Talk:Valerie Aurora

Getting people fired
‘When asked if firing one of the males was an appropriate response, she said "I don't have enough information to know that."’

That is her hobby, attending tech conferences to get people fired, that and being a total nutjob. 89.240.198.199 (talk) 22:51, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Recent addition of "Controversy" section
Hi User:Connor Behan! I have a couple comments about your recent contributions to this article - since this is about controversial material, I figure it's most helpful to talk this out on a talk page first instead of going straight in and reverting.

The first is that it's extremely important for biographies of living people to be sourced to strong sources, especially for controversial material, and most of these new sources are self-published. The policy at Biographies of living persons says "We must get the article right. Be very firm about the use of high-quality sources." Specifically, it says "Exercise extreme caution in using primary sources." and "Never use self-published sources – including but not limited to books, zines, websites, blogs, and tweets – as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject (see below)."

The second is that it's very important for BLPs to be neutral, and I agree with this essay about criticism that sections titled "controversy" tend to be mini point of view forks that unbalance an article. If this material is important, based on high-quality sources, it should be integrated into the main parts of the article in a balanced way. Dreamyshade (talk) 04:54, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks. While I agree that we should be careful about sources, "York says X" and "Patterson says X" are statements about York and Patterson, so they would be "the subjects" in "sources published by the subject". The main claim being made about Aurora is that she made the comment about the EFF that they attributed to her. This would require either a post by Aurora or a reliable secondary source. The Verge article seems like the latter so I think everything I added passes this test. This is obviously not the only test, because it could be used to litter BLPs with countless "person A doesn't like person B" comments. You can probably guess the two reasons why I thought these criticisms were more notable than everything else. First, Jillian York and Meredith L. Patterson have Wikipedia articles themselves. Second, they are more-or-less members of the group to which Aurora has dedicated a large part of her career.


 * One problem I tried to address is that Patterson's position is much more scathing than York's. Instead of just saying "Aurora has been criticized", I mentioned the other side which is that Patterson's use of the repeated use of the name "Henson" is a low blow. It's entirely possible that this still doesn't mitigate the problem, since Patterson has only said this "feud" in tweets and blog comments and has yet to write a coherent essay about it. And I am completely okay with merging one or both of the points into other sections. It just seemed like they would need a new section anyway since they weren't history or Ada-related. Connor Behan (talk) 18:15, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * If we back up statements about York and Patterson with primary sources from York and Patterson, we need to check that we are using "extreme caution in using primary sources", and I don't think their use in this article makes the justification clear - in a BLP, criticism between living people about controversial material needs Wikipedia's best sourcing, not references to self-published posts and tweets. I agree with you that we need to have a lot of caution about "person A doesn't like person B" comments. If York and Patterson's comments are significant enough for this article, it's likely that there will be reliable secondary sources available. Dreamyshade (talk) 03:18, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Looking at this more closely, I also have additional specific concerns about the sourcing:

1. ''"In 2013, when hacker Andrew Auernheimer was appealing charges of identity theft and unauthorized access to various computers, Aurora opposed efforts to defend Auernheimer given his openly racist views. Specifically, she criticized the Electronic Frontier Foundation's involvement with the statement "This is another case where they’re saying, ‘The cases we care about are the ones white men are interested in. We’re less interested in protecting women on the web.’""'' - The source supports the second sentence, but the source does not support the first sentence.

2. "Valerie Aurora is the subject of long-standing criticism by software developer Meredith L. Patterson." - This sentence is not supported by the provided source.

3. "Although claiming that Aurora has a history of making personal attacks, Patterson has herself been criticized for using Aurora's birth name." This sentence is sourced only to a short tweet that doesn't make that logical connection, and it's important for us to avoid WP:SYNTHESIS.

Dreamyshade (talk) 05:10, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * For the first point, other choices of words are welcome, but I don't see what other interpretation there is. Unless you think Aurora would also be displeased to see a non-racist, non-sexist white man represented by the EFF. And for the other two, I forgot a source. It's a tweet where Patterson links to the Yarnivore blog claiming that it backs up what she's been saying. Connor Behan (talk) 22:04, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * For the first, criticizing the EFF's involvement is not the same as opposing the whole effort - we can't infer her opinion based on what the source says, we can only say what the source says. For the second two, even with the addition of that tweet, this would still be weak sourcing based on primary sources with synthesis, and controversial material in BLPs requires a much higher standard of sources than ordinary articles. These sentences need reliable secondary sources that back up their entire statements, or we need to remove them until we can find better sources. Dreamyshade (talk) 03:18, 11 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I suppose she might've been okay with a different organization taking on the effort. I just replaced the controversy section with a writing section since her normal posts seem to be a good fit for the article too. The response by Jillian C. York is still there. You can remove it if you want, but I can probably find hundreds of BLPs where this is standard practice. Connor Behan (talk) 20:50, 11 November 2015 (UTC)


 * BLP policy is that we need to hold ourselves to high standards for BLPs, especially potentially controversial material, even if other BLP articles have problems (Other stuff exists is a helpful essay about this). The current sentence about York's opinion seems fine, since it's phrased neutrally and sourced to a substantial public post by York (rather than a tweet or other brief comment). A few policy/guideline issues with the current Writing section:
 * For the second sentence: WP:ALLEGED says "Words such as supposed, apparent, alleged and purported can imply that a given point is inaccurate, although alleged and accused are appropriate when wrongdoing is asserted but undetermined, such as with people awaiting or undergoing a criminal trial". In this case, the reference doesn't say "alleged" (or similar), it just says "published", and "alleged" tends to imply some sort of criminal trial or other legal matter, so a more neutral word such as "says" would be appropriate here.
 * Similarly, "announced" and "revealed" in the next sentences have a bit of POV to them - using plain language like "wrote on her blog" and "explained" would be more neutral. The source blog post also doesn't say "a wheat compound other than gluten" - the post says she doesn't know what wheat compound it is, and that it's not the specific type of gluten that affects people with celiac. It'd be more accurate to just say "a wheat compound".
 * "In 2013, during the appeal of then incarcerated hacker Andrew Auernheimer, an article in The Verge emphasized the fact that defending the right to find exploits in his case also meant defending a person with openly racist views." The inclusion of that sentence still implies that Aurora's comment is related to his racism, but the reference doesn't say that. It would be more accurate to describe this along these lines: In 2013, Aurora provided a comment to The Verge about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's involvement in the legal defense of Andrew Auernheimer, who was in prison for hacking and had previously harassed Kathy Sierra. Aurora said "This is another case where they’re saying, ‘The cases we care about are the ones white men are interested in. We’re less interested in protecting women on the web.’".
 * Dreamyshade (talk) 07:51, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
 * True. The only thing suggesting that Aurora's quotation was related to Weev's racist / anti-Semitic comment was the way Sandoval positioned the two. All of these changes sound fine :). Connor Behan (talk) 22:33, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Remove content not supported by reliable 3rd party sources
Hey folks, thanks everyone who had worked on this article. I can't help but notice that a lot of the content is supported by citations to sources that are not reliable third party sources that meet WP standards. Is anyone interested in going through and just deleting anything that is sourced by some random blog post, my website, or other sources that are normally not permitted by general WP:RS or by WP:BLP? Thanks!

(Testing out the WP iOS app for editing and not sure how to sign with it but let's see!) 2607:F598:B94A:B0:6804:1891:E632:BEF (talk) 17:21, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Heh following up now that I'm actually logged in to the app. :) Catavar (talk) 17:24, 7 December 2022 (UTC)