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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Poorly sourced info added by User:Jdtoellner

I agree that the second source used by user JDtoellner fails as a reliable source, as it is essay work, however, the use as reference of the film by an Emmy award winning broadcast reporter and producer with 25 years experience, incorporating a quote by the subject of this article is definitely a reliable source.MLKLewis (talk) 23:48, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
Nope. We have already hashed this out on the talk page. After significant discussion here, this "film" (actually a media piece affiliated with the article's subject himself, and his lawyer) was taken to the board WP:RSN. There, it was determined not to be a reliable source, especially not so for controversial information. This is most certainly controversial information. Archived RSN thread: Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_34#Film_affiliated_with_subject_appropriate_as_source.3F. -- Cirt (talk) 02:53, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
    • Whether or not the film is a reliable source certainly has been discussed here, however no official determination has ever been made that the film is an unreliable source. As a point of clarity, when Cirt sais that the question of the reliability of the film was "taken to the board", he means that it was posted on a reliable sources noticeboard, not that it was sent to a committee for an official ruling. On that notice board, the only editor who commented, Bignole asked and responded, "What informatioon is attempting to be sourced by the movie? I mean, if it's objective facts about him, I don't think it really matters. If it's info that's controversial, then I'd say probably not." The determination of what are objective facts and what is controversial information is matter that is certainly still open for debate. In addition, that Robyn Simon's journalistic integrity has been corrupted by Walter Maksum being the producer of the film has not been established, evidenced, or substantiated in any way. The film is a reliable source, and furthermore, what was removed from the article was a direct quote from Erhard, and according to Wikipedia:Verifiabilty; Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves, without the requirement that they be published experts in the field, so long as:
the material is not unduly self-serving;
it does not involve claims about third parties;
it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject;
there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity;
the article is not based primarily on such sources.
That Erhard discribes his experience on The Golden Gate Bridge as a transformation, rather than than a revelation is not unduly self-serving, it does not invole claims about third paties, it relates directly to the subject, it is authentic, the article is not based primarily on that description, and it helps the uninformed reader gain deeper insight into the man; therefore, it should be reinserted back into the article. Eaglebreath (talk) 19:25, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
How is it not unduly self-serving? It is the cornerstone upon which Rosenberg/Erhard has built a multi-million dollar commercial enterprise, and that is of itself the very definition of self serving. Further - there is no "reasonable doubt" about its authenticity? It is the claim of a subjective experience, one that is impossible to verify as authentic empirically. A good many reasonable people have doubts about R/E's veracity on this and a host of other issues.
The issue is handled in a more balanced fashion in Werner Erhard (book), which is a Wikipedia good article. The alleged "transformation" is presented briefly, in summary, and from objective WP:RS.
That leads BTW to another issue. Twenty references in this article are from that particular book, which as the article on it demonstrates beyond question fails, as the film does, any reasonable test of being WP:RS.Sensei48 (talk) 21:40, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
Comment -- There are plenty of independent reliable secondary sources such that we do not have to use a self-serving conflict of interest source that fails WP:RS. Find the info about Werner Erhard's purported "transformation experience" in reliable, secondary sources, please. Thanks. -- Cirt (talk) 21:55, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Werner's Transformation

Thanks for the feedback.

The section titled The era of the est training (1971 - 1984) says: He [Werner] started to see the world as perfect "the way it is" and reported an insight that his attempts to change or modify either his physical circumstances or his mental outlook had their basis in a conception of the world (that it should differ from "the way it is") that precluded or at least limited one's experiential and creative appreciation of it.

This attempts to describe a pivotal evet in Werner's life that he referrs to as a transformation. I felt that the description above fell way short of what it was that Werner has said he experienced. I'm not sure what the source of this material is. Describing an experience like this is exceedingly difficult. Seeing the world as perfect actually, I believe, was only a part of Werner's experience of transformation. Here is how Werner described it in his own words in the film Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard.

The way est happened was very simple. I had this transformational experience. I had a transformation. Whoever I had been up until that point I no longer was. I was on my way to work and there was nothing significant about it but I was on the Golden Gate Bridge. I just happened to be there and that's when I had the realization that what my life was about was really meaningless. It was empty. And this realization that the things that I thought were so significant like looking good and winning, just the normal things that most people think are important, that they really had no importance, that it was all empty and meaningless. When I broke through the sadness, broke through the sense of despair of having wasted my life, I all of a sudden realized "My God, I'm free." What's that mean to be free: free to choose, free to create a life that was worth living.

In order to describe it accurately why not quote Werner directly? I did my best to capture his words exactly as he spoke them. Is that considered a reliable source, given that it's a record of him speaking personally?

My purpose in posting this was to improve this section first for accuracy and second to elaborate in an event that was pivotal in his life. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jdtoellner (talk • contribs) 20:22, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

The sources you suggest, and have added to the article in prior edits, fail WP:RS. Perhaps you could suggest some secondary sources that are independent of Werner Erhard's circle of control and influence and not affiliated with the article's subject? -- Cirt (talk) 21:13, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I'll look into that. So, a direct and recorded quote from him isn't suitable?

It's hard to know who falls into his circle of influence and who would indeed be a secondary source. He has become a private figure by choice. It's hard to know who he's collaborating with. A source who appeared knowledgeable and secondary might actually be a close colleague.

The veracity of this is what's most important to me. That was my intent in quoting him directly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jdtoellner (talk • contribs) 22:57, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

It is the sources themselves that fail WP:RS. "a direct and recorded quote from him", from a source that fails WP:RS, is not appropriate for use. For example, some movie production produced by the lawyer for the individual himself. This does not constitute an appropriate source, especially fails WP:NPOV, as a form of hagiography. -- Cirt (talk) 01:43, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Categories regarding religious beliefs

I removed the category former scientologist from this article, as there are no reliable sources that say Erhard ever self-identified as a scientologist. I am including the relevant section of the biographies of living persons policy WP:BLPCAT where it states very clearly that:

Categories regarding religious beliefs and sexual orientation should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief or orientation in question.

Given that there are no reliable sources that have Erhard saying he ever was a scientologist, it is only appropriate to remove this category from this article. Also, if other editors are interested in knowing, in addition to the activity here, there is discussion about whether Erhard (and others who have never identified themselves as scientologists) should be included on that list at all. This discussion is taking place on the talk page at Talk:List_of_Scientologists#RfC:_Should_people_be_self-proclaimed_Scientologists_in_order_to_be_included_on_this_list.3F

Given the discussion on that page, I find it odd that after I removed the category as per WP:BLPCAT, the user Coffeepusher reinserted the category, despite Coffeepusher's own statement on the discussion page that "I completely agree that a category needs to have self identification as a criteria". ---- MLKLewis (talk) 20:05, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Under the current qualifications for that category Werner Erhard still qualifies.Coffeepusher (talk) 20:21, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Creation

Mr. Erhard made a recording (I have it on an old cassette) titled CREATION. Nowhere in his entry or on this talk page is that mentioned. I suggest that it be noted and reviewed. It's certainly part of what did actually did and it should be included.Copernikan (talk) 17:08, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

That would be WP:NOR violation. -- Cirt (talk) 15:19, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

We could create a new section for published works by Mr. Erhard and include the titles of his audio recordings and written works --MLKLewis (talk) 00:33, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Are those works notable? Have they received commentary from independent and reliable secondary sources? That can help us to gauge whether it would be undue weight here at this page to list all of it. -- Cirt (talk) 20:23, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
Yes, we could. – Cirt, you are not just mentioning, but citing and embedding a self-published YouTube video series in Aaron Saxton, which makes contentious statements about living people. I can't see any of the sources cited in that article refer to these YouTube videos. They have no coverage in Google News. By your above reasoning they are non-notable, too. Isn't that so? So, if you consider it good practice to cite and embed Saxton's self-published videos in his biography, even in the absence of RS coverage of them, and disregarding the fact that they make statements about third parties, why are you telling the above editor that it is not okay even to mention an Erhard video among the list of Erhard's works in his biography? If we go by your standards, the editor is not just entitled to mention the video, but to cite and embed it as well. Am I missing something? --JN466 21:32, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
Can we stay on topic here? It was suggested to list all "published works" by Erhard on this page. I asked if any of those received secondary source commentary. That is a valid question which has not been answered. -- Cirt (talk) 21:34, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
It is not a valid question if it is a question you yourself do not ask in the articles you create. --JN466 21:47, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
How many "published works" by Erhard shall we list on this page? 100? 1,000? Secondary source commentary helps to identify which should and should not be discussed. Using them as references in the article about the individual himself, per WP:SELFPUB, is an entirely different subject for discussion. -- Cirt (talk) 21:48, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
Have you looked at the article? We are not listing any works by Erhard right now. If he's produced some, we should list them. If they are online, we should add an external link to them. If it should turn out that there is a considerable bulk of them, and they end up overwhelming the page, then we should be selective. --JN466 22:00, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
I do not object to those proposals, but I am not sure that the above-mentioned work, would be one of those. -- Cirt (talk) 22:02, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Gandhi Humanitarian Award

Is this really relevant? As far as I can tell, no other award recipient's biography (Joan Baez, Bill Clinton, Shirley Temple Black, David Packard etc.) mentions the award, much less the fact that the award-giving foundation was brought down in a scandal 11 years later. --JN466 18:32, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

The "award" is relevant and noteworthy enough to be included on promotional material and websites pushed out by associated organizations affiliated with the individual's companies. -- Cirt (talk) 17:54, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
There are some RS mentions of it. However, mention of the award-giving organisation's fate more than a decade later is undue in his biography. The cited sources do not establish a connection between these events and Erhard. --JN466 02:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
If it is to be mentioned in this article, at all, it should be mentioned along with the controversy from the organization. Otherwise, the article is whitewashing history and making it appear like it was a legitimate award-giving institution devoid of controversy. If Wikipedia is going to be in the habit of whitewashing history, best to just remove mention of the "award" altogether, from the article. -- Cirt (talk) 14:45, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
As much as I rarely agree with Cirt, in this case, I concur. Seems like a good solution to the problem, and that WE and Landmark mention the award is not very relevant, as they do not set standards for the Wikipedia. Ratagonia (talk) 07:09, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
That was the solution I had originally in mind as well when I started this thread. --JN466 10:58, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
 Done, thanks. --JN466 11:01, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
No worries, -- Cirt (talk) 21:10, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Proposal for removal of NPOV tag.

I would like to try and resolve any NPOV disputes that people have with this article. I am proposing that the NPOV tag be removed. What do people have to say about this? I welcome any discussion. Russell Dent (talk) 06:14, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Please do not do so yet. A fair number of serious issues remain. At the head of that list, as far as I am concerned, is that 17 notes here use as a source the Bartley book, which would hardly qualify as a WP:RS given the fact that Erhard/Rosenberg himself wrote the intro and that critics have described it as a "promo." A fair number of other refs also come from projects initiated by or associated with Erhard, and their reliability/accuracy is also suspect.
I would add IMHO that the tone of much of the article is biased, either visibly pro- or anti-Erhard depending on section and source. I believe that much work needs to be done here before an appropriately neitral tone is established. Regards, Sensei48 (talk) 07:35, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I have no intention of removing the NPOV tag until any dispute has been resolved, I respect any opinions people may have. With regards to the references and citations throughout the article, I'm afraid my internet connection is rather patchy at times and I can't always access webpages with graphics, it can handle mainly text based sites just fine. I would like to try and write sections of the article in a more neutral tone while keeping the references/citations intact until someone else can provide a better one. Would this be acceptable? Russell Dent (talk) 07:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I think it is important to look at references used in any article when editing, as it is too easy to misstate the source without knowing what it says. However I disagree with the categorization of William Bartley's biography of Erhard as an unreliable source. Bartley was a reputable scholar and the author of several biographies including books about Karl Popper, Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein and more. Moreover, Bartley’s book is well sourced with 6 full pages of references to cite his research. I'd say that if we are going to look at references being overused, the ones that seem most overt are the 29 references to a short unsourced entry from the book Odd Gods. But what I find to be problematic and not neutral in this biography is repeating allegations that were recanted. I made an edit recently in the disputes section, and though I admit I may have been a bit too severe in my edit, this was my attempt to make the section more neutral. I do not see repeating recanted allegations as being appropriate in a biography of a living person.MLKLewis (talk) 22:47, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Mr. Lewis, it was I who reverted that last edit of yours, and I did not do so maliciously or with the intent of opposing a condensation. My point was only that the material removed was sourced, and your edit did, as you note reduce (in fact seriously reduce) discussion of the controversies that previous editors had deemed suitable to be included. The allegations and recantations are part of the historical record regarding Erhard; to condense them to the point that what was alleged and how the allegations were resolved begins to turn the article toward hagiography, which it veers toward seriously already at several points.
I applaud your effort to make the article genuinely neutral. Regarding the Bartley book - my source for questioning its reliability sprang from the discussion of the book itself in its Wikipedia article. Further, the fact that Erhard wrote the introduction for it casts serious doubt on its neutrality and reliability. Citing the film or other sources associated with Erhard is likewise suspect.
Erhard is clearly a controversial character, and finding sources that neither endorse nor condemn him is difficult. I did, however, check Mr. Dent's (above) work on some other figures of controversy, notably Herbert W. Armstrong since I have had a bit of familiarity with his life and career. One feature of that article that I liked was that at the end, it provided sources that were clearly pro- or anti-Armstrong and identified as such. Perhaps something similar could be introduced here. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 23:20, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
I did not think that you maliciously reverted my edit, and I certainly did not intend to be unsupportive of the previous editor's thoughtful work. However I do adhere to my point that the nature of allegations once recanted should not be republished because by doing so continued harm is done to a living person and that is just not right. I attempted to take all the points within the section and cover all aspects while making them very flat and neutral. I am willing to work with other editors to achieve neutrality.
As for the Bartley book, it is incorrect that Erhard wrote the introduction and I have corrected the wikipedia article on the book (which to me reads as quite a negatively biased article that is sorely in need of some neutral rewriting - It having been written almost exclusively by an editor with a reputation for bias against Erhard). Erhard did write a one page forward for the book, and I do not see how that would cast serious doubts about it's reliability and neutrality. I think that it is indicative of an accurately written biography to have a forward by the subject. Furthermore, Bartley is a scholar and his book has numerous footnotes and citations to provide support for his writing, unlike many other sources used in this article. --MLKLewis (talk) 19:50, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
No truly neutral or objective book-length treatment of any figure that I have ever seen has a forward from the subject of the book. "Accurately written biography"? The endorsement in a forward by W.E. makes it far more likely hagiography - and unlikely to provide a balanced or objective treatment. Bartley was by all accounts a disciple or follower of Erhard, and Erhard also describes Bartley as a friend - and that does in fact render the objectivity of the book suspect. Footnotes and citations are nice, but the nature of the works cited needs to be considered. But the personal relationship between the two men and Bartley's adherence to the corporate training eliminates the book as a genuine NPOV RS. The same would be true for books like this [1] whose opposite bias is just as clear - hence my comment above that really NPOV sources are very difficult to find. And a book written by a friend who was reportedly being paid by est at the time of the writing absolutely and completely removes any claim that the Bartley book could possibly have to objective reliability. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 23:35, 26 March 2011 (UTC)


Notice re Checkuser case

A checkuser case resulted in "confirm" on several users as sockpuppets of each other, that edited articles on closely related topics including Landmark Education, Werner Erhard, Landmark Education litigation, Scientology and Werner Erhard, Erhard Seminars Training, and Werner Erhard and Associates, among others. As a result, several of these users and sockpuppets of each other have been blocked. The checkuser case page is here: Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Eastbayway. Cirt (talk) 15:06, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Edit 4/30/11

The operative section in WP:BLP reads as follows:

In the case of public figures, there will be a multitude of reliable published sources, and BLPs should simply document what these sources say. If an allegation or incident is notable, relevant, and well-documented, it belongs in the article—even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it.

The sources remaining in the article detail the unpleasant allegations, and "made allegations" without specifying is worthless as information. The article on Kobe Bryant, for example, details the 2003 rape charges though they were dropped. Should this be left out of that article because, as the previous edit summary said, it is "harmful to repeat unproven allegations"? In the Duke lacrosse case, names of both the accuser and the players are included though the accusation was proven false. Should the article be deleted?

The wernererhard.com site, run by the group Friends of Werner Erhard, includes mention of the allegations here [2]. Though recanted and untrue, as the Wiki article demonstrates, the Erhard site itself makes mention of them. Sensei48 (talk) 00:16, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

"Has lectured at Harvard, Yale, USC" ?

In the lead paragraph, there is a sentence that notes that: "Erhard has lectured at Harvard,[7] Yale,[8] USC,[9] the University of Rochester[10] and Rotterdam School of Management"

You know, if you rented classroom space at one of these fine institutions over the summer to give a "free seminar", you can then claim to have "lectured" there in subsequent advertisements. I'm not sure this kind of rather dubious statement should fly on wikipedia, however.

Curiously, the citations given merely refer to the institutions themselves, and not to him having lectured there, so these footnotes are not probative.

Lacking any other information on this, I'm going to remove them shortly.--Petzl (talk) 17:30, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

While I agree that undue weight is created here and that mentioning the universities in the lede is a POV attempt to burnish Rosenberg's image - you are not correct about the citations, except for the one from USC, which is generic. If you follow each of the other hyperlinks, you will find that they do indeed take you to a page that clearly indicates that Erhard/Rosenberg lectured there. Sensei48 (talk) 18:55, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Section on the est Training

There is only one source being cited for this section. The examples given of what the est training entailed, including strict rules and name calling, sounds like simple abuse and seems to be biased, The example of the conclusion and message of the est training seems aimed at making the training experience sound trivial. We should find more sources to balance the writing in this section of the article.--RecoveringAddict (talk) 22:08, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm...I fail to see where. The opening quotation starting with "to transform" and describing est as "self-empowerment workshops" emphasizes the positive value of the program. Objectivity is not bias - both the rules and the name-calling were integral parts of the original [program, and they don't sound like abuse to me because the program was for adults who signed up for it with eyes open. If you feel a lack of balance, as you say, you could use sources to flesh out the purposes of the strict rules (the name stuff is covered in the article).The thing to do, of course, is to keep it balanced and not turn it in to advocacy. Sensei48 (talk) 22:48, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Werner is certainly NOT retired

For example ... He gave a major presentation in India in November of 2010. I am in touch with a good friend of his who assures me Werner is extremely active, productive, and is involved in much academic writing, along with Michael Jensen and others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.62.126.13 (talk) 05:22, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

NPOV removed

I've removed the NPOV tag on the article, please use {{POV-section}} for sections or {{POV-statement}} for a sentence, and clarify the issue(s) here. This will help address problems. - RoyBoy 19:09, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Updating Article

It seems to me that this article is not very current and up to date in regard to the work Erhard has done in recent years. It's a good suggestion to update the picture as suggested above, but I also think that adding some information about the work he is currently doing would be good too.--MLKLewis (talk) 00:10, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Portait updating

Anyone got an updated commons picture as seen here our pic clearly requires updating as it is from 35 years ago and he is seventy six years old now. Off2riorob (talk) 22:03, 4 November 2011 (UTC) Can you use this: http://wernererhardquotes.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/wernererhard20101.jpg ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.183.190.78 (talk) 06:35, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Weasel wording

Hi Sensei48. If you don't like the minor edit I did, I'd prefer that you discuss it here rather than high-handedly doing an instant revert. You say in your edit summary "The fact that the book was approved by Landmark is important, not weasel." Well, tht is your opinon and you are entitled to it. My opinion is that mentioning it in that context is clearly weasel wording, as it carries a clear implication that the book and its content is in some way compromised or suspect. If the content of the book is suspect, it should be possible to say so clearly and unambiguously, with appropriate citations.

