Talk:Eric LeCompte (non-profit)

UN affiliation
This article says that LeCompte "served on expert working groups for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights". I can't find any reliable source that says that this is true. There are a variety of sources that interview LeCompte that simply repeat this bio line back, but those sources obviously took it directly from LeCompte himself, it's not anything they researched. The UN Conference on Trade and Development has an Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting, but that group is for member states, not individual members, and so LeCompte can't be on it. I can't really find anything on him and the UNHCHR. I think that this information if dubious and I will delete it unless anyone has a good source for it. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 17:13, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

= UN afflilation = Tightened up language, introduced additional citations.Citizenlandi (talk) 00:51, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

= Non-notable role= Older, non-notable roles are not supposed to be included in introductory paragraphs for biographical entries.Citizenlandi (talk) 00:52, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Just because something happened prior to now or that it would not, on its own, meet wikipedia's notability standards doesn't mean that it can't go in the introductory paragraph. We very commonly briefly explain the career trajectory of professionals in the opening paragraph. 1983 is a long-enough time ago and earning an undergraduate degree from Columbia Certainly isn't enough to, on its own, meet wikipedia's notability standards, and yet the opening paragraph of Barack Obama mentions that in 1983 he earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia. Certainly Eric LeCompte isn't so noteworthy for what he's doing now that it overshadows his past to a greater degree than Barack Obama. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 04:43, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

While some might argue a well known University could be added, I believe the guidelines would disagree. In the case of this wiki page - the guidelines are clear:

"The notable position(s) or role(s) the person held should usually be stated in the opening paragraph. However, avoid overloading the lead sentence with various sundry roles; instead, emphasize what made the person notable. Incidental and non-notable roles (i.e. activities that are not integral to the person's notability) should usually not be mentioned in the lead paragraph."

The way the paragraph is written now is clear and precise. Other roles are mentioned later in the article which I believe is appropriate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Citizenlandi (talk • contribs) 01:27, 7 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Various webpages indicate the Eric LeCompte was the events coordinator for School of the Americas Watch, a well-known organisation within the human rights world, for over a decade. Given that this page says LeCompte has been "active" since 1994 and it's hard to imagine he's beyond his mid 40s, that means that bulk, probably the majority of his entire working career was spent at School of the Americas Watch. To suggest that his employment there was entirely "incidental and non-notable" strikes me as incorrect, especially in light of the fact that you have been adding information to the opening paragraph indicating that he once, several years ago, gave a talk at an event coordinated by the UN, and we're also using the lead paragraph to mention the fact that he is (or was) an unpaid member of one apparently non-permanent working group that is overseen by one subset of the UN system. Again, if we can use the lead paragraph to mention fact that Barack Obama spent a few years at Columbia before going on to be a state senator, the keynote speaker at the Democrats' convention, a US senator, and the president of the United States, certainly there is enough room in this article for us to briefly mention what appears to be the longest-lasting part of Eric LeCompte's career. For that reason, I am reinstating the information. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 10:07, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

= "United Nations finance expert" = We open this article by calling LeCompte a "United Nations finance expert". I think that there are a few different reasons why we should consider rephrasing this term which I'd like to explain below before I make any edits so that they can be individually discussed.
 * 1. I think the "United Nations" part is somewhat objectionable because it is misleading. If someone were to be called "a Cambridge physicist", a reasonable person would assume that that person is on the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, not someone who merely once gave a talk at Cambridge. In the same way, a reasonable person would assume that by calling LeCompte a "United Nations finance expert", we are saying that he is employed by the United Nations to work on issues relate to finance. But the sources that we have indicate that this is not at all true: he does not appear to be employed by the UN, and although he has worked on a volunteer working group that is or was overseen by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (which is actually mostly focused on trade, rather than finance, but that's a different story) and in 2013 gave a talk at a meeting convoked by a UN independent expert on human rights, he doesn't have any major relation to the overall United Nations organisation.
 * 2. I also think that the "expert" part is somewhat objectionable, albeit for entirely different reasons. While the meaning of "expert" is quite clear, I think it's a violation of the NPOV policy to use it in the narrative voice of the article. It's worth noting, for example, that we don't use the narrative voice to call Paul Romer, who is Chief Economist at the World Bank, one of Time magazine's 25 most influential people in the United States, and widely considered to be a front-runner for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics, an "expert". Doing so would be seen as a sort of endorsement of his ideas, which is a bit improper. I think the same principal applies to this article as well.

I'd like to change this, but thought it would be useful to float the idea here first. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 10:45, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
 * It's been five days and there has been no response so I am implementing the change. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 05:23, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

= "Raised a devout Catholic" = In a moment I'm going to delete the first sentence from the early life section and I want to explain why here. It says that LeCompte was raised a devout Catholic, but the article that is cited seems to argue almost the exact opposite:

He recalls being “disenchanted” with the church and Christianity when in high school, and he links that to one of his earliest memories in grade school when his parents often took him to church to see the statues and lights.

He was 5 or 6 when, on a weekday visit, he went to the front of the church and saw the cross with a person on it, “dying, bloody, a complete failure.” He didn’t understand when his parents told him, “That’s Jesus, the son of God.” His dad continued to instruct him, “Eric, your mother and I and you, we’re all children of God.”

LeCompte recalls “looking back up at that cross and thinking, ‘If that’s what happens to children of God, I want no part of it.’”

If LeCompte was uncomfortable (to say the least) with Christianity from one of his first encounters with it through high school, I'm not sure it can be said that he was a particularly "devout" Catholic while he was being raised. While the last line does say that he better understood what his parents were trying to teach him later on in his life, I still don't think that rescues the claim that he was raised devout. --LoveSometimesLoses (talk) 06:31, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 one external links on Eric LeCompte (non-profit). 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:
 * Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=134
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150703011334/http://www.unctad.info/upload/Debt%20Portal/WGlist%2029.05.13.pdf to http://www.unctad.info/upload/Debt%20Portal/WGlist%2029.05.13.pdf

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) 12:50, 25 December 2016 (UTC)