Talk:Peter F. Paul

message: The chronological formatting dates to early, very POV versions of this page. I think the story would be much easier to follow if more conventionally organized. I will get to this when I have a chance, but I invite others to take a crack at it (other than the crowd of sock puppets who have been vandalizing the page). Uucp 18:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chronological formatting 

message: === Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge ===
I've removed the following passage:
:"[PFP] was awarded the George Washington Honor Medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge for his programs."
The reason is that I cannot find any indication that this is true. I've checked the Freedoms Foundation's website, and cannot find any mention of PFP. If anyone can find a source, please post it here. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:17, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we need to distinguish between two issues: What was the sentence?  How much time did he actually spend in prison?  Needless to say, we need sources for both.  Information on sentencing will probably be easier to find. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:33, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Multiple sources concur that he got eight years for the cocaine charge, and three years for fraud, to be served concurrently; he was paroled after three years but, after being caught violating parole, was sent back to jail. I don't know exactly how long this second stint behind bars lasted. The sock puppets used to edit this out but seem to have given up, now that sources are provided. Uucp 12:01, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fact checking 

message: I've removed the following passage:
:"[PFP] was awarded the George Washington Honor Medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge for his programs."
The reason is that I cannot find any indication that this is true. I've checked the Freedoms Foundation's website, and cannot find any mention of PFP. If anyone can find a source, please post it here. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:17, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge 

message: How long was PFP sentenced to jail for the 1979 crimes? Early versions of this page said 8 years, but the recent wave of sock puppets have changed it to five and a half. (originally posted by Uucp, moved here during refactoring)
:I think we need to distinguish between two issues: What was the sentence?  How much time did he actually spend in prison?  Needless to say, we need sources for both.  Information on sentencing will probably be easier to find. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:33, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Multiple sources concur that he got eight years for the cocaine charge, and three years for fraud, to be served concurrently; he was paroled after three years but, after being caught violating parole, was sent back to jail. I don't know exactly how long this second stint behind bars lasted. The sock puppets used to edit this out but seem to have given up, now that sources are provided. Uucp 12:01, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  1979 conviction 

message: First, an introduction to those who are viewing this page for the first time. There are a couple of accounts, which may in fact represent one person and his sock puppet, which have been trying to whitewash the "Peter F. Paul" story for some time. They did, in fact, create the original page here. Their changes typically include removing any reference to criminal activity on Paul's part (he has been convicted of several crimes), removing any reference to his time in jail (he has had at least three stints in jail, one of which they referred to as a "move to California"), long rants against Bill and Hillary Clinton, and accusations that anybody who tries to clean up this page are secret agents of the Clintons. They also delete paragraphs from this "talk" page if they don't like what's being discussed.
When pressed for sources, they have historically made them up (see discussion of this above). When pressed further, they have referred to legitimate sources but mischaracterized their contents (see for example, the 1987 article in the Los Angeles Times attacking Paul, which was cited by the Sock Puppets in the last round of changes in his favor). Recently, they have also taken to posting home movies on Google Videos and citing them, which creates for exhausting fact-checking because you have to watch the whole thing to see if it bolsters what they claim. In every case that I checked, they did not. For example, a video clip of the young Will Smith at the tournament of Roses Parade was footnoted to demonstrate that "Paul arranged for the Monument to the Constitution sculpture, dedicated by President Ronald Reagan, to lead the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1990, with Will Smith riding on the front of the float." In reality, nowhere did the clip mention the "monument", nor Ronald Reagan, nor Peter Paul.
: Paul was the founder and president of the American Spirit Foundation, Smith thanks the Foundation for choosing him to ride on a float carrying the monument.User: 24.196.167.104 (signing as Franklyn2 below, seemingly proving the sock puppet hypothesis)
I have tried to be generous to Paul throughout this edit. For example, the only printed source giving details on the "Cuban Coffee Caper" is a TIME Magazine article from 1979 that never mentions Paul's name. Other people are named as responsible, but never Paul. However, he claims that this is the event for which he was convicted, and I have accepted this.
Changes in This Last Big Edit (forgive me if I leave out anything, ask and I'll expand if needed)
1. removed white washing of the Cuban crimes by the sock puppets, reintroduced the notion that it was also intended as insurance fraud, as explicitly stated in TIME Magazine. 
2. Removed claim that he was visiting the Contras when he was busted travelling illegally to Canada. No proof of this has ever been shown anywhere.
: Information presented in court filings,USA v Paul et al, Eastern District of NY, 2001. User: 24.196.167.104 (signing as Franklyn2 below)
3. Added a citation on his claiming to have been successfully sued by Cuba
4. Removed irrelevant text in his discussion of the California Constitution job. I looked up the Los Angeles Times article that the Sock Puppets cited, and was amused to see that it was an editorial attacking Paul. Added some of their complaints against him.
5. Removed discussion of connections to Ronald Reagan unbacked by video evidence provided by the Sock Puppets.
: http://www.hillcap.org/default.php?page_id=6see washington post article with quotes about paul and reagan User: 24.196.167.104 (signing as Franklyn2 below)
6. Removed text about the Stan Lee Media story unbacked by video evidence provided.
7. Removed quasi-citation "as reported in TIME Magazine"; the maximum size of SLM has not yet been shown from any source, though it shouldn't be hard to find out.
8. Removed some anti-Clinton material that doesn't belong in this article.
9. Could not find any evidence of a Robert Novak column in 2001 titled "Hillary's Donor," so I removed that citation and the facts supposedly proved by it. 
: Here is article.
: "Hillary's Fundraiser, June 28, 2001 http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/hillary2.htm User: 24.196.167.104 (signing as Franklyn2 below)
10. Removed a long paragraph that sought to "soften" his securities fraud. The original text, citing the government's summary of the case, is easier to understand and more reputable.
11. Removed a couple of paragraphs at the end attacking Hillary Clinton. These may be appropriate on some other page, but they do not belong here.
Uucp 11:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  March 14, 2006 changes 