I have two other concerns about bringing in the alleged "approval by Landmark Education". Firstly, the only source for that assertion is a throw-away line in the New York Review article "Pay Money, Be Happy", which is an entertaining op-ed piece with a generally flippant and disparaging tone, rather than a serious piece of factual reporting. Unless something more compelling in the way of a citation can be found, I suggest that is not enough to include in an encyclopedia treatment. Secondly, even if true that Landmark Education "approved" Jane Self's book, what does that mean? Does it mean that they previewed it and vetted the content, or does it just mean that they didn't object to it? The former meaning is clearly implied by mentioning it in the context, which is why I think the clause should be omitted unless there is more compelling support for the assertion and its implied slur. DaveApter (talk) 15:12, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Hello DavidA: First, you offered no defense for your assertion of "weasel" until AFTER I had reverted it. Second, my revert was no more "high-handed" than yours - above you say "My opinion is that mentioning it in that context is clearly weasel wording...." - nothing makes your opinion on this superior to mine, except that the material I reintroduced was sourced. The NYM piece is more correctly referred to as a feature article, not an op-ed, and it is published in a reputable and long-established journal. It is no less a WP:RS than many of the est/Landmark/Erhard-oriented publications cited in this article.
The larger issue is that Self's book is highly suspect as a RS. As you know, Self has taken Landmark courses and was and remains an advocate of the program, not an objective or academic analyst of it. The "approved by LM" establishes the suspect objectivity of the book, which was the point in the NYM article. That needs to be done in an encyclopedia article. If you prefer, Self's personal involvement with Landmark can be sourced form 3rd party publications and from her own pronouncements. In any event, whether the NYM article or another source is used, this section cannot reputably present Self or her work as disinterested. Her involvement with the program is a fact, not a slur. Sensei48 (talk) 17:00, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the prompt response. Firstly, I hadn't thought that the description of weasel-wording needed any justification as it genuinely seemed to me that the sentence was a clear instance of that. The whole passage had a clumsy and convoluted feel to it.
Secondly, I don't subscribe to the view that anyone who has done Landmark courses is automatically disqualified from being able to write truthfully and objectively about it and related issues. Her book strikes me as being fair and thoroughly researched and annotated with full citations of the sources of her claims (have you read it?).
Thirdly, yes - I would agree that the NYM piece should more correctly be described as a "feature article" than an "op-ed", but I think this is splitting hairs. My point is that it is not in any sense a news report. It is an article that is infused with the opinions and viewpoints of its author. It is an entertaining and mildly satirical description of the Landmark Forum written by someone who deliberately chose not to engage with the course for its intended purpose of empowering her to live life more fully.
Fourthly, the main point, is how to improve this article. I'd be happier if the entire two sentences relating to Self's book were removed completely, and we just leave the ones drawing on material from the Los Angeles Times, which is presumably an uncontroversial WP:RS? What do you think? DaveApter (talk) 18:40, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
I too would be happier without any reference to the Self book. The fact that her self-description includes an endorsement of Landmark and that adverts for the book included the comment that "After being maligned on "60 Minutes" in 1991, Werner Erhard told his version of events exclusively to Jane Self..." (italics mine, of course) prevents this book from being an acceptable RS. That engagement with the subject of the book does in fact render it unreliable as a source; the intent of the work is advocacy, not scholarship - not surprising since Self's academic background is in educational administration, not a relevant discipline like history, sociology, or psychology.
Your critique of the tone of the NYM article is well-taken, and I agree that that tone disqualifies it as a RS also. I would, however, take cautious exception to something you note above - that the author "deliberately chose not to engage with the course for its intended purpose of empowering her to live life more fully." In the context of a less flippant article, your point there would be a qualification, not the opposite - it would point to an objectivity, a disinterest, that an adherence to the principles of the program or accepting it on its own terms would prevent.
The parallel, and not I think an unflattering one, would be to an article on a major religion. What communicants believe about the religion should be included in the article, but as beliefs, not as objective facts. Academic objectivity does require a non-involvement with the subject on its own terms. Here, that might mean that the author of the NYM article should perhaps have taken a course or at least attended a seminar - but to investigate its nature, operation, and claims objectively, not to "engage" with it for its "intended purpose." Sensei48 (talk) 19:16, 24 February 2012 (UTC)
That's a good point, and I think there are some subtle matters to debate, maybe another time. I do think the Landmark Forum makes little sense from the viewpoint of someone who is determined to remain a "disinterested observer". The Amelia Hill article seems to me impressive, written as it is by someone who came with an agenda of doing an expose but who saw what there might be available.
Anyway, as regards improving this article, I'll take out those sentences and we'll see where to go from here. best. DaveApter (talk) 19:33, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

/* Disputes */ Restating harmful allegations unacceptable in a BLP

It is not appropriate to repeat allegations that are harmful to a person in a WP:BLP. The language in the disputes section is harmful to the subject of this article and I am replacing the injurious allegations with neutral language. Given that "Biographies of living persons ("BLP"s) must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy" and "The burden of evidence for any edit on Wikipedia rests with the person who adds or restores material," I ask that discussion take place here and editors come to consensus before anyone adds back the contentious material. Specifically I am referring to the sentence: "The program, which CBS later removed from their archives for factual inaccuracies, featured allegations, which were later retracted, of sexual abuse, incest, and physical abuse made by Erhard's daughters and associates." I have replaced this sentence with "The program featured serious allegations about Erhard which were later retracted." It is neutral in tone and it is sufficient to say that there were serious allegations without going into the details. Restating the nature of untrue allegations serves only to do further harm to the subject of the article.

Furthermore the citations being used to support their inclusion are not good sources. They are two newspaper articles published two days after the original (and withdrawn) 60 minutes piece aired. Given that that piece was removed by CBS "for factual inaccuracies" it is obvious that the two newspaper articles being cited here were based on factual inaccuracies themselves. The BLP policy states that "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced — whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable — should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." A source that removed its own material for factual inaccuracies is not a good source and the pieces that used that false material are clearly poor sources as well. Without a reliable source themselves, the two newspaper pieces amount to nothing more than tabloid journalism which is not good sourcing for any Wikipedia article, and especially not a BLP. The only citations for these allegations are these two questionable sources and BLP policy clearly states that "If you cannot find multiple reliable third-party sources documenting the allegation or incident, leave it out. For these reasons I am removing the contentious material and request that it not be added back in. Thank you --MLKLewis (talk) 01:00, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

This is absolutely unacceptable behavior. You have chosen to remove sourced material simply because you do not like what it says, and your attempt to justify it with your misinterpretation of the BLP dictum twists the meaning of the dictum, as my prior comment linked below indicates. I am reverting back to what the original and long-term stable article reported with sources.
You have chosen to ignore previous discussions on the matter. In archive 3 above, I provided a link to Erhard's own website in which he himself posts the Time Magazine article which refers to the allegations of incest, using that word. Again with emphasis - Erhard's own site includes the historically factual false accusation. You cannot maintain that information posted by Erhard himself on his own site is injurious if it is included in the Wikipedia article.
Here is my response, unanswered by you, to a previous rv: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Werner_Erhard/Archive_3#Edit_4.2F30.2F11
Included within is the link to the article on Erhard's site, which I will add as a 3rd source. It is logically impossible to justify the removal of information in this article that Erhard's own site posts publicly.
I am reverting to the long-term stable version of the article. The proper course of action at this point is an appeal to an administrator for arbitration, not unilateral reversion.Sensei48 (talk) 18:38, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I removed material that was poorly sourced and causes harm to the person this article is about, which is completely within the parameters of WP:BLP (I did not intend, btw, to remove the Believer reference, that was an error in my editing, I appreciate you adding that back in.) I did not misinterpret the Biographies of Living Persons Policy. I simply copied and pasted what was there. It says exactly this: "Biographies of living persons ("BLP"s) must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy." Your argument that because the Time article is on the friends of Werner Erhard site then Erhard must approve of the allegations being repeated is a gross misinterpretation and a completely illogical argument. Aside from the fact that that it has no bearing on Wikipedia, as websites are not good RS, you should also note that it is a site by the "friends" of Erhard, not Erhard's own site. But even if it were his and even if websites were good RS the Time Magazine article that is posted there (which is in fact already used in this article as a reference) says is that the allegations were false. There are no good sources that support the scurrilous language of the allegations being included. What sources are used here are based on a known falsehood and amount to nothing more than tabloid journalism. That there were allegations is indeed part of the historical record and should be in the article, however the nature of those false allegations should not be included and allowed to continue harming the subject of this BLP. My point was and remains that restating the nature of the false allegations does further harm to a living person and should not be allowed. He was already injured by the original false allegations and should not be further harmed by those false allegations being restated. BLP clearly says that "The burden of evidence for any edit on Wikipedia rests with the person who adds or restores material". You have not provided any evidence for restoring the wording you want to include. And I strongly disagree with your justification for keeping harmful language in a BLP. Other editors opinion in the matter would be welcome.--MLKLewis (talk) 22:34, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree that some adjudication would be appropriate, but since the only active participants in this discussion appear to be you, me, and David Apter, the best course is probably to submit the dispute to arbitration with an objective administrator. Prior to that, however -
1) Of course websites can be RS on Wikipedia - the criterion is the quality of the website itself, just as that would be the criterion for a book or any or any other sources.
2) The Friends of Werner Erhard.com is a site that uses Erhard's name, which is his intellectual property and which could not be used on a website without his permission, tacit or active.
3) Your proposed substitution of "serious allegations" is utterly useless as information and betrays a profound bias on your part, which is why such edits have been referred to as an attempt to whitewash. Further - you say above that "that there were allegations is indeed part of the historical record and should be in the article, however the nature of those false allegations should not be included and allowed to continue harming the subject of this BLP" and "There are no good sources that support the scurrilous language of the allegations being included" because from your POV daily newspapers and a national newsmagazine are not RS when they state something of which you do not approve. Let this be absolutely clear: Time Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer are old and respected publications in the U.S. and are absolutely valid as RS. That point and your attempt to pre-empt the edit restoration point to a serious bias on your point: you would suppress information that is a matter of public record because your intent appears to be to defend Erhard, not create a good article about him. Your sentence above - "He was already injured by the original false allegations and should not be further harmed by those false allegations being restated" is a clear indication of bias and does not reflect any objectivity whatsoever as to the subject of the article.
4) Most importantly, you have failed to respond to the two similar cases I have cited above, the Kobe Bryant rape accusation and the Duke lacrosse team incident. In both instances, damaging allegations of rape were made against living persons who were public figures. These were widely and extensively covered in the media. The allegations were both dropped or disproved. In the case of Bryant, the fact of the charges and incident remains in the Wikipedia article about him because of the fact that it happened. In the Duke case, the charges were dropped and proven to be completely untrue - yet we have a complete and thorough Wikipedia article on the incident - and all of the principals involved are living persons.
Here again is the previous edit from archive 3. You need to explain why Erhard's article should be exempt from the kind of specificity of the Bryant article especially.

":::== Edit 4/30/11 ==

The operative section in WP:BLP reads as follows:
In the case of public figures, there will be a multitude of reliable published sources, and BLPs should simply document what these sources say. If an allegation or incident is notable, relevant, and well-documented, it belongs in the article—even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it.
The sources remaining in the article detail the unpleasant allegations, and "made allegations" without specifying is worthless as information. The article on Kobe Bryant, for example, details the 2003 rape charges though they were dropped. Should this be left out of that article because, as the previous edit summary said, it is "harmful to repeat unproven allegations"? In the Duke lacrosse case, names of both the accuser and the players are included though the accusation was proven false. Should the article be deleted?
The wernererhard.com site, run by the group Friends of Werner Erhard, includes mention of the allegations here [3]. Though recanted and untrue, as the Wiki article demonstrates, the Erhard site itself makes mention of them."

Sensei48 (talk) 04:15, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Sensei48, though I loathe the calculated, vomit-inducing attack on Mr. Erhardt. However - "You have chosen to remove sourced material simply because you do not like what it says, and your attempt to justify it with your misinterpretation of the BLP dictum twists the meaning of the dictum, as my prior comment linked below indicates." (Sensei48) is a nasty personal attack on my fellow Wikipedian MLKLewis's wiki-integrity, and is unacceptable. You owe Lewis an apology for that, Sensei. Please. Ratagonia (talk) 19:28, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
I must disagree with your assessment. The sentence you quote here is a comment on the edit, not a personal attack on MLK, with whom I have had a lively conversation going for some time. MLK wrote above, "Your argument that because the Time article is on the friends of Werner Erhard site then Erhard must approve of the allegations being repeated is a gross misinterpretation and a completely illogical argument" - and I take no umbrage at that whatsoever because MLK is making a vigorous comment on my position. In the interests of consistency at the very least, you ought to be upbraiding MLK for a personal attack on another fellow Wikipedian. However, no comment at all about an ongoing, lively and civil discussion between MLK and myself would be the best option. I will, however, be happy to apologize to him should he feel it necessary - and providing he likewise apologizes to me. You might consider doing the same to both of us.Sensei48 (talk) 02:04, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
Now I will insult you, Sensei. You said "simply because you do not like what it says, and your attempt to justify it with your misinterpretation of the BLP dictum twists the meaning of the dictum," which is a personal attack, not a discussion of the issues. Perhaps you should look at what the words SAY, rather than defending your position with false claims. As a wikipedian, I take the opportunity to chastise whom I choose - I make no claim as to chastising all over-steps from all players. Ratagonia (talk) 16:49, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

And that last sentence is precisely what makes your whole interpolation here unworthy of attention and unworthy of the code of civility on Wikipedia. Your sense of what constitutes a "personal attack" indicates either an unwillingness or inability to understand the nature of the comment and the discussion overall. I suggest further that an impartial reader of the exchange above would find only you guilty of incivility - which is best dealt with by ignoring it, which I will henceforth do.Sensei48 (talk) 06:03, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Further comments on allegations in the 'Disputes' section

Firstly, I agree with Sensei48 that it would be good to submit the issue to arbitration by an independent administrator; I feel that all of us who edit on these topics (myself included) may have difficulty in distancing ourselves from our own viewpoints.

Personally I find it distastful that unsubstantiated (but not unambiguously disproven) allegations of serious illegal and morally obnoxious behaviour should be repeated ad nauseam. I'm more inclined to follow MLKLewis' interpretations of BLP policy on this than Sensei's. It also seems to me that the whole of the 'Disputes' section is convoluted and so riddled with claims and counter-claims that the reader is left confused about what has been asserted and how much substance there is behind the accusations. I have the impression that much of it is the work of editors who wish to disparage Erhard, and who follow the principle that if enough muck is thrown some of it will stick.

I feel that there is a substantial difference with both the Duke University and Kobe Bryant cases. In both of those, the accusations were the subject of court proceedings which resulted in a conclusion of sorts, whereas here we are dealing with hearsay and gossip.

The reference on the 'friends of Werner Erhard' website is a verbatim re-print of the Time article and the relevant passage reads: Then, after two decades and two divorces, the self-help messiah vanished amid reports of tax fraud (which proved false and won him $200,000 from the IRS) and allegations of incest (which were later recanted). If we must refer to these matters at all, I would suggest that the entire section could be replaced by something as succinct as that.DaveApter (talk) 15:29, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

OK, but but the point here is not the unpleasantness of the allegations but rather the fact that they were made, there were publicized in RS, they were (contrary to your differentiation of them from Bryant and Duke, David) advanced to court action with a substantial filed lawsuit, and then disposed of without trial (in which there is a strong resemblance to both Bryant and Duke).
While perhaps some former editors here wanted to besmirch Erhard and that must be rectified, the answer is not to avoid major matters of public record in an effort to sanitize the information in the article. Erhard was and remains being a controversial character, widely derided and disrespected in the main stream media and public perception. There is not nearly enough of this in the article, and the tenor and tone of "Impact" must be re-edited to reflect this, following its gutting to slant it toward WE.
Having so said, though, I agree with you and reiterate that neutral arbitration is probably the best course. Replacing some of the matter pertaining to the lawsuits with a blockquote from Time might help.Sensei48 (talk) 17:45, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Sensei, and thanks for your ongoing contributions to the debate. Firstly, I'd like to make it clear that I dispute the charaterisations of my suggestions as "an effort to sanitize the information in the article". The issue as I see it is the question of whether it does or does not meet the Wikipedia BLP guidelines to extend the currency of scurrulous accusations made over 20 years ago in what appears to have been an orchestrated attempt to undermine his reputation and his credibility. You are entirely correct in stating that it is a fact, and reported in mainstream media, that the accusations were made and retracted. The difficulty is that simply reporting that leaves a degree of doubt in the reader's mind as to whether this is a case of "no smoke without fire". Time magazine et al are doubtless reliable sources for the fact that the 60 Minutes program aired these accusations, but it appears that the program itself was not an adequately reliable source by Wikipedia BLP standards for the substance of the accusations.

Nor would I wish to obscure the undoubted fact that - as you put it - "Erhard was and remains being a controversial character, widely derided and disrespected in the main stream media and public perception". This is not surprising but tells us little about the man himself or the merits of his work. Public perception largely follows what the mainstream media tells it, and the media fulfil a function which is substantially to entertain, to titilate, to perpetuate the status quo, and to avoid challenging the prejudices of its readers and viewers.

My suggestion is that we proceed in collaboration as we did successfully on the Werner Erhard (book) article - by proposing and discussing a revised content for the Disputes section here on the Talk page. If we cannot reach a consensus, then it would be useful to refer it to Arbitration.DaveApter (talk) 10:55, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I continue to think that repeating false allegations when the reporting organization does not stand by their reporting is harmful in a BLP. But I'm also interested in working together and coming to consensus to improve this article. In regards to the cases you mention Sensei, there are some clear differences. There were no charges filed against Erhard, only allegations that were later retracted made on a tv program that was later withdrawn. It seems pretty clear to me that when a news organization does not stand by the factual accuracy of their own reporting the matter should be treated with exceptional care in any BLP. Otherwise we are really only talking about hearsay and gossip. But I also get your point Sensei that the phrase 'serious allegations' may not be sufficient here. In reaching agreement perhaps DaveApter's suggestion that we use the phrasing of the Time magazine reference might be the way to go. So I propose replacing the first sentence with this - On March 3, 1991, CBS News broadcast an episode of the program 60 Minutes titled "Werner Erhard"[40][41] featuring allegations of incest made by Erhard’s daughters (later retracted)[44], which allegations CBS determined to be false and removed the program from the CBS archives due to factual inaccuracies.[42] --MLKLewis (talk) 02:23, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
Hello MLK and David: I'm happy to be conversing with both of you on these points again, and I'm sorry that some time has elapsed since David's comments above. MLK, you and I understand that we have very different ideas about this, and I also think David's idea is a good one. I still like the idea of a block quote for about the last two sentences from Time - and that could be followed by an additional sentence based on MLK's above, starting with "allegations" so as to clarify and emphasize the untruth of the incident and the extent to which CBS nullified its original show. How does that sound? BTW - my other comment about perception that David responds to is really an entirely different point that I should have made elsewhere - it can wait until we settle this one. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 03:17, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to both for the continued constructive suggestions and civil tone. I'm broadly in agreement with the direction these suggestions are going in.

