also like to add this at the end of the section, translated and extracted from Guo Jun’s press release:

The waves of false allegations and smear campaigns made against me these past few years have been relentless and time-consuming. I am saddened that it has caused disharmony and depleted devotees’ resources. Our life here is but a short duration, it is precious and we must therefore use it wisely doing meaningful things that benefit more people instead of wasting it in winning and losing. As a monastic I seek to walk the Buddha path and guiding sentient beings is my duty. Besides practicing and spreading Buddhism, I will not allow unyielding sentient beings to continue creating bad karma. Endless suffering!….Wishing the unyielding individual to fine-tune the head space in order to end his own suffering that is the path of liberation.

Guo Jun’s press release link: Had trouble adding the URL as it contains Chinese characters and it is changed to sympbols when added in. Need Help.

Bluefairywren (talk) 08:24, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

@Bluefairywren: First of all, please read up on wikipedia policies on sources, especially WP:PRIMARY. Court reports are primary sources, on the absences of reliable secondary sources like newspaper reports, primary sources are accepted. We have plenty of news coverage on the court case hence we use these reports. Is Guo Jun's press release cited in any news reports? If yes, we can include it.

• Lee did file a CPIB report against Guo, reported in the press.
• From the source "They include Ven Guojun saying Mr Lee's construction company was in financial difficulties and asking if his cancer relapse was affecting his ability to think clearly." From the page, "Guo Jun had allegedly implied that Lee's company was in financial difficulties and questioned if his cancer relapse was affecting his judgement and decision-making". This is a close paraphrase of the news report. It did not indicated what Lee think, but the chats, which Guo had said.
• "Lee claimed that Guo Jun discredited him as he had uncovered the monk's alleged impropriety". This is a claim Lee made, which the page clearly indicated it is claimed, not said nor confirmed. Lianhe Zaobao is a reliable source, not a tabloid, you are looking at Xin Ming, the nightly chinese tabloid.
• There are a few cases on hand, Lee's defamation suit and Lee's pursuit of the study grant to be returned. Your court document refers to the return of the study grant case, not the defamation case. The section is somewhere messy in clarification which case it is referring to. Will tidy up based on secondary sources.
• Guojun disclosed he had SGD 3 million, 果峻庭上承认拥有约300万澳元（约384新元）资产, translates to Guo Jun admit in court to have almost 3million AUD (roughly 384 SGD), which should be 3.84 million SGD, shoddy reporting here. 万 is 10 thousands not 1 thousand. Referring to here, so 300 万 refers to 300 multiple by 10,000 which is 3,000,000 which is indeed 3 million.
• Also, for Guo Jun's press release, it is not related to the court case.

Bluefairywren (talk · contribs), thank you for making the discussion on the talk page instead of edit warring on the page. I will make edits based on the above points when I have the time--Xaiver0510 (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

References

Reply to Xaiver0510 re: Court case section

@Xaiver0510 I appreciate your work and communication on this page. All I want is just a fair edit on Guo Jun's page. I only stumbled on it in 2018 and had to learn how Wiki works in order to do something about it.

• Thank you for your kind comments but in wikipedia, as I understand, we called it a balanced view if there are supporting information. There maybe times where it seems unbalanced or biased, but generally when facts are presented, it looks like that but they are undeniable facts.

- FYI The defamation case and the statue case were settled in court concurrently. The court transcript which I have on file (but don't know how to upload it here) contains the Judges' final order. (The Document name/number: HC Suit No 436 of 2015)

• The defamation case was closed and already noted in the article.

- The money gift case has already come to an end in May 2nd 2018. The court has dismissed Lee's claim and Lee was ordered to pay miscellaneous cost. This verdict should be uploaded in the court case section along with a dedicated description about this as it is the verdict. Although it is a primary source but there is no secondary evidence available to cover this. Here is the link to the verdict, please add Supreme Court Ruling - Monetary Gift

• I reread about the policy with regards to primary sources and I will include this in and conclude the case.

- As for, 'Lee did file a CPIB report against Guo, reported in the press', filing a report is just filing a report. It isn't about the Court cases nor will a report necessarily lead to a case in court. This should not be included. It has nothing to do with the court cases and should be deleted.

• I will agree on this but this will actually still appear in another sub section. This is undeniably a fact that a CPIB report had been filed against him.

- Lee is a former trustee, this has not been corrected yet.

• I will add on this information as I need to check on the timeline and include accordingly.

Update, Lee only stepped down as trustee in October 2018 which is after the cases and there is no real need to reflect this as the article is about Guo and when the incidents happened, Lee was still a trustee. --Xaiver0510 (talk) 07:20, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

- {{During the proceedings, Guo Jun disclosed that he has at least A$3 million in assets in 2009, and that he has a "different interpretation" of Buddhist concepts of austerity; he believes he should manage his own financial assets and expenditure, without disclosing them to the monastery or its management committee.[19][15]}}

This should be removed from his page as, 1) his personal assets and 2) his stance that monastics should have the right to manage their personal finances are both irrelevant to the court case at hand. By the way, 300k is what he stands by as his total asset at the time, it was incorrectly reported as 3mil by the media.

• I will agree to move to another section but not remove the information unless there is a consensus to remove it. If you can find a correction by the media on wrong reporting or information that Guo Jun denies it is 300k and not 3m, I can add in as a disputed amount but until then it is original research by you.

- Yes, Guo Jun's press release was reported and uploaded in this news report which clearly was written in relation to court cases with Lee and Lee's false accusations about him. A sentence should be written about this with the link added. 告白信-堅稱遭抹黑-果峻法師拒再周旋 Bluefairywren (talk) 02:43, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

• On re-reading the press release, I can incorporate some of the information inside on his thoughts.

My replies are inline for easy referring. Once again, thank you for discussion instead of forcing on changes like some of the IP editors. --Xaiver0510 (talk) 05:48, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Sources

I am concerned about the quality of sources in this biography. Sources 1-11 in the sections: lead, education, Life and religious training do not appear to be independent of the subject. The "Criticism" section uses several websites in Chinese without English translation of title, author, publisher. Do these websites comply with WP:BLPSOURCES? https://mothership.sg/ appears to be a questionable source, it seems to be some online community (https://mothership.sg/careers/). JimRenge (talk) 09:14, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

@JimRenge: Mothership is a Singapore local website started off as a local entertainment website to becoming a news website. It has been classified by the Media Development Authority as a news website. A small discussion here on the Singapore wikiproject page. Chinese sources 14, 19, 21 and 22 are from Lianhe Zaobao, a Chinese local newspaper in Singapore which is a reliable source. --Xaiver0510 (talk) 02:13, 11 February 2019 (UTC)