message: This page seemed to be well documented and balance in early May. Since then, it has been hijacked by partisans and amounts to a paean to his (mostly or entirely not noteworthy) business dealings, plus a long apologia for Mr. Paul's crimes, and accusations against his perceived enemies (especially Bill and Hilary Clinton). Uucp 17:20, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV dispute, Jul 4, 2006 

message: and probably the same person as "Franklyn2". Not only did they both appear, pushing identical ideologies, the minute Franklyn2 and his sock puppets disappeared, with similar spelling errors, but Cybertrend just left a message on my talk page and signed it "Scuzzler"! Uucp 13:48, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scuzzler and Cybertrend are the same person 

message: The /Comments page is meant to be a place to give a very brief assessment of the article and how it can be improved. The comments get transcluded - just look here and see how a novella sized comment breaks things!. --kingboyk 16:30, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved from [[Talk:Peter F. Paul/Comments]]. 

message: I was torn between assessing this at "Start" class or "Stub". If there was a class "Start over", I would've picked that.
Despite the volume of detail, or perhaps because of it and the lack of organization, this article is effectively unreadable. This may in part be due to the edit warring and ongoing NPOV dispute(s). The article and comments appear to violate a number of Wikipedia policies, among them: WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:NOT, WP:GF, WP:NPA and possibly WP:V. The guideline WP:RS also needs to be taken into account.
===Areas of improvement===
====Text: reorganized and trimmed====
The corpus of the text needs to be reorganized and in many areas trimmed substantially. Remember that Wikipedia is NOT a vehicle to convince the world of the truth. A substantial number of factual assertions in the text appear to be present for the purpose of making a POV argument. While a Wikipedia article may contain one or more POVs, from properly referenced verifiable materials, it is not a forum for convincing the reader of the correctness of a POV. Facts included for such "convincing" are better left out of the article.
While there is a lot of inter-relationship between subtopics in the text, the material needs to be teased a part as much as possible, so that each sub-topic is as fully presented as possible in as few textual units as possible. For example, the "Early career" section naturally breaks up into 5 (or maybe 6) paragraphs:
# Miami business activities
# the coffee fraud plan
# the cocaine arrest
# the legal aftermath of the fraud and arrest
# prison, parole violation
Although inter-reference between the paragraphs may be needed (such as, "While investigating X, Y was discovered"), there should not substantial facts on one sub-topic in the paragraph of another.
===Repetitive references in all paragraphs to Paul's felony conviction===
Clearly no one is paying attention to the last line of this paragraph-"there should not (be)substantial facts on one sub-topic in the paragraph of another.- becaue if they were there would not be multiple references to the same felony convictions.
====more trimming====
There's quite a bit of apparently irrelevant material in the article. For example, unless Paul worked with the architect I.M.Pei, or chose him for the project, there's no reason to drop his name into the article (especially since the CenTrust Tower project apparently began in 1980 and Paul's initial legal troubles appear to have occured before that.
====dates====
A number of significant events lack dates; the Castro/cofee plot appears to date to the late 70s but that's a guess from context.
==This comment is typical of the lazy, biased review of facts in the life of Peter Paul. The Cuban Coffee Caper was reported in Time Magazine in February, 1979. It was  footnote 5 to the story.( "The Cuban coffee caper", TIME Magazine, February 12, 1979.) Like all other dates, it is not hard to find if the Clinton acolyte who keeps editing the article pursuant to his POV continues making nonsensical observations. After being advised by a neutral arbiter that the disambiguity page was not to be used to characterize the subject of the biography, only to identify him, Uucp went back and reverted that reference to a clearly prejudicial one having no relationship to the information that distinguishes one peter paul from another.
Just like when he said that there was no article in the Washington Post that was quoted in the article- which turned out to be either a negligent statement or just another effort to sabotage the truth from being presented in this  complex web of biographical stories.
====headings====
# the text of headings are too long. Headings aren't the place for information, they're merely navigation markers. For example, "Founding, with Spider Man Creator Stan Lee, Stan Lee Media" should simple be "Stan Lee Media".
# sub-heads. Some of the material under a heading ought to broken up with sub-heads.
====Wikify====
There's a lot of appropriate wikilinks that ought to be in this material that are not present. 
===In closing===
Keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a reference work that's going to be used by different people for different purposes; very many people who will look at this article will only be interested in a portion of the material and won't want to wade through the whole thing to find what they neeed. For example, a Stan Lee fan might only want to read a few paragraphs releveant to Stan Lee Media. the work needs to be organized so that such material is findable, and such that such partial readers are not left with part of the story.
studerby 23:28, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: WPBiography assessment