Regarding the other point - the one about the general public perception of Erhard, I agree that this is a separate topic of debate and one that we should deal with after reaching consensus on the more thorny 'Disputes' issues. What I will say at this point is that I'm a bit surprised at your characterisation of the 'Impact' section as having been "...gutt[ed] to slant it toward WE." I'm open to suggestions, but my reading of it is that it presents a concise and balanced neutrally phrased summary of the attitudes that were expressed both for and against the validity of Erhard's ideas. I put this forward as food for thought for the time when we discuss it in more detail. DaveApter (talk) 22:38, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Here is my proposal based on comments above to replace the first two sentences of the Disputes section:

In 1991, Werner Erhard “… vanished amid reports of tax fraud (which proved false and won him $200,000 from the IRS) and allegations of incest (which were later recanted).” [ref to Time] The March 3 1991 60 Minutes broadcast of these allegations was later removed by CBS due to factual inaccuracies.--MLKLewis (talk) 20:30, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

IMPACT section edit removal

I added the study by Rabow because this paragraph needed more balance of objective, positive reactions to Erhard's work. As it is now written, the paragraph states that "The validity of Erhard's work and his motivations have been met with mixed reviews." Then it goes on to give examples of those reactions. Six out of seven of these reactions are at best skeptical, and mostly highly critical. I agree with you that this paragraph needs "re-phrasing towards actual balance." Citing the Rabow study is a valid addition here. --RecoveringAddict (talk) 00:33, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi RA: Perhaps you misunderstood my removal and the nature of the section as it existed. In the stable edit, the first paragraph was designed - through a process of collaborative editing - to establish the positive reactions to Erhard's work. The second paragraph was designed to counter-balance that by presenting the predominantly negative responses to WE's enterprises in academic circles and mainstream media. The primary necessary edit is to restore the original sentence in this second paragraph about withering criticism, which is a statement of fact and which has already and unacceptably been watered down to "mixed reviews." The overwhelming reaction outside of the est community itself has been negative to the point of derisive, and that is the perspective necessary to be represented in the article. Your recent edits are not establishing balance; rather, they are upsetting the balance which originally existed in this section and must be restored - which will also involve a rewrite of the first paragraph. The article is now far from objective and appears to be approaching a whitewash of this very controversial and by no means widely respected personage. Sensei48 (talk) 10:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Further and pursuant to the above: "objective" and "positive" are not at all the same things. The article that existed here two years ago was IMO rightly criticized as aggressively negative toward WE. But the solution is not to make aggressively positive an article about a personage who is controversial at best and widely regarded as a charlatan at worst, especially outside of the relatively narrow confines of the population cohort who subscribe to his programs. Balance and neutrality require that both sides of the question be adequately represented, and much of the article now slants toward a non-objectively positive presentation. Much more needs to be done here to balance this toward objectivity...much, much more in every section. What was unacceptably too critical before is now unacceptably and non-objectively too positive. Sensei48 (talk) 11:08, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
I would respectfully disagree with the opinion expressed by Sensei48 that the article as it stands is "agressively positive" towards Erhard. I have just re-read it after a gap of several months since I last looked at it, and it appears to me to be essentially fair, well written, and balanced. The majority of the article deals accurately with factual matters. It rightly covers the fact that opinions regarding the man and his work are highly polarised and gives what seem to me to be an appropriate, balanced summary of the views from commentators at both ends of the spectrum. I am slightly at a loss to understand why Sensei seems to take it for granted that the views of those in "the relatively narrow confines of the population cohort who subscribe to his programs" should be discounted. The people who had taken his training courses are surely the ones who are in the best position to evaluate their merits? Although Erhard's critics in the media made a great deal of noise and no doubt had a signifcant influence on public perception of him, their numbers are minuscule in relation to numbers who participated in his programs (now numbering well over two million, including derivative products) - the overwhleming majority of whom expressed a high level of satisfaction.
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Erhard is "a personage who is controversial at best and widely regarded as a charlatan at worst", it seems to me that this opinion is held by only a tiny proportion of the individuals who were actually acquainted with him or with his work. The assertions to that effect come principally from commentators who were either happy to base their pronouncements on gossip, speculation and hearsay, or who had a deliberate agenda to defame him. The article gives due mention of these views, but I cannot agree that any greater emphasis would be appropriate. DaveApter (talk) 09:44, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Fix sentence fragment, or delete?

Mention of Valerie Harper, a notable person (not sure if notable for her participation in est, but may be) is a sentence frag at end of Impact section. Delete, reword, or attach to previous sentence? Oh, wait, citation may be needed?71.175.164.18 (talk) 11:34, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I am deleting it and the paragraph immediately above, which crept back in somehow, to the more stable edit that created a balanced pro/con assessment of WE. As above in the extended discussions on impact, there is a strong element of controversy about Erhard that has been all but removed from the article, and the previous careful edit (including "skepticism," which is mild and kindly compared to some of the vitriol out there). Further additions to this section must be balanced; each endorsement should be balanced by a criticism to maintain a balance to that section which was arrived at painstakingly.Sensei48 (talk) 17:31, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Hitler's Last Weapon

User:Thomas Ptarmigan has edited the article to say that rather than Erhard intentional adopting the name "Werner" after Werner Heisenberg, it may also have been a deliberate reference to Werner von Braun. The edit cites Jerry Rubin's biography and states that this explanation "was bantered as Hitler's Last Weapon by his despotic way of the seminar".

If this just means "Jerry Rubin once joked that judging by the nature of Erhard's seminars, perhaps he took his name from a Nazi war criminal!", we should not be presenting it as "Erhard chose his new name either from Heisenberg or von Braun". --McGeddon (talk) 12:52, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I am sorry that I could not reply to you sooner. I think that there are two points of argument.
1) Why did he declare himself Werner Erhard? From when did he give the name?
Did he abandon the first wife and four children and bear his assumed name like illegal immigration? Do you remember the name of the present German economy minister?
2) "Werner Heisenberg" or "Werner von Braun"?
I have the book written by Jerry Rubin. If you can borrow at a library etc., a description part of Warner von Braun will be caught in easily. This is a generation gap. Our generation thinks that it is Werner von Braun, and the talk of Hitler's Last Weapon was also famous.
The restoration of the contribution entrusts you. Yours sincerely. --User:Thomas Ptarmigan 14 December 2013‎ —Preceding undated comment added 11:07, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to say. Perhaps you could quote the text of the Rubin book for us so that an English speaker could judge its context? --McGeddon (talk) 11:10, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
<Notes> Jerry Rubin “Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven”(1976) ISBN 9780871311894 --User:Thomas Ptarmigan 14 December 2013 —Preceding undated comment added 11:40, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
I meant that you should quote the part of the book where Rubin says whatever he says about von Braun. --McGeddon (talk) 10:36, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Editing & Revising est Section

Today's edit to the est section replaces a stable, long-term text with a completely different one. In the process of so doing, all references to Kay Holzinger's article have been removed and replaced by references from Erhard himself. If the tone of the long-term edit is perceived as too dependent on a single source, fine - let's collaborate to improve the section. However, the net effect is to remove descriptions that were third-party and occasionally critical and replace them with the subject of the article essentially making an argument for the program itself. A careful, deliberate re-edit may be in order, but not one that again has the effect of promoting the subject and muting descriptions that are critical. At the very least, an analytical source objective in nature needs to be employed here. Sensei48 (talk) 05:54, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion, Sensei48. I found another reliable source, the Chicago Sun Times that gives a description of the est training that is factual. I removed "estholes" because it was not in Kay Holzinger's article. --RecoveringAddict (talk) 19:30, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

And a very good edit I think it is, RA. That line always bothered me and seemed to me to be gratuitous. I'm sorry that I haven't gotten back to this due to real world issues. But I do think we can collaborate to create a much better section on est than is currently there, one carefully balanced and sourced. Much of the original article was created by an editor or two who really wanted to do a hatchet job and not an article. I think that the phrasing in this section needs to be carefully dispassionate, and somehow we need to get both the positive responses to the program and the critiques of it into the section without unbalancing it. I'd like to see the basic framework of the current text remain - a sort of point by point dispassionate statement of the elements of est - and then if it seems appropriate - to add some compound sentences (with sources) that could be of the tenor like "The program's long sessions were designed to create a positive mindset through immersion (source), though some participants and critics found this approach to equate to thought control."(source) I don't mean this edit literally; rather it's just symbolic of what could be there. I also think that some of the est processes needs expanded explanation. Both the "danger process" and the conclusions reached on the fourth day need better explanation in terms of what the program wanted to accomplish, IMO. It's all a bit too abbreviated and blunt as it is. I really believe we can enhance the article while avoiding any kind of slant. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 21:26, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Lead Paragraph

User Zambelo's recent edit to the lead paragraph and reason for adding the catagory "Organizer of a new religion" to the Werner Erhard article is flawed. First, Erhard was not a founder of a new religion, second, the references user Zambelo uses to back that up are not stating that as a fact, but merely that someone, at some time considered this, but it was never concluded as a fact. Since it is an erroneous statement and not a fact, it does not belong in the article and certainly not in the lead paragraph of a BLP. Using conjecture and opinion rather than factual information is not suitable for an entry into an encyclopedia. --RecoveringAddict (talk) 21:22, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Ok, so it should be attributed to the authors who state it? The fact is, it has been studied as a New Religious Movement, and multiple sources describe it as such. To omit this from the article would be to omit cardinal studies of the movement. Zambelo; talk 22:18, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for contributing your ideas. However, we must be very careful and rigorous about what we put into a BLP. I went to look at the references you cited and in looking at the first one ("Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society," by Clarke) "among the movements referred to as NRMs one might also include...est (Erhard Seminars Training)." The use of the word "might" is hardly a statement of fact. This is not about a study that has come to this conclusion and it certainly does not constitute establishing a fact about est actually being an NRM.--RecoveringAddict (talk) 23:14, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Academic Sources

Can anyone find anything ever published by Erhard and solely written by him, in a peer reviewed academic journal. I can't find any anywhere. If I can't find them they don't exist but quite happy to be proven wrong.Cathar66 (talk) 01:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Your question is a good one. In the area of Management Studies - in the Social Sciences at large - almost everything is possible, including a favourable peer review of outright drivel (see the Sokal affair). Erhard is not an academic at all - he is a clever autodidact who never finished more than high school, who happens to be the founding father of est, who has the ability to charm and to impress those who are rich or famous or anyhow distinguished. The late Walter Kaufmann, a writer and Princeton professor, who was befriended with William Warren Bartley III and who was an "est-graduate" himself, wrote in the third volume of his trilogy Discovering the mind: Freud, Adler, and Jung (1980/1992), p. 472: "Many people, including myself, have gained insight into themselves and others as a result of the est "training"; yet Werner Erhard , who designed it, is no theorist or writer at all." Theobald Tiger (talk) 08:57, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

There seems to be debate as to whether Werner Erhard is, or can be considered to be a "critical thinker." Those who object to that attribution, point out Erhard's lack of formal, academic training. This point of view stems from the assumption that education obtained in the academic world is the only way to train "critical thinkers" who may impact the greater society. Having gone through my own experience of higher education, both as a student and as a teacher, I have both benefited from and been stifled by it. My studies in university gave me access to that which is already known and accepted, but not necessarily how to think "out of the box." Throughout the ages there have been individuals who incur censure and ridicule, even threats to their lives by solid members of the powers that be, brought upon them because of their ground-breaking, new ideas. Members of Academia fiercely attack anyone with ideas that threaten their already established "truths." Academics are often guardians of the status quo. History has shown that these authorities and critics eventually lose their power to shape public knowledge, as the validity of the new ideas emerge and replace the formerly held belief system. Galileo retracted his assertion of his findings to avoid the severe punishment threatened by the Church to him, if he did not. But nonetheless we now all accept that the World is round, Outside of Academia, Erhard followed his own course of study, no less rigorous simply because it was a course he created for himself. His sources would not have been available to him if he had followed the beaten path into a university. I assert that the there is a bias and an opinion underlying the criticism of Erhard and a rejection of him as a "critical thinker" on the basis that he was not a member of the club that one can only get into by earning degrees of higher education. This is not historically true. It is a phenomenon of our present culture and methodology of forming societal conformity. It is possible for people outside that system to find their own, unique path to learning that creates break-through thinking. Erhard's background as a salesman enabled him to put his ideas into a form that could be put on the market and shared widely. That's no sin, yet his critics use it as a slur. However, the vast majority of people who actually experienced est have very positive reports as to the value of the experience they had and its effect on their thinking, based on past conditioning, which limited their freedom to choose. Someone who uses ideas and puts them together in a form or system that enables others to become aware of and question their own thinking patterns, is by definition a "critical thinker." I don't know what a critical thinker would be, if not that. RecoveringAddict (talk) 02:18, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

@RecoveringAddict, Thank you for your profound exposé on the precious concerns of true originality and the value of informal intellectual education. Though I acknowledge and appreciate your considerations, I do not agree with the conceivable inference that Erhard could (or even should) be called a 'critical thinker'. Lack of formal academic training is not the main argument to deny him this status. Could you provide a reliable source - not a selfpublished book by a woolly writer as Paul Veliyathil (see the discussion under Hagiography) and not the miserable newspaper interview with Leonard Susskind - that supports the claim that Erhard should first and foremost be called a 'critical thinker'? Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:38, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Recent Removal of Referenced Material and Introduction of POV

The recent spate of edits and removal of well sourced and valid material is being done without consensus and looks to be an attempt to paint in negative light the subject of this article. Specifically some of these are:

1) Calling est "pseudo-psychotherapeutical self-help seminar trainings" is inaccurate and unsourced. It is also a very maligning statement that vastly misrepresents the work that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have taken part in. What was in the article previously didn't even capture the full scope of the impact Erhard's work has had on a huge number of people's lives, but it was neutrally and factually worded. Throwing words around like pseudo-psychotherapeutical self-help doen't give an accurate picture of what est actually was and it diminishes and does nothing to illustrate the effect that Erhard's work has had on people's lives and the culture at large. It instead sounds like manipulative wording that speaks of the POV of the editor who inserted it. (I don't know if it is Theobald Tiger who added it or Cathar66)
2) An earlier entry stated that Erhard is known for his academic work and that his writings can be found at Social Science Research Network which is a very reputable academic publishing company. The new entry became "Since 1991 Erhard, whilst not abroad, has devoted his time to giving presentations in ausiness environments." For one - What does "whilst not abroad" mean or what is it even meant to convey? doesn't make sense. (no comment on the misspellings, benefit of the doubt that what was meant was business) But this was changed from the statement of fact that he has indeed been doing work in academic circles. There are several instances of his and Jensen's recent work over the last 10 years or so being offered in places such as Rochester University, Yale, and in Harvard's Working Paper series for example. Secondly, Erhard has in fact made presentations in academic institutions throughout his career which a look at his CV details.
3) The previous, and more neutral, version regarding the Hunger project stated "Erhard, along with John Denver, Robert W. Fuller, and others, founded The Hunger Project in 1977." This is accurate and factual and neutral. This being changed to "Erhard founded The Hunger Project in 1977, which intended, but failed, to eliminate global hunger within twenty years" is a misstatement about what the Hunger Project was about. We should actually be saying something more along the lines of "The Hunger Project was founded by Erhard along with John Denver, Robert W. Fuller, and others in 1977 to generate global awareness about chronic persistent hunger and to build a consensus to bring about its end."
4) An entire section of the article was deleted without discussion on consensus. Deleting an entire section of well sourced material documenting Erhard's current work and the lectures throughout his career is completely inappropriate. These were well referenced activities that are relevant examples of the work he has done throughout his career and they most certainly belong in this article.
5) Erhard actually was the sole author of a chapter in the Hayek book and the desire on the editors part to change this without them doing any investigation into the facts is a pretty clear reflection of their intent to bring a biased POV into this article. MLKLewis (talk) 19:06, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
First: On this very talk page I had criticized the lead before I did my edits. No reaction came. Thus far, you have failed to address my criticism.
Second: not only the lead, but the article as a whole is POV, not neutral, unbalanced all the way through.
Third: It has not been my intention to paint the subject in horrifying colours, and it never will be. Every notable subject, as Erhard ondoubtedly is, deserves a balanced, neutral and readable encyclopedic portrayal. Both Erhard's achievements - which are real - and his shortcomings (if relevant for his notability) - which are obvious - should have a place in the article.
Fourth: to call Erhard a "critical thinker" is definitely not the impression you get when reading scholarly literature about his life and work. To assert otherwise is either cherry-picking or sheer ignorance - you may choose: the gallows or the stake. Of course there are hagiography's out there, and publications trying to debunk or demonize him, a mer à boire for POV-pushers on both sides. But to make it the first statement of the opening sentence is outright misleading. Even those who admire him, or at least hold him in high regard for his achievements, have serious doubts on this point. It is also not at all difficult to produce fifty footnotes referring to reliable sources, published by reputable publishers, that make plausible Erhard is considered an avaricious megalomaniac, a ruthless egotist, an authoritarian Sun King, an incoherent compiler of a hotchpotch philosophy, a snoring old bore, an intellectual fraud. I am not at all in favour to putting this sort of thing in the article, but the article as it is now is unbalanced, and totally so. His post-1991 lecturing and modelling should have a place in the article, but not in extenso in the lead (including a record of all the academic institutions where he has ever addressed an audience).
  • Ad 1. I am fully prepared to reconsider the definition, to think about improvements, but I do not think my text is particularly inaccurate. est is, as everyone who is vaguely familiar with the subject knows, frequently called a 'therapy', a 'psychotherapy' or 'psychotherapeutical'. It is with like frequency called not a therapy proper, hence 'pseudo-psychotherapeutical'. The expressions 'self-help' and 'seminars training' are not controversial at all. I have deliberately left out the religious aspects of est, although it is frequently mentioned in scholarly literature, because I know it would have caused hysteria all over the place. To name a few sources for the 'pseudo-psychotherapeutical'-statement:
  • Ad 2. I wrote: "Since 1991 Erhard has devoted his time to give lectures in academia and business environments, and to develop new models for being succesful in business as well as new paradigms for enterprises." Still, this seems to me a correct summary of Erhard's post-1991-activities.
  • Ad 3. Erhard's pretensions went actually a lot further than "to create awareness". Erhard considered "ending world hunger by 1997" an idea whose time had come. See: Suzanne Gordon, Let Them Eat Est, Mother Jones, December 1978. The Hunger Project is also a marketing vehicle for Erhard's businesses (as so many 'charities' are).
  • Ad 4. Nonsense.
  • Ad 5. Nonsense.
Theobald Tiger (talk) 11:33, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Since no reaction came, I have restored my previous edits. I have made some minor improvements. Theobald Tiger (talk) 10:34, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
There were comments made since you wrote this, please look in above sections.MLKLewis (talk) 22:11, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
Hello MLKL - I am looking at the dates of the comments above. I believe that Theobald is referring to his extensive and point-by-point ideas in the Feb 9 comment immediately above yours. Theobald has presented an array of RS for his "pseudo-psychotherapeutical" description and has raised other points as well. I would like to see your responses to them. As evidenced by our discussions above, I too have been troubled by the tone, sourcing, and slant of the overall article and have been working both on an expansion of the Criticisms section and rewrites of each of the other sections to bring the article closer to genuine neutrality. The extent of sourcing from writers like Bartley who are friends or boosters or from sites associated with WE and his projects remain problematic. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 23:01, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
In the meantime I have written two replies to the comments in the above sections. I wholeheartedly agree with the comment of Sensei48. Theobald Tiger (talk) 12:41, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Since no reaction came, I have restored my previous edits. Theobald Tiger (talk) 18:23, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Removing perfectly appropriate and valid references from this article that detail Erhard's current work is not an improvement nor is there any Wikipedia policy that supports the removal of validly sourced and neutral content. MLKLewis (talk) 20:53, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
Not answering, not arguing, but just edit-warring. Theobald Tiger (talk) 22:03, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

On 27 February I did a small edit to the 'Current Work' section on Mr. Erhard's Wikipedia page. I added that Erhard had in 1993 worked with "some members of the newly formed Russian parliament." As a reference for this I cited an interview with Mr. Erhard that was published in The Financial Times in April, 2012. I think this is a legitimate edit to the page, and adds value to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. Nevertheless few days later Theobald Tiger deleted my contribution and didn't even mention he had done so, or explain why. Is this appropriate? And few days ago it was the second time Theobald Tiger removed this same edit. Is it ok to delete other editors contributions without giving somekind of justification for it? Was anything wrong with my edit? Typewolf (talk) 10:23, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

@Typewolf, As far as I am aware, your edits have already been restored to the full (by me) before you made your comment. So I do not know why you are complaining in any case, and what exactly you are complaining about. From an encyclopedic viewpoint, your edits seem to me doubtful, but, so far, I have not expressed my doubts. My objective was (and is) to contribute to a neutral and balanced article and therefore to oppose what I consider the POV editing of MLKLewis. Theobald Tiger (talk) 11:28, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Should be a reference to Semi Tough

The BEAT training and Freidrich Bismark. The semi tough entry references est. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.179.146 (talk) 03:37, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

POV-template

As I have argued before, this article is POV to its core. I sum up what in my view is wrong with the article as an addition to what I have said before:

  • The first statement of the intro is misleading and not backed by reliable sources.
  • The article provides the image Erhard would like to present of himself, but it is not the image you get when studying the subject.
  • Nearly all the controversial subjects: tax difficulties, elements of the biography that are considered by the subject to be unfavourable (lack of formal education, bigamy, financial greed, relationship with Landmark Education, juridical agressiveness, the marketing-side of the started charities and the and tax-evasion-side of the chosen company/financial structure, his escapism - name changes, going abroad when problems became too great, his opportunism), the NRM-side of est (and successors), are either left out or treated in a non-neutral way.
  • Instead of telling the truth: nobody knew for some years where he was, the article tells us: "After retiring from Werner Erhard & Associates, Erhard continued to make public appearances."
  • The criticism section looks like an apology of Erhard.
  • The Film and television section only mentions positive Erhard news.
  • The only publication in the Publication section that is critical of Erhard is Pressman.

The Landmarkians do everything to invite their opponents to start edit warring (not answering the criticisms, but restoring POV versions), so I try to engage more uninvolved editors to get this article on a less hagiographic and more encyclopedic level. Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:36, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

The article is indeed quire reprehensible in its violation of Wikipedia rules, especially but not exclusively WP:N, WP:NPOV, WP:QUESTIONED, WP:BIASED, WP:BLPCOI, etc. A major overhaul is due. As it now stands, it's an example of how Wikipedia articles should not be. -The Gnome (talk) 09:02, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Despite Theobald Tiger's claim that this article is not neutral, the edits that they did to the article were removals of material that was backed by solid references that pertained to Erhard's current or more recent work and the removal of sourced material is not a proper way to bring about a good wikipedia article. In terms of POV, reading the talk page above will reveal Theobald Tiger's negative POV against Erhard. If there are specific points that editors want to address about the article then we should do so on this talk page one point at a time in calm and neutral manner.--MLKLewis (talk) 00:52, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

As you may be aware there is a huge difference between technically following the policies' to the letter, and actually adhering to their spirit. This entirely unacceptable "article" is clearly written by Erhard's disciples. It is completely indefensible in its current form. Judging by your edit history, you are clearly not neutral on this topic, and you should recuse yourself from editing the article, and from participating in any discussion on this talk page. --89.0.227.245 (talk) 02:22, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Hagiography

The opening sentence of this article reads: "Werner Hans Erhard (...) is a critical thinker and author of transformational models and applications for individuals, groups, and organizations." Erhard is whatever you like, a visionary, a smart eclectic, a selfmade man, a skilfull user of mass-psychological techniques, a man with an entrepreneurial spirit, a charming personality, a dexterous salesman, or what have you, but he is definitely not a 'critical thinker', and neither is he an 'author of models and applications' (whatever that may mean). The source is extremely poor, a short newspaper interview with Leonard Susskind, written by a journalist who obviously has heard the name 'Werner Erhard' for the first time, and who tries in vain to evoke in a few words Erhard's biography to inform the ignorant reader (between brackets): "(Erhard is a critical thinker who made his fortune with the New Age group, est, and is something of a “physics groupie”, presiding over meetings of some of the world’s greatest physicists.)" Perhaps we should rewrite the first sentence so that Erhard will triumphantly emerge as a 'physics groupie'? His role as the founder of est should be mentioned in the opening sentence, of course. Theobald Tiger (talk) 22:52, 6 February 2015 (UTC) (corrections 22:52, 7 February 2015 (UTC))

I have cut back the hagiographic content from the lead. Theobald Tiger (talk) 21:24, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Still reads like a vanity piece.Cathar66 (talk) 01:24, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

As regards the lead, Erhard is quite often referred to as a critical thinker and has been acknowledged and referred to as such by some highly regarded academic publications - one of them being the Harvard Business Press, which states "We are indebted to numerous philosophers, scholars, and thinkers who have inquired into the nature of being, especially Werner Erhard." And anyway, the London Telegraph is a quite reputable publication and there is no reason for you to cast aspersions on their editorial integrity and question the journalist's intelligence and ability to do research. A reference from a well regarded paper is perfectly fine source.

In regard to the string of deletions of good well referenced material from this article today - A lot of work has been done over the past several years to bring this article to an agreed on neutral quality that accurately represents Erhard and his work. Please do not degrade the neutrality and introduce unsourced and opinionated material while removing factual information backed up by good sourcing. ThanksMLKLewis (talk) 03:33, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Do you really think that the London Telegraph quote, which I ridiculed, and rightly so, suffices to establish that Erhard is first and foremost - we talk about the first statement of the opening sentence - a critical thinker? See also the thread below. I have reverted your edit. The piling up of footnotes, as the current article does, is a serious obstacle to an encyclopedic article of some merit. The selection of sources is highly biased, as is the section 'Books by others'. The article text is equally one-sided (I agree with Cathar66 who considers it a "vanity piece"). Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:01, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
With respect to the quote from the Harvard Business Review: it is a footnote dealing with unpublished lectures of Erhard, and there are scholarly surveys of Erhard's life and work that are much more notable, extensive and elaborate. None of those surveys call him a writer or scholar of some significance. Theobald Tiger (talk) 10:31, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I do indeed think that the Harvard Business Press is a quite reputable publisher and I don't see how it being in footnoted material detracts in any way from it being a reliable source. I also think that the London Telegraph chose their words with intention, as good journalists do. Erhard's work has dealt with ontology and what it is to be a human being in the world - and it is completely warranted to call him (as the reputable journalist from the London Telegraph journalist did) a critical thinker. It captures the essence of Erhard's work and effectively communicates his life's body of work which is exactly what a good encyclopedic article should do. MLKLewis (talk) 17:35, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I follow the rationale of your point MLKLewis perhaps you could elaborate on your reasoning? Cathar66 (talk) 17:41, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

My point is that Erhard's contribution to the world is fundamentally within the realm of thinking critically about what it is to be a human being and how human beings do what they do and act the way they act and be who they are in their lives - Erhard's work has also been about teaching people and organizations how to alter these aspects of being human beings relating to each other so that they can have choice in how they live their lives and behave in our societal groups and not be run by old patterns of behavior and action. There are numerous sources that say or illustrate that Erhard's work is about critically thinking about being human beings - Here is one: "according to critical thinker and author Werner Erhard, most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them." Paul Veliyathil in T.H.R.I.V.E MLKLewis (talk) 18:52, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
@MLKLewis, Do you really think that this selfpublished source establishes Erhard's status as a critical thinker? Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:28, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

The lede is totally on its knees in praise of the subject of the article. It's embarrassing to come here looking for information and to get propaganda. 842U (talk) 20:24, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Critical Thinker

If only Wikipedia could have been known to George Orwell. LOL

99.251.239.140 (talk) 14:02, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Hagiography

The opening sentence of this article reads: "Werner Hans Erhard (...) is a critical thinker and author of transformational models and applications for individuals, groups, and organizations." Erhard is whatever you like, a visionary, a smart eclectic, a selfmade man, a skilfull user of mass-psychological techniques, a man with an entrepreneurial spirit, a charming personality, a dexterous salesman, or what have you, but he is definitely not a 'critical thinker', and neither is he an 'author of models and applications' (whatever that may mean). The source is extremely poor, a short newspaper interview with Leonard Susskind, written by a journalist who obviously has heard the name 'Werner Erhard' for the first time, and who tries in vain to evoke in a few words Erhard's biography to inform the ignorant reader (between brackets): "(Erhard is a critical thinker who made his fortune with the New Age group, est, and is something of a “physics groupie”, presiding over meetings of some of the world’s greatest physicists.)" Perhaps we should rewrite the first sentence so that Erhard will triumphantly emerge as a 'physics groupie'? His role as the founder of est should be mentioned in the opening sentence, of course. Theobald Tiger (talk) 22:52, 6 February 2015 (UTC) (corrections 22:52, 7 February 2015 (UTC))

I have cut back the hagiographic content from the lead. Theobald Tiger (talk) 21:24, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Still reads like a vanity piece.Cathar66 (talk) 01:24, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

As regards the lead, Erhard is quite often referred to as a critical thinker and has been acknowledged and referred to as such by some highly regarded academic publications - one of them being the Harvard Business Press, which states "We are indebted to numerous philosophers, scholars, and thinkers who have inquired into the nature of being, especially Werner Erhard." And anyway, the London Telegraph is a quite reputable publication and there is no reason for you to cast aspersions on their editorial integrity and question the journalist's intelligence and ability to do research. A reference from a well regarded paper is perfectly fine source.

In regard to the string of deletions of good well referenced material from this article today - A lot of work has been done over the past several years to bring this article to an agreed on neutral quality that accurately represents Erhard and his work. Please do not degrade the neutrality and introduce unsourced and opinionated material while removing factual information backed up by good sourcing. ThanksMLKLewis (talk) 03:33, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Do you really think that the London Telegraph quote, which I ridiculed, and rightly so, suffices to establish that Erhard is first and foremost - we talk about the first statement of the opening sentence - a critical thinker? See also the thread below. I have reverted your edit. The piling up of footnotes, as the current article does, is a serious obstacle to an encyclopedic article of some merit. The selection of sources is highly biased, as is the section 'Books by others'. The article text is equally one-sided (I agree with Cathar66 who considers it a "vanity piece"). Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:01, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
With respect to the quote from the Harvard Business Review: it is a footnote dealing with unpublished lectures of Erhard, and there are scholarly surveys of Erhard's life and work that are much more notable, extensive and elaborate. None of those surveys call him a writer or scholar of some significance. Theobald Tiger (talk) 10:31, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I do indeed think that the Harvard Business Press is a quite reputable publisher and I don't see how it being in footnoted material detracts in any way from it being a reliable source. I also think that the London Telegraph chose their words with intention, as good journalists do. Erhard's work has dealt with ontology and what it is to be a human being in the world - and it is completely warranted to call him (as the reputable journalist from the London Telegraph journalist did) a critical thinker. It captures the essence of Erhard's work and effectively communicates his life's body of work which is exactly what a good encyclopedic article should do. MLKLewis (talk) 17:35, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I follow the rationale of your point MLKLewis perhaps you could elaborate on your reasoning? Cathar66 (talk) 17:41, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

My point is that Erhard's contribution to the world is fundamentally within the realm of thinking critically about what it is to be a human being and how human beings do what they do and act the way they act and be who they are in their lives - Erhard's work has also been about teaching people and organizations how to alter these aspects of being human beings relating to each other so that they can have choice in how they live their lives and behave in our societal groups and not be run by old patterns of behavior and action. There are numerous sources that say or illustrate that Erhard's work is about critically thinking about being human beings - Here is one: "according to critical thinker and author Werner Erhard, most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them." Paul Veliyathil in T.H.R.I.V.E MLKLewis (talk) 18:52, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
@MLKLewis, Do you really think that this selfpublished source establishes Erhard's status as a critical thinker? Theobald Tiger (talk) 09:28, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

The lede is totally on its knees in praise of the subject of the article. It's embarrassing to come here looking for information and to get propaganda. 842U (talk) 20:24, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Critical Thinker

If only Wikipedia could have been known to George Orwell. LOL

99.251.239.140 (talk) 14:02, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

The name of Werner.

To RA0808. (About "Early life")
I knew that it was Werner Heisenberg for the first time here. It is the best to be inspected in the applicable back number of Esquire more than 55 years ago. If nobody has it, it should be described together with Werner von Braun. Is it all right? --Sérgio Itigo (talk) 16:56, 24 September 2015 (UTC).

I am sorry, but your meaning here is not at all clear. This edit has been rejected every single time that you have posted it, and unfortunately language differences have made your attempt to explain your reasoning unsuccessful. The article itself makes clear that J.P. Rosenberg created the name from the from the first name of Werner Heisenberg and the last name of Ludwig Erhard. The source that you use to suggest von Braun is from a blog website (usually not a RS) quoting from an article in People Magazine (not often RS). I have adjusted the grammar to reflect accurately what I think you want to say, but the questionable source means that it still may be reverted. regards, Sensei48 (talk) 17:01, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
Is the meaning of your description "an only one magazine"? I saw descriptions that it was Werner von Braun in many web pages and books. I saw even German. This is so: Münchner Rundschau 28.10.83: est-Gründer in der Bayemhalle. --Sérgio Itigo (talk) 16:52, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

I have removed the sentence about von Braun. Reliable biographers and other reliable sources clearly state how he created his name. Websites and other places where it was inaccurately stated do not qualify as reliable sources for Wikipedia.--MLKLewis (talk) 20:19, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Marc Galanter reference

In the critics and disputes section we currently use a reference to Marc Galanter that reads, "Psychiatrist Marc Galanter described Erhard as "a man with no formal experience in mental health, self help, or religious revivalism, but a background in retail sales." However, in reading Galanter's book, I found that Galanter also immediately goes on to say that a study done with a large sample of people who had completed the est training revealed that “the large majority felt the experience had been positive (88%), and considered themselves better off for having taken the training (80%)."

It seems unbalanced and not representative of the actual source if we don't use both sides of the point that Galanter makes. His point is that despite Erhard's background being in retail and therefore not typical, Erhard still had a positive impact on people who attended his training program. However, as Galanter is used now, the article gives an incomplete picture of what Galanter is saying.

Interestingly the Galanter reference is being used in a section concerning disputes and by their very nature disputes have two sides, i.e. contrasting points of view. It is completely fitting to include alternate sides to those disputes and the point being made by Galanter in this reference is a perfect example of this. I propose that we add to what is currently there now and expand the sentence to read, "Psychiatrist Marc Galanter described Erhard as "a man with no formal experience in mental health, self help, or religious revivalism, but a background in retail sales" but he goes on to quote a study done with a large sample of people who had completed the est training which revealed that “the large majority felt the experience had been positive (88%), and considered themselves better off for having taken the training (80%)." --MLKLewis (talk) 20:03, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

The Galanter issue is one that may merit more comment, but the "Critics and Disputes" section has already been watered down far too much. The disputes referenced are the media and legal issues; the critics section needs to be greatly expanded to reflect accurately the extensive criticism that has been leveled at WE and his work through the years. The article as it exists is wildly unbalanced in favor of creating a positive and not neutral image of WE. It might be useful to remove the Galanter reference after futher discussion, but the "but he goes on to say" acts to negate a valid observation that the first part of the quotation identifies. The point of this section is to explore criticism of WE's work, not to present it and then negate it - unless we want to go through the entire article, point by point and section by section, and present a refutation from a critic of every positive assertion currently here.Sensei48 (talk) 21:44, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
This exchange seems to illustrate the impossibility of ever satisfying everyone on a topic such as this. Whatever the content of the article there will always be editors who think it is painting too rosy a picture, and others who find it excessively critical. While it is true that there has been over the years a good deal of critical comment regarding Erhard and his works, this is utterly minuscule in comparison with the enormous numbers of people who have completed the programs delivered by him and their derivatives, and have been delighted with the results. Furthermore, the majority of critical comment came from people who have no direct experience of either Erhard or his works and who base their opinions on gossip, rumour, prejudice, or downright deliberate malice. Much of that content is factually inaccurate, and a good deal is no more than smear and innuendo. The quote above is a case in point; while all four component assertions are factually correct - so what? He never claimed to have "...formal experience in mental health," nor has it ever been suggested that his programs were intended to address mental health issues."Religious revivalism" is even less relevant; "...a background in retail sales" is an unnecessarily demeaning description of someone who rose to senior executive positions in major corporations. As for "self-help", he is widely described as having virtually invented the industry, which barely existed prior to the foundation of the est training. DaveApter (talk) 11:05, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
DaveApter's mischaracterization and dismissal of the opposition to Erhard is characteristic of his persistent efforts to whitewash everything around this topic to fit with his evident religious like worship of all things Landmark. In fact, there are few such self help gurus that have generated such sustained and widespread criticism. Legacypac (talk) 03:21, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Lee Iacocca fluff

The article states that some time in 1960 Erhard started selling cars (in St. Louis), and that he worked for Lee Iacocca. The page on Iacocca says Iacocca was named vice-president and general manager of the Ford in 1960. The term "working for" might be technically true in the sense that a guy at the bottom "works for" the guy at the top. But in any professional sense the term means "reports directly to" and in this case seems more like misinformation. Arbalest Mike (talk) 16:09, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Name of the training program

The program Erhard was originally known for creating was “The est Training”. It was never known as Erhard Seminars Training (that was the name of the company that offered “The est Training”)--MLKLewis (talk) 01:17, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Correcting facts about Erhard's work, selling cars.

In fact in the early mid-1950s Erhard was a direct report to Lee Iacocca. According to his biography, he began selling cars in Norristown Pennsylvania in 1955. Quoting directly from Bartley, “First he sold Fords at a dealership under the general management of Lee Iacocca, who later became president of the Ford Motor Company.  Later he worked for a Mercury dealership; still later, he sold Chevrolets.”  What is stated in the article about this is inaccurate and I will correct it. RecoveringAddict (talk) 23:39, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Libelous statement of "stolen car."

The attempt to report that Erhard committed a crime (stole an automobile) - a crime that he never committed - was already attempted on 10 October 2015 and was reverted the next day, successfully removing the libel.

However, the latest attempt to reinsert the line in the Early Life section, "They drove west in a stolen automobile and settled in St. Louis, where Erhard took a job as a car salesman" repeats that libel and does not accurately summarize what is said in Bartley’s biography. It makes it sound as if Erhard went out and stole a car off the street. However, what actually happened was that the owner gave the car to Erhard. He asked Erhard to see if Erhard could sell it. There was never any report to the police or even accusation by anyone of a stolen car. It is apparent from the full quote in Bartley that it was only Erhard, who (in making a point with his biographer about “responsibility”) characterized his having the car as “stolen”. Erhard said, “… as far as I (italics) was concerned the car was stolen." So he set out to earn enough money to pay for the car. Bartley writes that after getting a job in Spokane, Werner now had enough money to pay the owner for the car, contacted the owner "and the matter was settled amicably, with more being paid for the automobile than it was worth."

The woefully out of context phrase that the Erhard’s "drove west in a stolen automobile" leaves the reader with a seriously inaccurate view of what actually happened, so I am removing the line. If it is added back in, it needs to be worded in a way that gives the full picture stated above about what actually happened. RecoveringAddict (talk) 21:41, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Fine, but Pressman tells a somewhat different version of the story. It is at the least a point of controversey. However, I believe that if you edited the section with the information that you provide above and without using the word "stolen" and with appropriate page sourcing to Bartley then the editors who want it in will be satisfied and there will be no libel. Sensei48 (talk) 22:20, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
We should give priority to the source of "Outrageous Betrayal". The reasons are as follows.
The inconsistency: By a automobile or a airplane, to St. Louis or Indianapolis, from the name of Werner Heisenberg or von Braun?
It seems to be sure that he went to the west with June Bryde. According to the other source, he chose the names of Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard described of "Esquire magazine" in the airplane. However, they did not settle in Indianapolis or state of Indiana. Why?; is inexplicable. I have read a description that he changed his name to Werner Erhard in San Francisco. --Sérgio Itigo (talk) 17:38, 18 December 2015 (UTC). Revision, --Sérgio Itigo (talk) 17:13, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Pressman’s book is notorious for not providing a single reference or citation to any of the assertions it makes, and considered unreliable source within academia. Renee D. Lockwood PhD, at the University of Sydney, says for an example that Pressman’s book is “sensationalist and lacking academic rigour”. W. W. Bartley III on the other hand was a distinguished scholar and author of at least two acclaimed biographies on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Bartley’s biography on Erhard states clearly where Werner Erhard took his name from, and what actually happened in relation to the car that is the subject of this section. Typewolf (talk) 19:04, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Excellent scholars are also deceived when they experience an "endorphin hight". The person deceived in an experience becomes like patients with poisoning. I already experienced a considerable "endorphin hight" before. So, the more I had gotten to know him and them, the more I was rather worried about his secret background under cover of darkness and their fanaticism. I felt the risk at the same level as Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo. I think that it was not wrong. We should give priority to descriptions of courageous journalists over the deceived scholars. --Sérgio Itigo (talk) 17:29, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

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somebody needs to check this. i tried but am not experienced enough with archived sources. as it is, BOTH links are active--the archive one works fine (going to the relevant material as found now at the Wayback Machine). however, the original link is still active, in the sense that it appears as a clickable link (text="the original"), and when clicked it attempts to go to the Landmark Education site, but (at least on my browser) it was blocked with a "connection is insecure" warning that reads, "The owner of www.landmarkeducation.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."Colbey84 (talk) 12:56, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Self-education

The section "Self-education" says: Werner Erhard, while being largely self-educated, has learned from and worked closely with academics, philosophers and thinkers such as... followed by an impressively long list of notable and semi-notable names, supported by this source. Using a primary source for this gives it the appearance of name dropping, but it's also inconsistent. Was he self-educated, or did he learn from a laundry list of notables? Can we find a more neutral source for this, while we're at it? Grayfell (talk) 02:30, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

  • The sources cited, the Financial Times and Leeson, clearly back up the statement that Erhard was self-educated (the Financial Times refers to Erhard as an autodidact, which is defined as being self-educated). The scholars listed are individuals that Erhard both learned from and sometimes collaborated with as he developed his body of work. Including the thinkers that he interacted with (sourced by the Social Science Research Network) isn’t namedropping but rather speaks to the wide breadth of Erhard's studies and ongoing self-education. It is not at all inconsistent with being self-educated to learn from others who have mastery in areas one is studying and working in.--RecoveringAddict (talk) 16:27, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

Moreno clarification

The book, "Impromptu Man, J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network," was written by Jonathan D. Moreno, the son of J.L. Moreno. They are not the same person. J.L. is deceased but Jonathan D. Moreno is alive, well and is a current writer and professor. For his book, Jonathan D. interviewed Erhard and wrote a section about the est training, on page 246 Jonathan D. writes, "Over the next couple of decades the vilification of Erhard only intensified. Allegations of all sorts of personal and financial wrongdoing were hurled at him, none of which were born out and some were even publicly retracted by major media organizations." This supports my edit, stating there were "ad hominem attacks" on Erhard, therefore it is an appropriate edit. --RecoveringAddict (talk) 20:21, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Nationality in lead sentence

Is there some reason NOT to include? --Malerooster (talk) 22:47, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Tax Matters

I am concerned about the accuracy of the claim that Erhard's tax fraud accusations were a sham. This seems to be based on glib statements that confuse the issues. While this article does state that Erhard successfully settled a defamation suit with the IRS: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/LEADER+OF+EST%20+MOVEMENT+WINS+$200,000+FROM+IRS.-a083966944

It does not follow that he never owed money to the IRS. For the relevant court case, see: Erhard v. C.I.R., 46 F.3d 1470 (9th Cir. 1995). The final paragraph of the case concludes:

"We are not persuaded by Erhard's argument. The amounts Erhard remitted to the IRS were withheld from payments to ICF and thus were in payment of ICF's tax, not Erhard's tax. Section 1464 provides that a refund or credit of an overpayment of tax which has actually been withheld at the source shall be made to the taxpayer from whose income the amount of such tax was in fact withheld. I.R.C. § 1464; Treas.Reg. § 1.1464-1(a); Bank of America v. Anglim, 138 F.2d 7, 8 (9th Cir.1943). Thus, the IRS may refund any overpaid amount only to ICF, the taxpayer from whose income the tax was withheld. That the IRS deemed the loans shams does not transform payments made on behalf of ICF into payments made on behalf of Erhard. Erhard withheld that money on ICF's behalf regardless of the underlying purpose of the payments"

I'm happy to open it up to comment before I modify the article to accurately reflect the fact that Erhard did evade taxes and did have to subsequently pay the money to the IRS. E-Parrhesia (talk) 21:15, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

I just noticed this comment that editor E-Parrhesia added to the talk page. I'm going to do some research into the court documents and write up a response.--Patermann18 (talk) 00:44, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
In response to editor E-Parrhesia statements, here is the result of the research done.
1. I am unaware that anyone ever claimed that Erhard “never owed any money to the IRS”. Erhard and his businesses owed and paid taxes every year.
2. Erhard did have one dispute with the IRS over taxes. The facts about that dispute are as follows:
a. Ernst & Young, a big 8 accounting firm at the time, prepared Mr. Erhard’s tax return. Mr. Erhard paid the tax that Ernst & Young said was due. The IRS disputed some of the business deductions on the tax return and said as a consequence additional tax would be due. Mr. Erhard sued the IRS in Tax Court over the IRS disputed business deductions taken by Erhard’s sole proprietorship, Werner Erhard & Associates. The Tax Court decided more than half of the disputed tax in favor of Werner Erhard & Associates, but decided some of the disputed tax in favor of the IRS. Even though the Tax Court decision substantially reduced the amount of tax the IRS had claimed as due, Mr. Erhard’s tax attorneys were convinced that Ernst & Young was correct in its preparation of the tax return and therefore appealed the Tax Court’s decision on that part of the matters the Tax Court had found in favor of the IRS. That appeal was to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
b. Mr. Erhard lost the appeal. The matter of tax withheld and paid by Erhard to the IRS quoted by the editor E-Parrhesia was the 9th Circuit Court’s rejection of Erhard’s lawyer’s argument to the 9th Circuit Court that some portion of the tax that the Tax Court found to be due had already been paid via withholding tax payments made by Werner Erhard & Associates to the IRS on interest Werner Erhard & Associates paid to its lender. The 9th Circuit Court said that those payments were not a payment of Werner Erhard & Associates’ tax liability but rather a payment of its lender’s tax liability.
c. After the Circuit Court issued its final decision Mr. Erhard paid the amount of tax that had now been finally adjudicated to be due. No tax was due until the Circuit Court’s decision was final. That is the law. Tax is not necessarily due because the IRS says that it is due. If a taxpayer has a legitimate dispute with the IRS’ interpretation of the law then the taxpayer may sue in Tax Court and all IRS collection action is stayed because the matter of the law has been given to the Court to decide. Given that a big 8 accounting firm and a prominent tax law firm, Michael I Saltzman, thought they had gotten the law right on the tax return as filed, the tax court accepted the case. Until the final Court’s decision (in this case the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals) is issued, there is in fact no tax due. After the final Court’s decision is issued, then, and only then, the tax is due.
d. The whole story here is: Erhard’s sole proprietor business took business deductions on his tax return; the IRS disputed some of the business deductions; the Tax Court found most of the disputed deductions valid and some invalid; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Tax Court’s decision; upon the final decision of the Appeals Court some additional tax was due; Erhard paid the tax.
3. There was never any tax evasion, and the IRS never claimed that there was any tax evasion. There was never any tax fraud, and the IRS never claimed that there was tax fraud. The statement in the quotation “the IRS deemed the loans shams” was the IRS’s defense during the tax court trial; it is a term of art used in the Internal Revenue Code. In fact, the Tax Court itself rejected the IRS claim for punitive tax penalties; stating that Erhard had used competent professionals to structure the transactions and those professionals testified that the structure of the transactions was their invention. Of course, there is nothing in the paragraph editor E-Parrhesia quotes that mentions “tax fraud” or “evade taxes”, or suggests that such crimes were ever committed. Tax fraud and tax evasion are a criminal matter. If this were a criminal matter the case would have been titled “U.S. v Erhard” – in other words the U.S. would have charged Mr. Erhard and taken him to criminal court. But the case is titled “Erhard v C.I.R.” (where C.I.R. stands for the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service) because Erhard took the IRS to court. There were no criminal matters involved, just disputes over business deductions.
4. Given there was no tax fraud I have changed the topic name of this discussion since it is unfair to the living person to even use that topic designation, even for discussion.
5. To inaccurately state that someone has committed a crime is defamation, and in fact “defamation per se”.
6. During the Appeal process, the IRS made false statements about Erhard and his tax matter to the media. Erhard sued the IRS for “wrongful disclosure”, this time in Federal Court. The outcome of the case was reported in the Daily News (and reprinted in The Free Library), two relevant quotations from the article follow:
a. “Between April 9 and April 15, 1991, several IRS spokesmen were widely reported as saying that Erhard owed millions of dollars in back taxes, that he was transferring assets out of the country, and that the agency was suing Erhard. The implication was that Erhard was a tax cheat who refused to pay his taxes that were lawfully due.”
b. “IRS spokesmen subsequently admitted that statements attributed to them about Erhard's supposed tax liability were false, but that they did not ask the media to correct the statements.”
c. The IRS paid Erhard $200,000, as far as I can tell, the largest settlement of a wrongful disclosure case that the IRS had ever paid to that date. By the way, one of the false statements made by the IRS was that “the agency was suing Erhard”. The IRS never sued Erhard
7. Given that the IRS made such false statements about Erhard and never asked the media to correct the false statements, it is perhaps understandable that editor E-Parrhesia was misled. --Patermann18 (talk) 22:38, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for posting this detailed explanation of the issue of the tax dispute. Patermann18 makes it abundantly clear that the reference E-Parrhesia quotes from (Erhard v. C.I.R) is not related to a case involving tax fraud, so it would obviously not support adding anything regarding tax fraud to the article. The policy on Biographies of Living Persons WP:BLP states, “Be very firm about the use of high-quality sources. All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be explicitly attributed to a reliable, published source. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced – whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable – should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion.” In keeping with this policy, any additions to the article regarding tax fraud that are not supported by relevant high quality sources would need to be removed. MLKLewis (talk) 02:20, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

About the appropriate content of the "Critics and disputes" section:

A. Webster's Dictionary defines dispute as: "1. a disputing; argument; debate, 2. a quarrel".  As is clear in the dictionary's definition of dispute, a dispute by its very nature has two sides.  Without the other side - that is, with only one side of a dispute - what is said is nothing more than an accusation.  Hence, Sensei48's claim that the "Critics and disputes" section in the Erhard article is "not a place to mitigate that criticism" is unfounded. 

B. Many Wikipedia articles on people have a "Criticism" or "Critiques" or "Controversies" section; e.g., Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Tony Robbins.  Each of the so-named sections in the named people's articles includes rebuttals or equalizing comments.  Hence, given what is done in other people's articles in Wikipedia, Sensei48's clearly implied claim that the "Critics and disputes" section in Erhard's article is a place for only negative criticisms is unfounded.  There is balance in the approach in these other articles' Critics-like sections that must also exist in the "Critics and disputes" section of the Erhard article.

C. Given what is said in A and B just above, there needs to be a balanced approach to this section.

D. The statements from University of Pennsylvania's chaired professor of ethics, Jonathan D. Moreno (by Wikipedia's standards an irrefutable source), related to Erhard and Erhard's critics are not an attempt to dismiss the criticisms that happened. What they do is provide historical context for those criticisms. Yes, there were criticisms made, but as is made clear in Moreno's quote and the reportage of the outcomes of various unsuccessful attempts to attack and defame Erhard's character, those criticisms did not stand the test of time. If you are going to include allegations of wrongdoing by people who were critics of Erhard, in balance you must also include this completely legitimate reference that says those allegations were not born out. Anything less is misrepresentation and irresponsible. --RecoveringAddict (talk) 19:06, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

The criticism of Keynes, Friedman, and Galbraith is in the articles and in the real world directed at the validity of their theories, not at these men personally. As the correct first sentence of the stable edit suggests, criticism of Erhard (as with Robbins) is directed at motivations, honesty, and personal behavior as much as validity of the various programs. The added edit is yet another hagiographic attempt to bend this article even further into the area of almost complete uselessness: it might as well be from one of Erhard's own websites.
The fact is that nearly every point raised in this article from first paragraph to last is eminently challengeable and refutable using RS. There is virtually no aspect of his work that hasn't been called into question by responsible academics at one time or another. The "Critics" section was set up to offer a minor offset to the hagiography of the rest of the article. What the article needs - and will get when time permits - will be a thoroughly balanced, sourced view of WE from first to last, at which point the few points raised in this section can be integrated into the larger article, as happens in the analogous Tony Robbins article.
For now, however, rather than reverting, the opening material added will be placed where it belongs, if anywhere: at the end. Sensei48 (talk) 00:28, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
My title for this section was simply criticism. I can do without the "disputes" addition. Sensei48 (talk) 00:30, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

No Hagiography

1. For a Wikipedia article itself, there is a straightforward test for what Sensei48 labels hagiography. In the “Manual of Style/Words to watch”, Wikipedia speaks of the use of terms that “may introduce bias, for example, terms of puffery”. Within the material in the article that Sensei48 charges is hagiographic, one should be able to locate terms that “idealize or idolize” Erhard (the actual definition of hagiography – a term Wikipedia itself does not use and has no policy for). The terms of puffery that are actually listed by Wikipedia as terms that may introduce bias are: legendary, great, acclaimed, visionary, outstanding, leading, celebrated, award-winning, landmark, cutting-edge, innovative, extraordinary, brilliant, hit, famous, renowned, remarkable, prestigious, world-class, respected, notable, virtuoso, honorable, awesome, unique. I may have missed one, but I do not see any of these terms used to refer to Erhard, nor other terms that refer to Erhard that embellish or that are promotional or that are even flattering. It seems that this article uses facts from RSs to demonstrate whatever importance Erhard may have, as Wikipedia policy require.

2. Sensei48, in attempting to justify his/her charge of hagiography says, “The fact is that nearly every point raised in this article from first paragraph to last is eminently challengeable and refutable using RS.” In fact, virtually every point that could be considered positive or even neutral raised in this article from first paragraph to last is backed up by a reference to a 100% fully reliable source.

3. What Sensei48 calls “hagiography” is in fact an accurate picture of Erhard’s work and the regard with which it is held. For a claim of hagiography to be valid, one must demonstrate that the claims of competence or excellence were manufactured or at the very least embellished. The following are examples of the wide regard in which Erhard’s work is held (much of this is taken from the article itself), and is just a sampling for time’s sake. There is much more that can be located:

a. Erhard is the 22nd most downloaded author out of over 325,000 authors at the Social Science Research Network. SSRN is the top open-access repository in the world for scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities according to the Ranking Web of Repositories, an initiative of The Cybermetrics Lab.
b. Universities like Harvard, Oxford, Dartmouth, Yale and the United States Air Force Academy (just a sampling from the first four paragraphs) do not invite people to speak or instruct or write with nothing important to say.
c. According to the references in just the first paragraph of the article, Erhard’s association with some of the world’s major universities dates from 1981 to 2016 – 4 decades of references cannot be simply dismissed as a passing interest. In fact, reviewing the dates of the references demonstrates that Erhard seems to be more in demand in academia as time goes on.
d. Neither the National Bureau of Economic Research nor the European Corporate Governance Institute accept for publication material from people who only claim to have something important to say but don’t in fact have something important to say. These are credible, world-renowned organizations.
e. In addition to a few other references from Harvard’s long-term association with Erhard found in the article, Erhard (as the lead author) and his colleagues were asked to contribute a chapter to Harvard’s 2012 foundational reference book (the editor’s words) for teaching leadership, The Handbook For Teaching Leadership. The editors, the Dean of the Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria, the Dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, and Harvard Senior Lecturer Scott Snook stated in the editor’s introduction “ …this eclectic group of scholars argues for adopting a decidedly ontological approach to leadership education that promises to leave students actually being leaders.” The editors go on to say, “… this chapter presents a rigorous theory of leadership education …” It is unimaginable that editors such as these are given to idealizing or idolizing anyone, it is probably quite the reverse.
f. The Financial Times does not interview people who do not have something important to offer. The Financial Times management editor Andrew Hill writes “Werner Erhard and Michael Jensen look an unlikely pairing but their leadership teaching fits into a broad stream of business education and research about ethics and integrity.”
g. The impact of Erhard’s work is widely acknowledged. Financial Times Columnist Lucy Kellaway says his influence “extends far beyond the couple of million people who have done his courses: there is hardly a self-help book or a management training program that does not borrow some of his principles.”
h. David Logan, PhD, President of CultureSync and Associate Professor of Business at the University of Southern California said, "Werner's thinking – I don't know any nice way of saying it – is just out there in the world. You can't do a Master's Degree in organizational development or human resources without picking up some of it. And it's usually not credited back to him. His stuff is just out there."
i. Professor Warren Bennis (who actually participated in the est Training), who is (as stated in his Wikipedia article) “… widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies” said about Erhard, “It’s what Werner’s contribution is, the technology that takes an abstraction and changes people’s lives.” Bennis, in an interview of Erhard in the late 1980s, introduced him by saying “Werner Erhard, founder of est, now with Werner Erhard and Associates, and arguably the man behind the most significant educational development of the 70s and 80s.”
j. Robert Leeson, visiting Professor of Economics at Stanford University included in his book about economist F. A. Hayek a chapter written by Erhard.
k. Bernie Roth, Rodney H. Adams Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, and the co-founder of the world famous Stanford design school, says about participating in one of Erhard’s programs, “This experience brought a renewed realization as to how deeply his style and content have influenced my teaching. I am very thankful for his teachings and friendship.”
l. One may be able to fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, however it is a difficult claim to make that the programs Erhard designed have fooled over two million people for over 45 years. The fact is that the programs Erhard designed continue to be available to the public worldwide, and there is no apparent evidence that this will end anytime soon. Businesses do not succeed over time if they do not provide actual results for the people who pay to get them.

4. Finally, Sensei48’s contention that this article needs harsher criticism may ironically point to the reverse. If there are many other readers who are also unaware of the high regard in which Erhard’s work is currently held, that argues for more examples of that high regard.

5. Sensei48 stated, “The added edit is yet another hagiographic attempt to bend this article even further into the area of almost complete uselessness: it might as well be from one of Erhard's own websites.” The added edit to which Sensei48 refers (and moved and altered) is a statement from a relatively recent book written by a respected source about what is covered in the Critics and disputes section. There is nothing hagiographic about it. It is simply what one unquestionably respected source had to say about the rest of what is said in the first paragraph of the section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patermann18 (talk • contribs) 22:20, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

This article, as all articles on Wikipedia, should aim to accurately portray its subject matter based on reliable sources. I take exception to the statement that adding a well-respected social academic’s writing to this article is “hagiography” (as Paterman states above hagiography is defined by Webster’s as “idealizing or idolizing”). Professor Moreno is more than well qualified as a reliable source. He is indeed a “philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine.” Moreno’s 2014 assessment of Erhard’s work (one of the most up to date references on Erhard in the article) adds a much-needed historical perspective to this article and the impact of Erhard’s work over the last forty plus years. Moreno’s observation of how the media handled the new ideas that Erhard presented serves to give the reader a broader picture of the life and work of Erhard, which is the main objective of a good encyclopedic article. Moreno’s writing puts accusations made in the past into the perspective of seeing what has transpired over that forty-year span of work.
It is our job to capture the full picture of the subject of the article. In this case, it is of an innovative thinker. “Innovative thinker” applied to Erhard is not hagiography, it is based on the statements of quotes from the Dean of the Harvard Business School, and the Dean of Harvard College, and a Harvard Senior Lecturer. In addition the publishers of the book write, “This volume brings together leading international scholars across disciplines to chronicle the current state of leadership education and establish a solid foundation on which to grow the field.” This is unequivocal evidence that Erhard’s work, while first found only in public programs, has evolved into being taken seriously in academia.
One important part of that story is how the media covered his work in the early days. The media at the time of the est training wrote primarily untrue things about what happened in the est Training and accused him of misdeeds that history (and the courts) have shown he was not guilty of. Sensei48’s view that the article is too positive about Erhard seems to be based on these early attempts by the media to paint a negative image of Erhard. Questions about Erhard’s motivations, honesty and personal behavior that were proffered to the public by reporters who did not know how to grapple with his ideas, or how to grapple with the impact that the ideas had on people’s lives at the time, or how to grapple with people’s enthusiasm for the value they received from those ideas, do not constitute reliable sources when seen from the current vantage point of history.
In fact, legitimate news organizations have retracted attacks they made on Erhard’s character when they found that the attack lacked real substance. For example, ABC News published an article called “EST Is Back, More Popular Than Ever” which stated “… the U.S. government ultimately paid Erhard $200,000 over statements the IRS made …” And, Slate Magazine published a correction to one of their articles which correction stated “ … [Erhard] was found not to owe any additional taxes and won a $200,000 settlement from the IRS for making false statements about his taxes.”
Additionally, I find it quite an irresponsible claim to state that nearly every reference in this article is challengeable and refutable, simply because Sensei48 seems to think there should be more of those allegations from the media and others who never actually observed or experienced the programs themselves. Reporters who regurgitate the unsubstantiated allegations by others do not constitute a reliable reference. For example, attempting to “balance”, with quotes from much lesser lights, the quotes from the Dean of the Harvard Business School, and the Dean of Harvard College, and a Harvard Senior Lecturer. The legitimately referenced sources about Erhard’s work include institutions such as Harvard University and Sage Publications. They are relevant to the article for one reason and that is that he actually presented there and was published there. Regarding referenced material from responsible academics who have critiqued Erhard’s ideas: of course they should be included in the Critics and disputes section – as long as there is, as is the established tradition in academia, an opportunity to respond. They can add to the objective approach of representing his ideas. However, old criticisms based on rumor that impugn his character by repeating allegations put forth by the media that have not passed the test of time are simply not appropriate to a Biographies of Living Persons.
By the way, there was early media written by journalists who had a direct experience of the early est Training who wrote accurately about it. For example, Marcia Seligson in Cosmopolitan wrote, “est – The New Life-Changing Philosophy that Makes You the Boss”, (Cosmopolitan Magazine, June 1975)RecoveringAddict (talk) 23:15, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
The edit I made on March 2, which was then moved and altered, is, in light of the above discussion, more fitting to the first paragraph of the Critics and disputes section than it is to the ending of the section. As I said above, the Moreno quote gives an appropriate historical context to this section and offers a context for statements by reporters who did not know how to grapple with Erhard’s ideas at the time. It therefore belongs at the beginning of the section in order to provide readers with the appropriate context for the critiques that follow. As Petermann18 accurately notes, the Moreno quote is "a clear statement from a relatively recent book written by a respected source about what is covered in the Critics and disputes section," and is "simply what one unquestionably respected source had to say about the rest of what is said in the first paragraph of the section." I agree with their assessment and am making that change now.RecoveringAddict (talk) 18:17, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Self education

In this section the article states that he is self educated then says Werner Erhard "has learned from and worked closely with academics, philosophers, thinkers and artists such as", going on to list many people, some notable academics. There are two sources for the list of names:

There are some concerns about these:

  1. The first reference is in the domain wernererhardvideo.com, which would indicate that it is a primary source, one connected to the subject of the article, when Wikipedia requires secondary sources. (See also WP:RS, WP:SCHOLARSHIP, and WP:ANALYSIS.)
  2. The second reference seems to have Werner Erhard as the author, it it also mentions the Barbados Group, which the article mentions - this makes it a primary source, not a secondary one as Wikipedia requires.
  3. The list isn't clear about:
    1. Which of these people he worked closely with.
    2. What their influence was on him. In fact the list is quite vague about the connections between those named and Werner Erhard and may constitute WP:PUFF.

Autarch (talk) 18:36, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Remove it all. I've studied works of and been influenced by many famous people, none of whom I know personally. Even if he knows some personally, so what? Typical puffery found in up and coming band pages too. Legacypac (talk) 20:28, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

There is no disconnect with someone being self-educated and also learning from others.  I think that how he educated himself is an important part of Erhard's story. He wasn't formally educated in a college setting, yet has become a philosopher creating thought systems. His way of self-educating himself was to seek out and interact with leading thinkers of the times. Including the diverse group of thinkers in the self-education section speaks to how he developed the expertise needed to have the impact he has had and helps the reader better understand his life and work - which is, after all, the objective of a good encyclopedic article.   As for the sources being primary sources, in this case and given that these sources are not used extensively elsewhere in the article, I find that they are consistent with WP:ABOUTSELF which says that references may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves, as long as the material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim. I don't think anything in the section is unduly self-serving or can be called an exceptional claim.  We should leave the section as it is.RecoveringAddict (talk) 20:28, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

  1. The second point of WP:ABOUTSELF says that such sources may be used as long as it does not involve claims about third parties - the passage in question goes on to list third parties (23 of them). Therefore there is a problem with it.
  2. The second reference is quite vague about how Werner Erhard, claiming "tutoring" by those named, but not being more specific. Any interpretation of it immediately falls foul of WP:PRIMARY, as it says Any 'interpretation' of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for thuat interpretation. Is there a reliable secondary source that could be used in that way?
  3. As both references (Werner Erhard Videos and the Curriculum Vitae) are connected to the subject of the article, there is an issue with WP:BLPSOURCES - namely that the material is poorly sourced. (A vague claim written by the subject of the article.)
  4. The vagueness of the listing makes it look like the Association fallacy, specifically 'Honor by association'. This could be WP:PUFF and in breach of WP:NPOV. Autarch (talk)

Your points are well taken. I have added some new citations to this section one of which references David L. Smith, who writes, "Werner also credits tutoring by Richard Feynman, Michel Foucault, Humberto Maturana, Sir Karl Popper, and Hilary Putnam." I will work on finding additional references for the others in this section that cite their interactions with Erhard.RecoveringAddict (talk) 20:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Really Awful Article

If nothing else, Erhard should at least PAY somebody to re-do this article, so that it least APPEARS as if it were credible work, rather than transparent trash. As it stands, it's an utterly maladroit attempt to make the guy look as if he were somehow respectable.

Myself I am unable to devote any time to this sorry topic. Badiacrushed (talk) 20:24, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your opinion, however Wikipedia talk pages are for discussions on improving the article and are not a place for editors to argue their personal point of view about a topic. The foundation of Wikipedia is based on referencing high quality sources and this article has many such references including the Dean of the Harvard Business School and the Dean of Harvard College, who accepted Erhard's chapter for publication in their highly respectable Harvard book on leadership.MLKLewis (talk) 22:13, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Yeah this article is a MESS. How to improve? Get a concept of what a "good" article is.... and be objective about the topic at hand.....Erhard is widely known (and derided) as a charlatan.
Badiacrushed (talk) 22:59, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
Targeting by sock puppets have made improving this article incredibly tedious. That said, There is a lot of work that needs to be done.
"Charletan" or not, this article does have some very strange problems, which should be discussed. The first sentence was ...is an American critical thinker[2][3][4][5][6] and author of transformational models and applications for individuals, groups, and organizations.[7][8][9] This is a awkward sentence even in isolation, but is also specifically a poor choice when attempting to summarize who this person is. It's cryptic while also being vaguely promotional-sounding. Few readers are going to have any understanding how a "critical thinker" is defined, or what a "transformational model" is. The purpose of an encyclopedia isn't to make the reader feel stupid. It doesn't matter whether or not he truly is a critical thinker, what matters is that this has a clear and discrete meaning to readers. Using critical thinking is not understood as a defining trait or profession the same way that something like 'professor' or 'criminal' or even 'best-selling author' is. In this regard it's more of a peacock than the textbook example of peacockery. The use of citation overkill, although sometimes necessary, is a red flag that the approach is flawed. The use of his own works to describe him this way is especially alarming. Grayfell (talk) 23:28, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
My comments about sock puppetry were a mistake, I apologize. Whatever problems I have with this article, as far as I know, sock puppetry isn't one of them. I was confusing this article with another, but it was poorly phrased anyway, since I didn't mean to make insinuations about any editor who is using this talk page. Grayfell (talk) 01:01, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Article Edits

The recent changes to the intro section resulted in the removal of appropriate and valid references and information. I have reverted to the long standing version of the article until we reach consensus for proposed changes.

The first sentence of the article as it was changed a few days ago is simply incorrect in stating that Erhard writes about critical thinking. He writes about integrity, leadership, etc., but has not written about critical thinking. Yet, referring to him as a critical thinker is a good descriptor of what he has been doing over the last forty some years and it is supported with references. (the Daily Telegraph specifically states that “Erhard is a critical thinker.” Removing this valid reference is completely inappropriate). The Foundation for Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” This is a very good description of what Erhard has done in creating his body of work. He developed new ways of thinking about being a human being and developed methods for people to change how they live their lives and see new opportunities that they did not see before. Saying "Erhard is an American critical thinker and author of transformational models and applications" is actually a very concise and accurate way to describe Erhard's work and as such belongs in the intro. I don’t think we need to make things more vague and unclear out of the assumption that readers won’t understand what critical thinking is. They can easily do a search online and get some info, or we can wikilink to critical thinking and they can read more. Likewise transformation is a widely used word in the business world and the world at large.

The argument that many references make an article promotional is odd. Having many references does not equate to promotion. The references support what is said. There is no valid reason to remove a Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources such as the Harvard Handbook on Leadership which refers to what the editors (who are Deans of Harvard) write about Erhard.

One way I see to improve the article is to better represent Erhard’s ideas and provide information about what his work is about.MLKLewis (talk) 20:07, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

The article was completely unacceptable in tone. As just one of many, many examples, long lists of lecture appearances do not belong in the lede. This wouldn't be appropriate for any article, no matter how many sources are used to prop it up. Verifiability doesn't automatically mean inclusion. As I said above, "critical thinker" doesn't explain to the reader who he is, what he does, or why he is notable. It is just one of many aspects of this article that make it read as a vapid press release instead of a neutral summary. Whatever details need to be adjusted, fine. Reverting to the previous trainwreck is totally unacceptable. Grayfell (talk) 20:32, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
I very much doubt I'd touch this article. But I don't think "Erhard" had any "ideas" worth "representing." Almost nobody takes him seriously as a "thinker" and doing so is a mistake.

His significance is as a cult leader, somewhat like a lesser Scientology figure. The historical context is of some interest, and necessary certainly, for insight. There are certainly adequate sources. Badiacrushed (talk) 01:10, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Renamed from John Paul Rosenberg, When and Where.

Deleted description without explaining the reason:

However, the New York Times reports that the Erhards have renamed when they moved to San Francisco. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help, The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2015. Also, another media reports that they first went to Maryland and signed the marriage license as "Curt Wilhelm VonSavage" and "Celeste Marie Radell" on April 1, 1960. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2015451/bio Werner Erhard Biography, IMDb.com, Inc.

If there is no objection, it should be restored.--121.117.163.216 (talk) 07:36, 19 August 2018 (UTC)

IMDB is not a valid reference to use for biographical information, and the 2015 New York Times article cited says nothing about Erhard changing his name, so no, this statement should not be put in. MLKLewis (talk) 21:51, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
The current source "W. W. Bartley III" is a passionate believer of Freemasonry or Indra and can not be trusted at all. IMDB is more reliable. --121.117.163.216 (talk) 07:17, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
"Anecdotes, trivia, and unreleased film information from IMDb do not meet the reliable sources guideline." - see WP:CITINGIMDB MLKLewis (talk) 23:54, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
Also, regarding the comment about Bartley. Whoever this editor is posted something for which they provided no reference, and talked about Bartley with no understanding of who Bartley actually was. Bartley was a professor and scholar who wrote about philosophers such as F. A. Hayak, Karl Popper and Wittgenstein. His books and papers are: The Retreat to Commitment; Morality and Religion; Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic; Wittgenstein; Ludwig Wittgenstein e Karl Popper: maestri di scuola elementare; Come demarcare la scienza della metafisica; Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of est; The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism,; (editor, with F. A. Hayek), Rehearsing a revolution – Karl Popper: A Life; Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth.
As one can see from the list of Bartley’s books and papers, there is nothing there about Freemasonry or Indra. MLKLewis (talk) 18:39, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
It should also be noted that the author of the New York Times article “The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help” (November 28, 2015) made a mistake when he said of Erhard “Even his name was fake, lifted from an Esquire article he read on the plane to California.” As it already says in the article, and is well documented in several references, Erhard legally changed his name on the way to Indianapolis. MLKLewis (talk) 22:10, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Puffery tag

I removed the 'Puffery' tag which was placed on the article last November without any supporting evidence or explanation. Editors placing such tags should at least give an indication of what statements or sources they find objectionable so that the issues may be addressed constructively. DaveApter (talk) 14:43, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The whole article is puffery. The "Related organizations" section should be deleted, as this is supposed to be a biography not a description of organizations. The career section is overly detailed with long lists of puffery. This is not like a normal biography. Volunteer1234 (talk) 14:04, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree with Volunteer1234. This article is very slanted in favor of the subject, both by its language and the material it includes. It needs a major rewrite, which I assume would be rather contentious. I don't necessarily agree that the Related organizations section should be deleted, but it should be pared way back. For the moment, unless there is a consensus to remove the tag, it should remain and I will reinstate it. I will also make some copy edits and a few slightly more significant but I believe uncontroversial changes.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:49, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
I can see that it is a challenge to produce an article on this individual because opinions on him are so polarised; some people see Erhard as a hero, and others as an unprincipled charlatan. Whatever form the article takes, one camp or the other is bound to be dissatisfied (if not both). Volunteer1234's assertion that "the whole article is puffery" is clearly absurd, and not conducive to constructive debate about what steps might be taken to improve it. I don't follow the logic of the claim that the "Related organizations" section should be deleted (although I do agree that it is maybe over-long). Surely a mention of notable organizations that an individual founded or inspired is entirely appropriate in a biography? Personally I struggle to see how the article might be seen as "very slanted in favor of the subject" - it seems to me to be essentially factual, and in places not even particularly flattering. Perhaps the best way to move forward would be for editors who are dissatisfied with the present form to start listing on this page specific statements they find objectionable (and why), and to list specific sources which they feel do not meet WP:RS criteria. DaveApter (talk) 19:38, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
I stand by my statement. All the sources are too close to the subject. There should be plenty of good sources in mainstream media. Much of the articles text, e.g. lists of charities that his foundation donated too, seem like a public relations handout. The "Other organizations" section could be reduced to a sentence- Other organizations Erhard has helped form are the Hunger Project, Landmark Education and the Barbados group. That section isn't about him and hence not not biographical. Volunteer1234 (talk) 20:30, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
I've already suggested the section should be shortened, but that would be going from one extreme to another. DaveApter (talk) 09:28, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
It's hard to list all the objectionable references, but we could start with the first one- Werner Erhard (book) which has been criticized as a hagiography and also seems to be the basis for this article. Volunteer1234 (talk) 00:47, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
The biography by William W. Bartley is an essentially factual account written by a respected academic and published by an established publishing house. The fact that some individuals expressed an opinion describing it as a "hagiography" does not invalidate it as a Reliable Source. DaveApter (talk) 09:28, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
The article references this one book 33 times. That is not normal. Volunteer1234 (talk) 19:27, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
With respect, I think you are mistaken. Where an authoritative biography exists, it is quite usual for Wikipedia articles to refer extensively to it. To take one example completely at random, the article on William J. Donovan references the authorised biography by Douglas Waller (which is, incidentally, sympathetic to its subject) over 70 times out of 88 footnotes. However, I'm not interested in further verbal sparring with you. If you want to improve this article, could you please make some specific suggestions for edits here so we can see if there's a consensus for them? DaveApter (talk) 11:28, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Given that no-one has contested my comments since they were made over eight months ago, and that there has been no evidence of puffery provided, I plan to remove the puffery tag. DaveApter (talk) 17:20, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Changes to Article

Please use this talk page for proposed changes to this article.MLKLewis (talk) 21:59, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Quote by James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton

Regarding this edit:

As I said in my edit summary, this is kind of tedious to explain, so I will try to be brief.

There are several issues. The first, and most glaring, is that this paragraph isn't about Erhard, it's about Erhard Seminars Training (E.S.T.). This paragraph was already copied to that article a few years ago, where it more obviously belongs. This article is already quite bloated, so this redundancy isn't helpful. This is also editorializing. Using a source which says negative things about Est to indirectly criticize Erhard is inappropriate.

Before digging up this source to summarize what it says neutrally about Erhard, evaluate whether or not it is due and proportionate.

To say that J. Gordon Melton and James R. Lewis are controversial would be an understatement. Melton has done work on behalf of Scientology public relations groups such as Americans Preserving Religious Liberty. Both Melton and Lewis have very strong histories of being supportive of some new religious movements, including Scientology. This reference was added to the article by an editor who was later topic-banned from Scientology, for pro-Scientology editing. As a reminder, Scientology has openly feuded with Erhard.

I do not consider this book a reliable source at all, but I recognize that this position may not have consensus. Regardless, WP:CONTEXTMATTERS, and providing the necessary context for any of this seem WP:UNDUE. When we provide an opinion, we must contextualize that opinion. In this case, attribution and a wikilink seem insufficient.

@AlsoWukai:, if you would still like to include this paragraph, please rewrite it to more closely match what it says about Erhard at a bare minimum. Thanks. Grayfell (talk) 20:28, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Since there has been no response, I have moved the content to a different part of the article where it is more directly relevant, and rephrased the content to more closely match the cited source. Grayfell (talk) 21:45, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

Recent Edits

I have reverted the article to a stable state it was in for several years before recent edits. Let's discuss and align on individual edits to improve the article here on the talk page before making changes to the article.MLKLewis (talk) 22:39, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

See WP:OWN. Multiple editors have been working to clean-up this mess. Since, per the above discussions, you do not have consensus for this content, the burden is now on you to gain consensus. Further, much of this content was completely inappropriate. Grayfell (talk) 20:12, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
I agree that there have been some constructive edits of late and I am happy to work with editors here to sort through them one at a time.
I will begin with your recent edit of [4] which seriously flies in the face of what you yourself argued in the section above this one. You did not simply "move the content to a different part of the article" and rephrase. You included material about which you yourself said, "This is editorializing. Using a source which says negative things about Est to indirectly criticize Erhard is inappropriate." Additionally you inserted material about John Henley and Lifespring about which I can again directly quote you: "There are several issues. The first, and most glaring, is that this paragraph isn't about Erhard." MLKLewis (talk) 21:18, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
As I indicated above, I support removing the paragraph entirely. If retained, it need to include important context. The cherry-picked version you restored is indeed editorializing, but that doesn't, necessarily, mean that any use of this source will always be editorializing. The source directly compares Erhard to Lewis. A comparison to another person is about both people, and explaining the context used by this source in direct terms is a good way to avoid editorializing. Grayfell (talk) 00:21, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Erhard's later work

Recent edits by editor Grayfell gave me the opportunity to take a closer look at the references I was using and to get clear about primary and secondary sourcing.  Thanks for the opportunity for clarity. In looking more closely I found that quite a few of the references in the notes are primary source - and are not needed.  There were also a good number of references that actually are secondary sources, but looked like primary sources from the way they were cited.  I removed the primary sources and summarized and cited the secondary sources.  Given the three aspects (writing, lecturing and teaching) I kept it down to six references. Please discuss any issues you have with this edit here on the talk page so that we can come to consensus – thanks!MLKLewis (talk) 21:46, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

These six references are poor, so the problem remains. Examples of his publications are still primary. Press releases cannot be combined to form a broad conclusions like this, for multiple reasons. Combining sources is WP:SYNTH, and press releases are neither independent, nor reliable, making them poor for anything other than filling-in non-controversial details of better sources. This source merely mentions, in passing, that Erhad appeared at one event in 2009. It cannot be used to imply anything about his habits since 2007. It is also a blog of some sort, and should only be used with attribution, and only with restraint.
It is still not clear what any of these sources accomplish unless their were added to support a prior claim. That is not how WP:V works. Please find reliable, independent sources, and summarize from there. Do not attempt to go backwards to support prior knowledge, as this is misusing sources to insert WP:OR. Grayfell (talk) 22:04, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, articles should primarily be based on reliable, independent sources. The article absolutely should not compile editor-selected examples of primary sources to support factual claims which are not directly supported. Just as importantly, those facts should always be supported by by a reliable, independent source. Specific details can come from primary sources, but conclusions must be made by sources, not editors. This is the basis of encyclopedic writing. Anything else is WP:OR at best.
To repeat, the majority of the article should be cited to independent sources, with primary sources used to fill-in specific details, or possibly to provide a response to disputed claims or accusations. This would be decided on a case-by-case basis. Grayfell (talk) 22:22, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
I have gathered 8 reliable independent secondary sources and summarized what they state for the Introduction. I am including these sources here for editors of this page to view:
1) Lucy Kellaway in The Financial Times (April 28, 2018) writes, “Erhard is an autodidact… Jensen is emeritus professor at Harvard Business School… Together they are writing academic articles and touring the world’s best universities.”
2) Andrew Hill in “The only way is ethics: Andrew Hill on where Erhard and Jensen are coming from", The Financial Times (April 28, 2018) “Werner Erhard and Michael Jensen look an unlikely pairing but their leadership teaching fits into a broad stream of business education and research about ethics and integrity.”
3) Peter Haldeman in The New York Times, November 28, 2015, writes, “In his ninth decade, he is consumed with his latest mission, putting in 10-hour days lecturing and teaching three courses a year in addition to completing the textbook.”
4) Bartley J. Madden (August 28, 2012) “Management's Worldview: Four Critical Points about Reality, Language, and Knowledge Building to Improve Organization Performance”, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 22:4, 334-346. “Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, and their Barbados Group colleagues (hereafter EJB) have developed a new paradigm of individual, group, and organizational performance. The theoretical underpinnings of this approach are covered in a series of working papers… A centerpiece of EJB's new paradigm is its emphasis on integrity”
5) James Kerr (December 17, 2013). Legacy, Constable & Robinson ”In a paper published at Harvard Business School, Michael C. Jensen, Werner Erhard, and Steve Zaffron explore the relationship between integrity and performance.”
6) Suzan Oran and Scott Conard (November 1, 2014). The Art of Medical Leadership, Wheatmark, Inc., “These concepts are starting to become less rare in both business and medicine. There is a unique, high-level course titled Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model by Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen and Kari L. Granger. This course has been taught at several universities, including the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in June 2012 and the University of British Columbia in June 2013.
7) Thornburgh, Nathan (April 10, 2011) Change We Can (Almost) Believe In, Time Magazine, “The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. It is about as old as the nation…But it was Werner Erhard who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded est seminars in 1971.
8) Mistlberger, P. T. (2012) Rude Awakening: PHe has written, lectured and taught on integrity, leadership, personal and organizational performance, and transformational principles.erils, Pitfalls, and Hard Truths of the Spiritual Path, John Hunt Publishing, “Erhard - whose birth name was Jack Rosenberg, and who changed his name to 'Werner Erhard' while on a plane - essentially initiated the phenomenon of public workshops for large groups of people, in the 1970s… A natural autodidact, he became extraordinarily successful as a teacher of transformational principles...” MLKLewis (talk) 00:49, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

At this point is is apparent that you are compiling sources and cherry-picking from those sources to support your preferred, highly promotional wording without regard for context, due weight, or neutrality. Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion. If you you do not see the problem with this bloated, PR-like prose in the lede of the article, we have more serious issues and may have to take this to a noticeboard. If you cannot summarize sources neutrally, you should not be editing. Grayfell (talk) 22:24, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

I am at a loss to understand what you find so objectionable in the statement "He has written, lectured and taught on integrity, leadership, personal and organizational performance, and transformational principles". This seems to me to be a purely factual statement which is both more informative and more accurate than the one which you have reinstated stating that he taught "self improvement". Could you please explain?
Your earlier complaint that the assertions relied on primary sources was entirely justified, but this was rectified by Lewis finding these secondary references in publications which clearly meet WP:RS. What is your justification for removing these citations? If you have an opinion that the article is unbalanced, surely the solution would be to add material which presents an alternative perspective, assuming that you can find suitable authoritative statements backed by reliable secondary sources.
In any case, it strikes me as high-handed to make a block revert without first discussing your concerns here and attempting to reach a consensus. DaveApter (talk) 12:21, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
I dispute that it is factual, but further, just because something is factual doesn't mean it belongs in the article, much less the lead of the article. As just one example of the problems with this approach, "transformational principles" is very cryptic jargon, at best. I have already discussed above the problems with this phrase, but to go into details, readers will not know, nor can they possibly know, what that means when it is presented as a defining trait. "Organizational performance" is similarly WP:BUZZWORDy at best, and naked promotion at worst. His association with "universities" would need context to avoid name-dropping. Simply mentioning that a lecturer has lectured, or that he's "published and presented" at.... a certain group of schools, is promotional, but it is arbitrarily highlighting a specific factoid devoid of all context for obviously promotional ends. It isn't sufficient to Cobble together many obscure sources, some of which do not appear to be reliable, to support these factoids. Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion. Grayfell (talk) 21:28, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply, and let me start by establishing where there is common ground: naturally I agree that Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion, and that buzzwords should be avoided, and that it is not necessarily appropriate to state everything factual in an encyclopedia article, especially in the lead.
Having said that, I must point out that I find myself unable to agree with other opinions you expressed in the above paragraph, specifically:
  1. While agreeing that "just because something is factual doesn't mean it belongs in the article", surely it is appropriate in a Biographical piece to give some indication of what the subject has been doing for the last 28 years, and a succinct single-sentence summary might be incorporated into the lead?
  2. Although you refer to '...many obscure sources, some of which do not appear to be reliable...' we are talking about the Financial Times, the New York Times, Time Magazine, Harvard University and Dartmouth Medical College. Which of these do you consider obscure or unreliable?
  3. "Transformational Principles" may have qualified as a buzzword in the 1970s, but hardly does so today; a google search on the term produced over 18 million results. Similarly "Organizational performance" produced 235 million results, including a Wikipedia article on the topic. In any case, these phrases were what was stated in the sources.
  4. I cannot agree that it is "promotional" to state that he lectured and presented at various universities - this is a statement of fact which is either true or false (and verified by suitable secondary sources). And we are not talking about obscure third-rank institutions, even if it would be excessive to list them all in the lead. DaveApter (talk) 13:46, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

For what he has been doing, I think there must be a better way to explain his activities than this. This phrasing is so unusual, I cannot recall any other article which explains this in such stilted and distracting way. If he is a lecturer, he is presumed to be lecturing. If he is a teacher, he is presumed to be teaching, etc. To highlight that he does the activities associated with his career is strange, and seems almost like damning with faint praise.

All sources must be judged in context. The sources used for this edit were clearly added after-the-fact, since the wording was essentially unchanged from previous, badly sourced versions. It is not a great habit to use online sources without including the links. This behavior, regardless of intent, discourages editors from checking them, which hinders verifiability.

Here are the sources, or versions of the sources with links I could evaluate:

  • Kellaway, Lucy (April 28, 2018). "Lunch with the FT: Werner Erhard". The Financial Times.
  • Hill, Andrew (April 28, 2018). "The only way is ethics: Andrew Hill on where Erhard and Jensen are coming from". The Financial Times.
It appears that "The Only Way is Ethics..." is a full duplicate of "Lunch with FT", which is behind a paywall. This article was published in 2012, not 2018. They are the exact same source. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but both were published in the same place by the same outlet. Why double-dip like this if not for WP:REFBOMBing?
The NYT source goes into a broad range of details, and using it to summarize this specific point is missing the forest for the trees. Using a source only for the most routine, least interesting possible detail, while discarding all the rest, suggests this could be a form of cherry-picking. That the source is used for an idiosyncratic, flattering phrasing makes the risk much higher.
What is the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce? Who is Bartley J. Madden? This obscure work is already cited in the article in far, far too much detail. This quote suggests that this is more biz-speak, and is not improving the article. Wikipedia is a general audience encyclopedia. We should actively work to stamp-out these kinds of buzzwords.
The James Kerr book is a single passing mention which says nothing of substance about Erhard. It mentions his name once, as one of three authors of a paper cited by the author. The book may or may not be reliable in some contexts, but doesn't appear to be reliable in this context. It cannot be used to imply something which it doesn't specifically say. It doesn't say anything about his activities in general, only a single paper he wrote, but which was not necessarily published in the conventional sense. It is not a particularly good source even for that, since it misspells the primary name of the author (giving both "Jensen" and "Jansen" on the same page) and doesn't appear to provide a date or the journal, or really any info on the study itself.
The cited pages are another passing mention of a specific course. It says nothing about Erhard at all other than that he was involved in a course in some capacity, and cites a working paper from 5 years previously (perhaps the same paper as the Kerr book). The introduction to this book "honors" Erhard in the acknowledgments. Even here very little info about him or his activities is provided.
This mentions Erhard by name once, on page 2. Erhard is discussed in reference to his activities in the 1970s. His refusal to offer pee-breaks is discussed. "Integrity", "tranformation", and "performance" are not mentioned. Therefore, this source is not reliable in this context, because it doesn't support the attached statement.
I don't know who P.T. Mistlberger is, nor whether or not this book is generally reliable. Worldcat lists copies in 13 libraries, which isn't a lot, and this is a red flag. The source appears to be highly critical of Erhard for kicking-off the "Enlightenment Industry". It would not be appropriate to cite this source without evaluating all this much more carefully.

So again, as a whole, I don't think these are reliable in context.

"Transformational Principles", in quotation marks, produces about 13,000 hits, not 238 million. At least it does for me, but Google is not consistent with this, which is just one of many reasons these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I am not concerned with how popular a phrase is, I am concerned with how informative it is to readers. This term is not informative, despite sounding vaguely grandiose and impressive. If we cannot explain to readers what this means, in neutral, encyclopedic language, we shouldn't be stating this as a simple fact.

Does the Wikipedia article for organizational performance help readers to understand what Erhard does and talks about? I do not think it does. Instead, I think it is a badly-sourced article which supports that this is, at best, biz-speak jargon. The Madden source above further supports this, since it lists this as just one routine entry in a list, along with individual performance and group performance. Neither of these are automatically informative terms, even if they were not red-links. Grayfell (talk) 08:38, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your continued discussion with a view to improving this article. Some of your comments on the sources are however mistaken:
  1. The FT pieces by Kellaway and Hill are two entirely separate items in different sections of the paper. (They are presented together on the same page on the website, which may have contributed to the misunderstanding). The Kellaway one is a fairly frivolous entertainment piece, although it does substantiate the fact that Erhard and Jensen had been making presentations and giving lectures at a number of major universities and training institutions. The Hill piece is a more serious item about the benefits of - and the need for - higher ethical standards in business, and Erhard's contribution to this understanding.
  2. The NY Times piece does indeed relate a broad range of issues regarding Erhard's history and activities, and various controversies surrounding him. Most of these are already well-covered in existing sections of this Wikipedia article. The point is that it does clearly verify that he has been providing training on leadership and integrity to academic and business personnel.
  3. The Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce is, as the name suggests, a journal for a certain segment of business professionals, and appears to have respectable editorial standards. The contention that is is "obscure" does not disqualify it from being reliable for our purposes. B. J. Madden is a former CEO of Credit Suisse, and a respected economic researcher - but this is irrelevant anyway since he is not being quoted to provide an expert opinion, rather the ref is cited to substantiate the fact that Erhard has published papers which have been taken seriously in the business world.
  4. The Kerr book actually contains a two or three page discussion of the impact of the ideas presented in the cited Erhard paper on performance in business and in sport.
In short, there is plenty of reliable confirmation for the assertion that "He has written, lectured and taught on integrity, leadership, personal and organizational performance, and transformational principles." Maybe the phrasing is a little clumsy and could be improved? To say that he was a 'lecturer' - rather than 'has lectured' would be misleading as it would imply an employed post rather than an occasional activity.
Similarly, there is adequate justification for the statement: "Erhard’s work on integrity, leadership and performance is published and presented at universities". Again the phrasing might be improved, perhaps with an indication of the number of such institutions? Especially if some examples are given (in the body of the article, rather than the lead).
Regarding your objection to some of the specialised terms: in my view none of them would present problems in understanding to any native speaker of English. "Transformation" in its dictionary sense of "a complete change in the appearance or character of something or someone, especially so that that thing or person is improved" (Cambridge University Dictionary) is in common usage; but we would lose little by eliminating that phrase if you insist. However I would suggest that "personal performance", "organizational performance", and "group performance" are all examples of everyday speech which present no difficulty in grasping their meaning. DaveApter (talk) 16:00, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
I stand corrected on the FT sources. If one provides context for his position on ethics, that context should be indicated in the article. Fluff pieces are not useful for establishing encyclopedic significance, and should not be used simply because they are at-hand.
It was probably a mistake on my part to focus so heavily on individual sources, because my underlying point was lost. Going through each source, it is clear this was an attempt to "back-fill" a prior assumption with whatever sources could be cobbled together, such as fluff pieces and passing mentions. I do not think someone who is researching Erhard from an outside perspective would choose these specific sources, nor would they summarize them in this way. Therefore, I do not think this was a good-faith attempt to summarize reliable sources. Instead, this appears to be an attempt to support preferred content without whatever sources could be found. Why was this awkward and evasive wording originally chosen? I don't know, nor do I really care. It doesn't belong for multiple reasons, and that's the important thing.
To put it another way, there is barely any common thread between all of these sources. How to summarize them could easily be disputed. In fact, I am disputing it right now. The phrasing is not merely clumsy, it is unnecessary and it is not supported by these sources as a proportionate, neutral description. In this regard, these additions strongly appear to be hagiography. They are adding some details while ignoring others based on some abstract, idiosyncratic opinion on what is relevant. This is not an appropriate approach for a biography.
As an example of what I am trying to explain, a summary of the some of these sources might be this:
In 1971 Erhard founded EST (later renamed The Forum) as a platform for him to provide courses on personal transformation. According to Time Magazine, courses Erhard taught at EST were "legendarily uncomfortable".[time source] Erhard's ideas and training have had a major and lasting influence on the self-help movement and management training.[nyt and maybe ft source, others should be easy to find for this point] Coinciding with bad publicity in 1991, which Erhard attributes to a dispute with the Church of Scientology, Erhard sold The Forum and reduced activity during that decade. In 2004 he worked with economist Michael C. Jensen to design a course on integrity in leadership which has been taught, by Erhard and others, at several universities and elsewhere.[nyt source]
This is not a proposal, and it's not necessarily a great summary of these sources, but as an example, it provides specific context and details from those sources. It also, hopefully, allows readers to follow wikilinks which provide more information, if they want it. We should use sources to provide basic information to readers. We should not try to shove "Delphic phraseology" down their throats, to borrow from the NYT source. That should be the goal of the article: to explain to readers based on a neutral summary of sources. Grayfell (talk) 00:29, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
Thank you for the constructive discussion and helpful illustration. Although 'not a proposal' I think your suggested phrasing is excellent, and I may well use it as an outline for an edit of my own later. DaveApter (talk) 12:24, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Grayfell, what is going on in this article? I just removed the fattest resume I've seen in a long time. Drmies (talk) 15:59, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, it's hagiography. Werner Erhard's public success is partly built on his image as a ruggedly individualistic autodidact. His style is either academic or pseudo-academic depending on who you ask, so this stuff is over-emphasized. Sources are relatively skeptical that it's anything more than image and name-dropping. For example, Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training suggests that none of these experiences of large-group awareness training have any lasting positive effect. As I said above a few years ago, it mostly boils down to inscrutably vague buzzwords like "Transformational Principles". Grayfell (talk) 21:17, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
Haha, Grayfell, if it's an article on a book and it's clean but longer than it should be, you know it's Cirt. I think you've been doing a yeoman's job on this article--but why is MLKLewis, who's pretty clearly a WP:SPA and COI editor, still working here? Drmies (talk) 21:22, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
No doubt we all look forward to a created future in which Wikipedia features a brilliantly-written and clear article on "transformational principles". - 131.203.30.137 (talk) 01:33, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

One could say that the written interaction between Drmies and Grayfell reveals a bias on the part of each of these editors – “depending on who you ask.” I am not qualified to comment on Drmies removal of what he recently removed. However, given the removal of books and publications, if one is interested in Erhard’s actual work, there is now nothing in the article to support one in finding it. Also, if one is interested in finding what scholars reported about their study of Erhard’s work, there is now no support in doing so.

I also note that in what was said above, there are accusations made based on opinion and without evidence.

Moreover, people who have participated in Erhard’s work, or more pointedly scholars who have studied his work, might say that both Drmies and Grayfell – evidenced by their statements about Erhard’s work – have a naive understanding of Erhard’s work. As Roderick Munday says in his Glossary of terms in Heidegger’s Being and Time when speaking about Being, “Facticity ... has a complicated structure which cannot even be grasped by people who have a naive ontological understanding.” -- Lars Steiner (talk) 20:12, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree with the previous comments. The exchange between Drmies and Grayfell not only indicates strong personal opinions regarding the subject of this article, but also clear breach of civility and a refusal to assume good faith. I am baffled by the wholesale removal of all the links to Erhard's recent work. It is surely entirely normal in BLP articles to have a section listing publications by the subject, and also a section for 'Further reading'? Could we have an explanation of the rational for that removal please?
As I commented on this talk page about three years ago:
"I can see that it is a challenge to produce an article on this individual because opinions on him are so polarised; some people see Erhard as a hero, and others as an unprincipled charlatan. Whatever form the article takes, one camp or the other is bound to be dissatisfied (if not both)."
This clearly remains the case. Could we please have a more cooperative approach, and more discussion before making sweeping changes? Thank you. DaveApter (talk) 10:45, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
DaveApter, I don't know who you're thanking or that you are thanking them for, but you are clearly calling for my and Grayfell's attention. If you want that attention, you might could try to be a bit less polarizing. Or assume less. I don't know who Erhard is and I don't care. I care about Wikipedia not being a repository for resumes (and these edits, I maintain, are article improvements). And where have I been uncivil--on this talk page, that is? Are you talking about my comment about MLKLewis? Their contribution history is pretty clear, it seems to me, and they have no fewer than 235 edits in this article, one tenth of their total production on Wikipedia. I suggest that you drop the personal attacks, and that I also suggest that this whole business of "polarized opinions" should be applied to the secondary literature, not to the editors--unless you are willing to place yourself in the camp of the Erhard fans. Because if you put me in the charlatan camp, then you are the one who is displaying a stunning amount of bad faith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drmies (talk • contribs) 14:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • So, I am being chastised for even daring to mention that some people have described his style as pseudo-academic? Is that actually a controversial observation? Nah. Here, the implication is that Drmies and I are "biased" (*gasp*) because we might have strong opinions. Or maybe "strong opinions" are just opinions another editor disagrees with, it's not really defined. This doesn't hold up for a lot of reasons. The article is damaged if it's only written by people who care so little about a topic that they cannot be bothered to form an opinion. The first step to addressing bias is to acknowledge it.
Instead, this stance of artificial detachment implies that those who are deemed to be "biased" must have "a naive ontological understanding". The unstated alternative must be that those who truly understand Erhard would not remove all of those paragraphs of content. That's too convenient. I must admit I don't find it particularly insulting merely because it's comically obvious.
If there are any policy or guideline-based reasons for including that material, feel free to discuss them. My understanding of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines is that this material doesn't belong. Grayfell (talk) 03:11, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
My apologies if anyone was offended by my remarks. That was not my intention. My italicised quote of an earlier comment above was not intended as an accusation of any individual; it was a reminder that this is a contentious topic and a plea for all contributors to keep cool heads and discuss matters to seek consensus before making sweeping alterations.
The mutually congratulatory exchange between Drmies and Grayfell above seemed to have an odd tone to me, and not to be relevant to the purpose of this page, which is to discuss constructively proposals for improving the article.
Accusing another editor of having a COI without producing any evidence to support the accusation seemed to me to be a clear example of a failure to assume good faith.
It had not occurred to me that Drmies might "not know Erhard is", since they discussed him (in the course of an entirely constructive debate) at some length on the Landmark Worldwide talk page a few years ago.
Since - as I said above - it is common practice on BLP pages to include a list of the subject's publications, and also common practice to have a 'Further reading' section, I was not aware of any policy that precluded that. I would be grateful if you could direct me to the relevant guidelines. DaveApter (talk) 11:49, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
Even where it is common practice, there are a lot of caveats.
First, all pages must be evaluated on their own merits. Just because it may be appropriate on one page doesn't mean it's automatically appropriate on this page.
Second, lists of publications are typically limited to people who are known, in part of whole, for having authored works. An author is generally going to be understood as someone who has written books or plays. The article currently does a poor job of supporting this. To make sure this isn't an oversight, I looked at WorldCat. I had a very hard time finding good examples of works by. There is a lot of search noise, but I found very, very few books which list him as the sole author. All of those appear obscure and short. OCLC 186984316 for example, is only held by a single library, in Sweden. (Most of the rest of the results are for a different person with the same name) From this, I am not confident that Werner Erhard should be described in the lead of the article as an "author". We shouldn't take this kind of thing for granted.
Third, even when such publications are included, they require editorial restraint. The previous version included "Selected" works where he is the "lead author", but who is "selecting" these? For example, why was a single brief local newspaper article included? To put it another way, who decided that Erhard's opinion on Ethiopia in 1989 is encyclopedically significant? This kind of thing strongly looks like padding. Would an impartial scholar actually tell someone that to understand Werner Erhard, they should read Werner Erhard's opinion, published in 1989 in the New Hampshire Union Leader, about famines in Ethiopia?
Fourth, a list of works and a 'further reading' section are handled differently on Wikipedia. Per WP:EL, links should not be in the body of the article. If a primary source is often cited by independent sources as useful (either because of what it says, or as an informative example) then summarize what that source says and then add it to a further reading section. If, instead, and individual editor merely decided that it was interesting, that's editorializing and it should be removed.
Grayfell (talk) 23:05, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the thorough research, and for the detailed and courteous reply. To be clear, I have no judgement either way on the merits of the works whose references were removed. I just found it alarming that such a large volume of material was removed wholesale without any prior discussion or explanation, especially as this is a controversial article and has a long history of having been a WP:BATTLEGROUND. It was also maybe unfortunate that you commented approvingly on a quote from Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training, which was substantially created by permanently blocked editors Smee and Cirt (who may or may not be the same individual), who were obsessive editors on this page and inserted a great deal of negative POV content. DaveApter (talk) 15:41, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
Sorry, either I misunderstand you, or I think you are very confused about how Wikipedia works. Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training is a book published in 1990, written by Jeffrey D. Fisher, Roxane Cohen Silver, Jack M. Chinsky, Barry Goff, and Yechiel Klar. One of the authors of the Wikipedia article about this book has since been blocked. This, by itself, has almost nothing at all to do with this particular discussion. If you have evidence that the author of that article was also one of the authors of the book itself, and you also think this editing was inappropriate or damaged the article, you can that share evidence, cautiously, at either that article's talk page, or at WP:COIN. If you dispute the use of that book as a reliable source, explain why directly, but don't go hunting for ways to discredit a source without a good reason. Grayfell (talk) 22:02, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
Yes, you misunderstood me. I had been hoping that we could move on to constructive discussion on improving this article, rather than point scoring over peripheral issues. DaveApter (talk) 11:48, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
All things considered, I've shown plenty of patience for explaining how I think this article could be improved over the past few years. Your comment was casting aspersions by connecting my comment to a blocked sock. If you have a real problem and you can back it up, spit it out or take it to a noticeboard, otherwise rethink your approach. "Point scoring" indeed.
A published academic book about Werner Erhard's courses are about as basic and on-topic as this talk page could possibly get. It is not a peripheral issue, and I mentioned that source (almost two months ago) specifically as an indication of how reliable, independent sources discuss this topic.
Grayfell (talk) 05:10, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
A couple of years ago we had an extensive civil and constructive discussion on improving the article (earlier in this section). I don't find the aggressive and combative tone of your recent comments helpful. DaveApter (talk) 10:08, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
How ironic. Grayfell (talk) 19:36, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

NPOV

I have tagged this article for a review of its neutrality. To start the discussion, I would like to call attention to the following problems:

  • The section on Erhard Seminars Training ("est") is one-sided and promotional in tone.
  • The content of the "Critics and disputes" section is tendentious and also serves to decontextualize controversies which might otherwise appear in the chronological "Career" section. This decontextualization interferes with both a neutral presentation of the controversies (e.g. framing them as vilification by "the media") and of the subject's career as a whole.
  • Over its history, the article appears to have sustained campaigns of edits by accounts that were later identified as sockpuppets (e.g. Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Eastbayway#Landmark_Education_Group_of_Sock_or_Meat_Puppets). It's not clear whether the net effect of those edits has been assessed or redressed.

I see that a number of editors have attempted to make reforms, but find little evidence that the current state of the article reflects consensus. I hope that this article will receive more editorial attention and I would like to participate in that process. In the mean time, I think that readers are best served by a notice that the article may not comply with Wikipedia's policies.

– Shunpiker (talk) 20:06, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

"accredited by the United Nations"

This article repeatedly claims THP is "accredited" by the United Nations. In reality the UN does not accredit NGOs. What happened is that THP applied for and received Roster Consultative Status in 1985. Any NGO could request that (and well over 6000 NGOs have) and the only requirements are that: the NGO must be registered with the government for over 2 years, must have headquarters, a democratically-adopted constitution, authority to speak for its members, a representative structure, appropriate mechanisms of accountability and democratic and transparent decision-making processes. 1 The UN does not check if the NGO meets these requirements.

The roster lists NGOs that ECOSOC or the UN Secretary-General considers can make "occasional and useful contributions to the work of the Council or its subsidiary bodies."

The website states: "A profile in this database and on this website does not in and of itself connote any affiliation with the United Nations, unless such affiliation is expressly indicated, i.e., by identifying the type of ECOSOC consultative status held by an NGO".2

Instead of saying they filled out a form in 1985 and got added to a list of NGOs the article makes it seems as if the UN lends credibility to THP. Polygnotus (talk) 11:06, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Trained by Lee Iacocca

The article currently claims he was trained by Lee Iacocca, but all I can find on Google is Werner claiming that Lee was his boss. Which is kind of a non-story because Lee was the boss of a lot of people. Should this even be mentioned? Polygnotus (talk) 12:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Promo/puffery

I deleted the following text:

"While largely self-educated,[13][14][15] Erhard was influenced by or worked closely with philosophers,[16][17] leadership and business academics,[18][19] physicists,[20][21][22] and Zen masters.[23][24] Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman said of Erhard, "He had no particular formal training in anything, but he understood things as well as anyone I'd ever seen, and I've been around a lot of smart people in academia."[25]"

This kind of promotional text has no place in an encyclopedic article. If you like the dude so much, that's cool, marry him. Don't post a hagiography on Wikipedia. Polygnotus (talk) 13:15, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Same book cited 27 times

Werner Erhard (book) is currently cited 27 times in this article. The lede of that article contains the text: "Reviewers generally commented that the book was favorable to Erhard, and a number of critics felt that it was unduly so, or lacked objectivity, citing Bartley's close relationship to Erhard. Responses to the writing were mixed; while some reviewers found it well written and entertaining, others felt the tone was too slick, promotional, or hagiographic.". The article shouldn't rely so much on one imperfect and nonneutral source. Polygnotus (talk) 13:24, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Creative use of sources

The article currently contains the following text:

"Erhard led all the early est courses himself, but by the mid-1970s he had trained ten others (doctors, attorneys, and businessmen and -women) to do so."

But if you actually look in the source it says:

"There were ten est trainers other than Erhard by the mid 1970s."

Nothing is mentioned about their previous occupations. So I think it is important that someone compares the references with the text in the article. Polygnotus (talk) 13:59, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Synthesis of sources

There are many WP:SYNTH problems. One of the worst examples is the Impact section:


"Erhard's work has impacted millions of people's lives[76] through his programs for individuals, organizations[77] and business leaders.[78]"

[76] says: "Block, Peter (2009). Community: The Structure of Belonging. Berrett-Koehler.“Werner has developed programs that have touched millions of lives.” "

Not a neutral source but a guy he worked with.

[77] says: " Wakefield, Dan (2004). Spiritually Incorrect: Finding God in All The Wrong Places. SkyLight Paths.“Erhard's "technology of transformation" drew more than a million people to his est training … Over the past 22 years, more than a million people around the globe – including business executives, NASA officials, juvenile delinquents, government bureaucrats, federal prisoners, and mainstream religious leaders have done Erhard’s seminars.” "

More than one million people is not the same as millions. A bunch of individuals are mentioned, but no organizations.

[78] says: " Kotler, Steven; Wheal, Jamie (2017). Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Dey Street Books.“While est itself made an impact, with almost one million people going through those original seminars, Landmark, the latest incarnation of Erhard's teachings, boasts corporate clients including Microsoft, NASA, Reebok, and Lululemon.” "

Almost one million is certainly not millions. And the "business leaders" isn't even mentioned (that was source 77).

The only explanation I can think of is that someone has randomly inserted references which do not support the claims made in the article. Polygnotus (talk) 22:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Madden quote

I removed the following text:

Author Bartley J. Madden wrote of Erhard's, Jensen's, and their colleagues' new paradigm of individual, group, and organizational performance that it "emphasizes how one's worldview shapes and constrains each individual's perceptions. The paradigm takes one to the source of performance, which is not available by merely explaining performance through linear cause and effect analysis", that "the source of performance resides in how actions correlate naturally with the way circumstances occur", and that "language (including what is said and unsaid in conversations) plays a dominant role in how situations occur and so is instrumental in improving performance".<ref name="madden">{{cite journal|last1 = Madden|first1 = Bartley J.|title = Management's Worldview: Four Critical Points about Reality, Language, and Knowledge Building to Improve Organization Performance|journal = Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce|date = August 28, 2012|volume = 22|issue = 4|pages= 334–346|quote = Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, and their Barbados Group colleagues (hereafter EJB) have developed a new paradigm of individual, group, and organizational performance|doi = 10.1080/10919392.2012.723586|doi-access = free}}</ref>

This is not encyclopedic information. Polygnotus (talk) 23:05, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Revert

@MLKLewis: Reverting all the improvements is basically vandalism at this point. Please explain what you have a problem with and why and don't just delete all the improvements. Polygnotus (talk) 20:42, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

@Polygnotus: My intent in putting the article back to it's consensus version was so that we can go forward objectively and agree on changes before implementing them in the article. You made roughly 2 dozen or so edits over a 10 hour period which resulted in deletions of entire sections. I do not agree that these were improvements and the manner in which they were done did not give other editors time to come to consensus. MLKLewis (talk) 00:27, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
@MLKLewis: That is not how it works. If it would be then no problems would ever get fixed and Wikipedia would be a dead project. The burden of proof is on those who want to include stuff. The article was in a terrible state. I have fixed many of the problems but there are many left. Compare the source material with what was in the article. People have used sources very very creatively. If you have any specific problems with any of the improvements I am willing to discuss them. I have ordered "Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of Est" from Amazon. Polygnotus (talk) 00:38, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Works & further reading

I deleted a giant list of links that are mostly only tangentially related to the topic and basically promo/spam.

This was deleted before but added back in. Polygnotus (talk) 11:22, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Many Wikipedia articles contain a section called Works. MOS:LAYOUTWORKS describes it as "a bulleted list, usually ordered chronologically, of the works created by the subject of the article." What was listed there before you deleted them were publications written by the subject of the article.
The Further reading section of an article contains a bulleted list of a reasonable number of works that a reader may consult for additional and more detailed coverage of the subject. What was there before you deleted them were 5 publications that provided readers additional material for them to investigate the topic further. (One of which you said you just purchased).
I fail to see how these were a "pov pushing, long list of stuff that isn't about Werner Erhard".
I am adding the sections back and based on the above guidelines, I will bullet them MLKLewis (talk) 01:58, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
@MLKLewis: A giant list of random stuff selected without any care or attention is not a good addition to the article. Please read WP:EL first before you add anything. My sister has written a couple of books and perhaps 100+ scientific papers. But you shouldn't add all of them to her article. And a random selection of them would also not improve the article. Polygnotus (talk) 02:01, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
I assume you haven't read Werner_Erhard_(book) but that book I bought is a great example of a non-neutral source that is pushing a POV (you can read about it in the article about the book). Polygnotus (talk) 02:11, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
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