Talk:Craig Shirley

2006 starting point?
Not in copyright violation, on the board of ACU and offered my bio for them to post on their site. 20:21, 31 October 2006‎ -- Hmcconnell

Inadequate source for Central Intelligence Agency claim?
The sentence "Shirley was also a decorated contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency." in the article cites as its source only Craig Shirley's own web site (I am assuming that he himself is the maintainer of craigshirley.com), and the only source there is the single sentence "He was a decorated contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency." appearing at the end of his capsule biography on the web site's front page. Does this really count as an adequate source for Wikipedia citation purposes? Effectively, Wikipedia is asserting that Craig Shirley was a decorated agent for the CIA because Craig Shirley himself asserts it; other than that, there is no evidence presented. I don't feel expert enough in Wikipedia sourcing policy to take any action in the article, but thought the question worth raising here on the Talk page.

For more details: Back in August 2014 I wrote a blog post with more information and history about the Wikipedia claim, then entirely unsourced as far as I could tell, of Shirley's past CIA employment. That post provides some more details that might be useful in deciding what to do here. It looks to me like Shirley himself might have seen that blog post, added the "source" information on craigshirley.com, and then later made the corresponding edit to Wikipedia restoring the assertion, this time citing craigshirley.com as the source. But I am not sure about that. The Wikipedia edit that restored the claim, this time with a citation, was made on 28 April 2015‎, at 20:39, by user User:Ppetrovich4. Meanwhile, at craigshirley.com, the source information appears to have been added some time between 17 May 2014 and 17 December 2014, according the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The May 17 snapshot of the site doesn't mention anything about the CIA on the biographical page (which is the About page at the time), whereas the December 17 snapshot mentions it on the front page (which is where his biographical material appears to have been moved to by then). Note that the dates in the URLs of those Wayback Machine links are different from the dates shown in the Wayback Machine page that I got them from, but that may be an artifact of how the Wayback Machine does timestamping; if I've misinterpreted any of these timestamps, my apologies and please update here with a correction. --Karl Fogel 19:43, 26 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Shirley appears to have been involved in various political positions since prior to graduating high school, so I have no idea of what and where this contract work for the CIA would have been or why he would have received special recognition for it. The source in his bio points back to this Wikipedia page, so it is definitely not properly sourced. I have removed the claim due to lack of reliable sourcing. - Location (talk) 23:04, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks. That all makes sense to me.  (Also, thanks for teaching me about the "" syntax! :-) ) --Karl Fogel 01:15, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

I'd like to give a little more detail about what User:Location points out above: Craig Shirley's current bio page now sources the claim that Shirley was a CIA agent to... Wikipedia! The bio page says "Shirley was also a decorated contract agent for the CIA.[ 23 ]", with that superscripted " [ 23 ] " linking to a reference in this article (a reference that no longer exists, but when it did exist it simply pointed to Shirley's own site). Craig Shirley has finally taken us full circle. This reminds me of the famous citogenesis incident from Der Spiegel's reporting on Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, mentioned, along with other incidents, on the circular reporting page. I have asked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to take a snapshot of the bio page just now, as a baseline for tracking any future developments in Craig Shirley's past. --Karl Fogel 06:50, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Many uncited claims, most ascribed to a single wikipedia user who only ever edits this page
Much of this article content -- and in particular the most laudatory portions -- were written by user "Reagan1988" who has ever only edited this one wikipedia page, and who offers few or no citations for many of the claims. Previous users have scrubbed out some of the most over-the-top puffery, but much remains. What is the wikipedia policy on this? Might this could be Craig Shirley himself? Should this content be preserved if it is? Should it be preserved if there are no citations, regardless of who this is? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MManville (talk • contribs) 20:08, 20 February 2021 (UTC)