message: Keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a reference work that's going to be used by different people for different purposes; very many people who will look at this article will only be interested in a portion of the material and won't want to wade through the whole thing to find what they neeed. For example, a Stan Lee fan might only want to read a few paragraphs releveant to Stan Lee Media. the work needs to be organized so that such material is findable, and such that such partial readers are not left with part of the story.
studerby 23:28, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: In closing

message: Now that we have confirmation of the sock-puppet status of Scuzzler, Cybertrend, Whistleblower, Franklyn2, etc., I have gone back and cleaned out the mess they had made of this article. I cut the length to about 1/3 of what it had been, removing all the editorialization and material from nonsense sources. I also removed material that had been inserted before real sources, but which did not really come from those sources. I updated the lawsuits section to reflect developments in 2006. I think it is probably still too long, but it's fair anyway, and as accurate as I can make it given the sources in the Nexis and ABI/Inform database.Uucp 19:28, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  August 21, 2006 cleanup 

message: I was wondering if he has been disbarred. He is a convicted felon, so I'd assume he would have been in most jurisdictions, but I'm not American so I don't know. The article states that "his license to practice law was revoked" so I'm guessing he was? Just asking because he should be added to the list of disbarred lawyers if he indeed was. --68.149.181.145 17:13, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect his license was suspended and never reinstated. Whether or not that equates to a disbarment probably depends on the laws in the states in which he was licensed. It may be a matter of semantics -- the suspension or revocation of a license is a matter of official record, while "disbarment" may be a colloquialism inadequate to capture this subtlety. Uucp 17:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disbarred? 

message: UUCP, I understand you are a politically motivated, and if you want to include information about Paul's felony in the article go right ahead... but please put it in the correct place.  Should you continue editing this page and including the line about Paul being a felon in the opening line... I will report you for vandalism. I hope you can be upstanding about this.
The following wikipedia articles are about famous people with criminal records:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tyson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Avary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Rhys_Meyers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_O'Neal
Notice, none of them mention their criminal activities in the opening line. Should you continue to follow your political inclination and vandalize this article I will be reporting you and requesting a WP:AIV and page protection.
: First, your claim that I am politically motivated is wrong and insulting. Second, I am not even slightly scared by your threat to "report me for vandalism." Third, the people you listed there are primarily known for their non-criminal activities. Check out the pages for Frank Abagnale, Susanna Mildred Hill, Carroll Hubbard, Frederick Emerson Peters, John Peter Galanis, or Martin Frankel for more appropriate examples. It is perfectly appropriate on wikipedia to describe a man who has been convicted of committing felonies four times as a criminal.
: I do not know why you feel the need to insult me for my honest description of this man's criminal career.
: I welcome inviting in a moderator if you disagree. Uucp (talk) 17:16, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think that would be a good idea. I will approach one tomorrow to moderate this dispute. I am not even American, and care not who ::wins, but I do understand propaganda when I see it. Will to my best to make sure this is resolved through normal wikipedia channels.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by W1z4rd (talk • contribs) 19:30, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  UUCP and the felon comment 

message: ===MEDCAB case underway===
I have accepted the MEDCAB case regarding Peter F. Paul for mediation. Please go to the case page at this link and note your acceptance of mediation and your acceptance of me as the MEDCAB mediator. -JodyB talk 14:05, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: MEDCAB

message: I have accepted the MEDCAB case regarding Peter F. Paul for mediation. Please go to the case page at this link and note your acceptance of mediation and your acceptance of me as the MEDCAB mediator. -JodyB talk 14:05, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: MEDCAB case underway

message: Substituted at 02:42, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 6 external links on Peter F. Paul. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050311195609/http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nye/pr/2005mar8.htm to http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nye/pr/2005mar8.htm
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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080929213941/http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Colbert_Report_Is_Hillary_Clinton_A_Muslim_Video to http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Colbert_Report_Is_Hillary_Clinton_A_Muslim_Video
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090906054408/http://electioninspection.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/is-barack-obama-a-teflon-candidate/ to http://electioninspection.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/is-barack-obama-a-teflon-candidate/
*Added archive https://archive.is/20080915224629/http://www.peterfpaul.com/2008/08/26/stan-lee-sues-peter-paul-for-blogging-libel-in-100k-illegal-donation-to-hillary-clinton/ to http://www.peterfpaul.com/2008/08/26/stan-lee-sues-peter-paul-for-blogging-libel-in-100k-illegal-donation-to-hillary-clinton/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060617215820/http://thehollywoodreporter.com/thr/business/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000989551 to http://thehollywoodreporter.com/thr/business/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000989551
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 02:34, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified