Talk:Invisible Children, Inc.

(Unstructured discussion)
I think it is important to emphasize that "only 32 percent of the $8,676,614 Invisible Children spent in their campaign has been used in direct services to the people of Uganda" and that this should appear on the main page. The figure comes from the organization's audited financial statements available on their website (so comments below about validity of sources are irrelevant). See page 6 of the latest financial report, http://c2052482.r82.cf0.rackcdn.com/images/737/original/FY11-Audited%20Financial%20Statements.pdf?1320205055. Nemanja antic (talk) 02:03, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Deleted the section "LRA vs. Government of Uganda." The section had a lot of factual errors (like Alice Auma wasn't Kony's aunt and the LRA wasn't started until 1987, though the Holy Spirit Movement started in 1986), and I don't think it's as relevant to this article since the LRA now operates outside of Uganda. The link to the LRA article should be enough. So I replaced it with Invisible Children's history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPendleton11 (talk • contribs) 23:00, 2 December 2011

Thought it would be appropriate to add their mission statement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPendleton11 (talk • contribs) 23:06, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Removed "Cause for Action" section because it was outdated and the content was covered in other sections of the aticle. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPendleton11 (talk • contribs) 19:10, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Updated Advocacy section to include more recent events and to clearly differentiate between advocacy events and programs on the ground. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPendleton11 (talk • contribs) 19:37, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Added two events to the Advocacy section — Preceding unsigned comment added by BPendleton11 (talk • contribs) 18:25, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Made a number of copy edits, including making the page more uniform and adding in some relevant details to existing sections. Blackhillsandbadlands (talk) 18:24, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

The additions to the criticisms section regarding Charity Navigator and BBB are useful, but I deleted the couple of sentences about the failed Operation Lightning Thunder since it's a historical fact, not a criticism. Also, the fact that a military operation was launched and failed has no bearing on Invisible Children as on organization.Blackhillsandbadlands (talk) 17:26, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

The end of the intro section includes an innaccurate statement. It claims Charity Navigator 'reports that the groups finances are not independently audited'. First it should be group's not groups. From Charity Navigator itself: 'The charity's audited financials were prepared by an independent accountant, but it did not have an audit oversight committee.' These are two very different statements and I would change the wording to something along the lines of Charity Navigator 'reports that although the group's finances are prepared by an independent accountant, they did not have a committee independently review the audit.' Ncjgallant (talk) 09:57, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I just fixed an inaccuracy regarding the mission of the US troops in the region. The article originally claimed that these soldiers were deployed to directly seek/capture Joseph Kony. In reality, they were deployed to act as advisors to regional forces. Additionally, the article originally claimed that Invisible Children was "influential" in the passing of a particular piece of legislature -- I have revised this to "advocated for," as no description of /how/ Invisible Children was "influential" was given, and I found this to be misleading. Please ensure that this article doesn't misrepresent the involvement of United States military forces in the region. MichaelKovich (talk) 06:31, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Content of Criticism Section
Re: Mhall623's replacing the Operation Lightning Thunder argument and additional criticism. I don't really see what you're getting at with the LRA no longer being in northern Uganda. The LRA left northern Uganda for good in 2006. It was a result of the failed Juba Peace Talks and OLT. But that's not to Invisible Children's credit or fault. Secondly, Invisible Children originated in northern Uganda, but at the end of 2010 they expanded their attention to include DRC, CAR, and South Sudan as well--wherever the LRA is affecting civilians. I guess I'm just not seeing the connection, even with the references. Please explain.

Apart from the relevance of the criticism, I want to talk about the citation. I don't think Michael Kirkpatrick is an established authority on this topic, except for writing that article. I googled the name, and nothing conclusive came up. So I don't think his name should be mentioned in the text of this article, though I don't have a problem with his article being cited. Chris Blattman, on the other hand, is well-respected in the field and the region, so his critical blog (http://chrisblattman.com/2009/03/04/visible-children/) would be a better citation.

I'm not sure if the citation to the "i'm a fan of postcards" blog is reliable enough since it appears to be a personal blog that hasn't been consistently updated since 2007. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? But if nothing else, it should be noticed that the post cited is from 2006--that's 6 years ago. Circumstances have changed significantly since then. So maybe it could say something like "early in Invisible Children's history, the organization was criticized for...."

Then there should be some edits to this paragraph to make the language more neutral and fix the grammar: "Another area of contention for Invisible Children and its detractors deals with their financial statements. Invisible Children, which often portrays itself as a selfless program is often criticized for its financials. Invisible Children's financial reports reveal that the organization's three filmmakers and co-founders receive a combined pay of 223922. This comprises 2.77% of IC's expenses.

I will make these proposed changes in a few days. But I wanted to open it up to discussion before I made the changes since there seems to be some dispute. Please discuss. Blackhillsandbadlands (talk) 20:11, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Ya, I'm not a fan of the statement:"which often portrays itself as a selfless program" - it's not a factually based, verifiable statement, and only serves to load the rest of the critique. In addition, I'd wonder where this critique comes from. I.e., is it just a fact, or has somebody of note actually used this fact in an attack against the organization? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.9.160.15 (talk) 23:10, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Made changes as described above. Blackhillsandbadlands (talk) 01:22, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I feel this should be added to the criticism section, pertaining to comparison to other charities: "By contrast, Direct Relief reports 98.8% of its funding goes to programming. American Red Cross reports 92.1% to programming. UNICEF USA is at 90.3%. Invisible Children reports that 80.5% of their funding goes to programming, while I report 31% based on their FY11 fiscal reports, because other NGOs would count film-making as fundraising expenses, not programming expenses." Source — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.198.104.107 (talk) 21:31, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

There's an article by Michael Wilkerson at ForeignPolicy.org (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/07/guest_post_joseph_kony_is_not_in_uganda_and_other_complicated_things) that has a critical eye on the film and the organization, with a follow-up interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation (http://www.npr.org/2012/03/08/148235383/fact-checking-the-kony-2012-viral-video?ps=cprs). Apparently there's some growing criticism of the video now that it's "gone viral" -- I would like to suggest that the Criticism section add a discussion on this, with the links I've provided (there are others but the two I've linked are a start). Given its uber-positive spin, I'd like to add a POV flag on this article as well; it really kind of sounds like a PR piece. Traveliter (talk) 21:55, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

"Of major concern is that US troops are already deployed in an operation that should be secret. The attention that is being brought the region now may actually do harm. It is assumed that Joseph Kabila, the President of the Congo, would not respond favorably to foreign troops crossing his borders. For this reason, the attention that the Kony 2012 film is bringing could incite violence. "If you want to catch Kony, I can't think of a dumber thing to do,"[10] said Africa expert, Peter Pham." This section should definitely be removed. It is totally biased and downright bizarre. Why on earth should any American military operation be kept secret, how is this objective? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.161.144.228 (talk) 21:20, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Criticism moved from article on Invisible Children film
The following text has too many faults (less obvious than that of being about criticism of the organization Invisible Children, Inc., not the film) to simply relocate it into the accompanying article, whose topic is the organization this text criticizes: Wording from the first and the last sentences of those two 'graphs seems to have been added 13:01, 8 March 2012 by, in a contiguous block new material. (The corresponding portion has evolved considerably since, including material that is more than rewording of that prior material.) The site URL provided presumably (whether or not accurately quoted) draws from "Invisible Children's contract with a private military company", which cannot be added as reference to justify any of the information provided on that Web page, nor thus any of our contributor's or the ext-linked page's author's insinuations about ICI's plans: The Web page's authors (BTW, they infer a plan under way, tho -- even accepting their notion of an ICI/STTEPI contract as a fact -- it could amount to a fantasy constructed for a well-financed brainstorming exercise, rather than with any intention of a capture or assassination.)  What a poster child for a non-RS! Without my addressing each of the other sites mentioned, i also note that my doubts were first raised by offering (along with a bunch of explicitly declared blogs and a student paper) of ibtimes.com as a source. International Business Times is a less-than-7-year-old enterprise, linked from 200-and-some main-namespace pages, created 23½ months ago, [[WP:CSD#G11|G11-speedy-deleted after 16 months for "Unambiguous advertising or promotion"], recreated (with clear good intent) in less than a week, and averaging 10 edits per month since -- but the occasion of the indefinite block of Ibtimesuk (IBTimesUK) about 6 weeks ago. I think the article should be retained, but i suspect it of being, despite its carefully stated claims of importance, undeserving of the presumptions of being a credible source, on controversies, that editors citing it have in effect assumed. Where it is the only ref, remove and fact-tag, or add a ref from one of the world's great papers that agrees with it, IMO. --Jerzy•t 08:05, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) insist on anonymity,
 * 2) name no person as their own supposed source,
 * 3) (apparently better to impede attempts at duplicating their the evidence they claim) describe the setting of their meeting the source as "a large city in Africa",
 * 4) profess to trust that source -- without seeing any need to wonder if the security breach they found so easily exploited by "each one of us, separately" was, say, a disingenuous ploy to lower their sales resistance by implicitly naming, perhaps falsely, a previous client whose expectations they seemed to be meeting, and who at least marginally resembled those authors.

Wikipedia Page Created 22nd November, 2010‎
Yes apparently has been doing very public and well known work since at least 2007, if not when it was founded in 2004?

Watch this space to see if this article related talk is deleted by sockpuppets. It's looking more and more like this "group" is a scam charity. 203.59.6.159 (talk) 09:46, 8 March 2012 (UTC) Harlequin


 * Registered through GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
 * Domain Name: INVISIBLECHILDREN.COM
 * Created on: 18-Jun-04
 * Expires on: 18-Jun-17
 * Last Updated on: 13-Jun-11
 * http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/invisiblechildren.com <- content going back to 2004... Are you suggesting that they have been operating as a scam for the last seven and a half years? 31.185.129.83 (talk) 16:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

What one or other of you is suggesting here doesn't matter - what matters is that this article gets some properly sourced material written from an unbiased perspective - that means citations that aren't taken directly from the group's website, and that means that statements like that it's 'primarily youth driven' need to be properly backed up. So let's save the debate regarding what will no doubt become clear in time, and work on shedding some light on what already should be. 86.150.124.168 (talk) 19:42, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Logo
I have uploaded the organization's logo to Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Invisible_Children_Official_Logo.jpg) but for some reason I cannot seem to figure out how to make it show up in the infobox. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Basilisk4u (talk) 22:25, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I asked for help and we got it. The editor who fixed it said "when adding images to infoboxes it's useful to check the template page for usage guidance (in this case, Template:Infobox non-profit).  Unfortunately our infoboxes are inconsistent when it comes to image parameters. Some only need the filename, others also require the File: prefix, and yet others (such as this one) require you to enter the full image markup.  AJ  Cham  23:47, 9 March 2012 (UTC)"

So that explains it.--Ishtar456 (talk) 23:56, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

school presentations
If any one knows of any source that talks about Invisible Children doing presentations at high schools and colleges, please let me know. I know they do it, they are coming to the school I teach at in a couple of days, but I cannot find anything about it even on their site.--Ishtar456 (talk) 00:01, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I haven't yet found a strong mention of their presentations at schools, but pg 27 of Invisible Children's annual report mentions two 10-week long tours that they did in 2011 for fundraising purposes. It doesn't explicitly say they visited schools though. Beyond that, all I could rustle up is a blog where the writer mentioned that there were a couple of events hosted by the Invisible Children club at the University of San Francisco. Not sure if any of this helps. (Jonathanfu (talk) 05:10, 10 March 2012 (UTC))

Thanks, I actually just found and added a good citation for it.--Ishtar456 (talk) 05:15, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

NFCC
Since I was reverted for my NFCC enforcement I might as well start a discussion. Non free files should only be used as a last resort ( WP:NFCC ). I am not convinced that the cover of the film is needed or that something would be lost in this article if it is not used. There is a link to the page of the film in the article and there is libre text talking about the film --In actu (Guerillero) &#124; My Talk  21:54, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It just seems to me that the film was an integral part of the founding on the organization.. I feel like things have been used that way throughout wikipedia.  I will take it out pending the result of this discuss (if it goes any further).  Thanks for discussing it.--Ishtar456 (talk) 22:07, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Everyone has criticism on Criticism
We do seem to have a lot of unhappy bagles here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.198.42.45 (talk) 01:12, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, many just weren't too happy with the video, but that is not for discussion here, sorry.75.171.14.76 (talk) 05:17, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

African Criticism
Why is there no mention of criticisms of the Invisible Children and Kony 2012 coming from Ugandans and African themselves? Do the voices of people who are actually being affected by these media campaigns not matter? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.54.32.177 (talk) 04:11, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Critics are wrong sources
Here's a copy of the sources I listed at Talk:Kony 2012, which should be helpful over here too.


 * 100 Million Viewers Can't Be Wrong - Foreign Policy
 * Kony Baloney: Why Invisible Children's Critics Are Wrong - Huffington Post
 * Joseph Kony 2012: child at centre of viral hit defends film - The Daily Telegraph
 * Child abductee featured in Kony 2012 defends film's maker against criticism - The Guardian
 * Guest Post: I've met Joseph Kony and Kony 2012 isn't that bad - Foreign Policy
 * Senate pushes measure condemning Kony - The Seattle Times

Thanks. Silver seren C 05:44, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Excellent list, though I'd take the 100 Million Viewers Can't Be Wrong - Foreign Policy source with a grain of salt - it's written by Adam Finck - the director of programs at Invisible Children. Maybe anything new from this source should be added to the Invisible Children Response section. The Huffington Post one too, it apparently is the Huffington Post-based blog of an environmental activist - not sure how experienced he is in this area.

The Seattle Times thing is gold though(Jonathanfu (talk) 15:02, 23 March 2012 (UTC))


 * Copying these over from the other talk page:
 * Don’t dismiss the Kony video - Reuters, a good opinion piece we can probably use
 * Backlash Aside, Charities See Lessons in a Web Video - New York Times, a lot of good statistics info on the response, along with response videos, and responses from other charities on the video's success
 * A Video Campaign and the Power of Simplicity - New York Times, this is a good one discussing how the critics are missing the point
 * Joseph Kony captures Congress’ attention - Politico, more info on what Congress is doing, with some good responses by house representatives
 * Kony 2012: African Union ramps up hunt for Uganda rebel leader in wake of viral video - Toronto Star, more effects! The African Union has sent out 5000 troops to look for Kony in response to the popularity of the video.


 * And this one is one of the most important, since it is clearing up a misconception, rather than adding in info:
 * Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell hospitalized after public breakdown - Washington Post, this article includes a copied part of the official police statement, which shows that Russell was NOT nude. He was in underwear. Out of all the reports they got from witnesses, there was just one person who reported that he was nude. It just so happens that this same person was also the only one to say he was masturbating. The person clearly has a good imagination and the majority of news outlets have good experience at repeating lies without actually doing research. So, let's fix this.


 * Lots of work to do here. Silver  seren C 17:13, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Look on YouTube, he's clearly naked. Crzyclarks (talk) 22:42, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I do see a naked guy, but I can't tell if that is indeed Jason Russell. Not sure if TMZ falls sufficiently under the "Reliable Source" category for me to believe wholeheartedly that this video is Russell (Jonathanfu (talk) 01:37, 6 April 2012 (UTC))
 * Well, it is a gossip website, so anything sourced to them must be taken with a grain of salt. For now, the article should just say that TMZ is claiming its Russell. Between TMZ and the official police statement, I think the police statement deserves far more prominence. Silver  seren C 03:22, 6 April 2012 (UTC)


 * This news article contains a still image from the video. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2118275/Kony-2012-video-director-Jason-Russell-suffering-reactive-psychosis.html Crzyclarks (talk) 23:46, 7 April 2012 (UTC)


 * So? You keep going on about things you can "see", but what you can see has nothing to do with writing a Wikipedia article. You can only write what other people say and you have to make sure to couch it as something that they said or are claiming, not something that is fact. Silver  seren C 06:27, 8 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Difficult to understand how Silverseren can disagree with this Gareth Griffith-Jones (talk) 10:35, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Bias
The introduction claims that the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the group. It sounds like it means Invisible Children, which I highly doubt. If it means the LRA then it should be changed to make it clear. Also in the History of Invisible Children section it says Barack Obama told them "We have seen your reporting, your websites, your blogs, and your video postcards—you have made the plight of the children visible to us all." Was he saying that specifically to the group or to everybody at the signing? If it was to everybody it should be made clear. Crzyclarks (talk) 22:41, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

The response and history of the organisation also contained some inaccuracies, clearly biased and outright false. I've made the necessary changes and explained them in the summary of each edit. Crzyclarks (talk) 23:10, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

British English or American English
There are American and British spellings on this page, there are only supposed to be one, excluding things like quotations. The subheading on the page is spelt "Criticism" and there are mostly British English spelling in the discussion page as well. I recommend converting the spelling on the whole article to British English, possibly using this script. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ohconfucius/EngvarB

Alternatively the page can be edited word for word. Or even edited word for word to American English if that's what this discussion produces. Crzyclarks (talk) 01:34, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ
ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ lets make all the children visible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.57.31.197 (talk) 03:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Jason Russell at Liberty University: "Most people view us as a non-profit, a charity. We view ourselves as a business, a company."
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkB8o5VWAjE&feature=player_detailpage#t=287s (time: 4:47)

Maybe something reflecting this should be included in the article? Anon12356 (talk) 10:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

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