Talk:Wendy Yoshimura

Issues

You might have some facts, but its impossible to tell because it is all uncited and there is clearly some POVism at work there. For instance, saying Emily Harris "accidentally" killed Myrna Ospahl is unfounded. At the most, you can say something like "according to S, the shooting was an accident". It's also not legitimate to remove the sentence in the first paragraph about Yoshimura being known for her SLA involvement. Google gives more hits for "yoshimura SLA" than "yoshimura watercolor". Justforasecond 16:29, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but if you search "Wendy Yoshimura" SLA as opposed to "Wendy Yoshimura" artist, you only get 200 more hits. Obviously, Wendy Yoshimura is more famous for the Symbionese Liberation Army. But there is life after cults. Patty Hearst just won a prize at the Westminster dog show. Er, her French bulldog did. In any case, at the current moment, Wendy Yoshimura is almost as notable for being an artist as for being an former cult member. I hope saying so doesn't make you feel old.

Also, I can't find a source that says that 'Wendy Yoshimura was famous' besides this article; all I get are hits about Patty Hearst being famous and also mentioning Wendy Yoshimura. "Famous" is technically a peacock term, though I believe you mean to say "infamous"--now who's being POV? Let's work on establishing that Yoshimura is notable first, then we can work on famous. ClaudeReigns (talk) 07:03, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Accidental nature of shooting is in Hearst's account and was undisputed in Steve Soliah trial and 2002 prosecution of 5 who pled guilty. Its accidental nature was of no legal consequence; killing in commission of armed robbery = murder either way.

Relying on Patrick Hoge's 2003 SF Chron article is not best practice. Hoge uncritically single-source quotes ex-DA Omara's version of (and complaints about) WY's Grand Jury testimony, which is not public record. WY's lawyer, Dennis Riordan is an easy interview who could have provided balance; he lives and works less than two miles from the Chronicle building in SF. Similarly, Hoge cherry picks one of 200+ sentences about WY in Hearst's book Every Secret Thing ("...our explosives expert") for dramatic effect. In Hearst's own account, evidence of this expertise is limited to WY criticizing Bill Harris's use of toilet paper in pipe bombs by telling him "That's not how Willie [Brandt] would do it." When the group manages to build bombs that actually explode (unlike Harris's), Hearst dubs them "Kilgore bombs," indicating that the expert skills weren't WY's at all. The seemingly trivial details at the end of the Hoge piece (lives with dog in apartment) are wrong or at best ambiguous (does she live alone other than a dog?). Being both dubious and trivial, probably inserted by Hoge more for effect than accuracy, they seem unnecessary in a Wikipedia article.

--Hillary

Two edits

I removed a previously deleted but reinserted unattributed quote from the Patrick Hoge article ("with her dog"). It's an example of feature writeritis, selecting a single (presumed) fact out of many ("with her fish," "with her friends," "with her cats," "by herself," "with her lover(s)") to create an impression not supported by research or warranted by relevance.

I removed the single "external link" as tangental at best. There are literally hundreds of sites with fairly extensive discussions of Yoshimura. The difficulty is to select those that are authoritative, accurate, and substantive, particularly in the context of living person's biography. Providing a single link to a page that hypothesizes astrological properties of an asteroid doesn't help resolve that problem.

--Hillary

Fair use rationale for Image:Yoshimura webpage.JPG

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BetacommandBot (talk) 03:17, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Whitewash

This whole article is POV. Yoshimura or her supporters are clearly busy at work whitewashing her past. A sad day for Wikipedia, but more and more the trend to dance delicately around socialist friends. Proxy User (talk) 21:05, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

(User banned as a WP:Sockpuppet)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 02:02, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I assume this is the "NPOV disputed" section of the talk page? Is there a verifiable fact you feel the article still excludes? I would be happy to source it. Otherwise, I think we should call the POV dispute resolved and remove the {{POV}} boilerplate. ClaudeReigns (talk) 10:41, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

• I am removing the boilerplate now. Please feel free to discuss any further suggestions or tag any instances of non-neutrality in the article. Thank you. ClaudeReigns (talk) 04:46, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Verifiable Facts

I deleted many speculative assertions and modified others to conform with verifiable fact. In addition, I deleted material that was inappropriate for its placement (i.e.: the intro graph) or because it gave undue weight to disputed or minor details. Claude Reigns decided that citations, no matter how dubious (Larry King?) or distorted, trump criticality.

Intro: I deleted "...she became involved in radical politics during her last year of art college after meeting Willie Brandt. She became a member of the SLA, a violent 1970's group that was said to practice brainwashing, as well as another early terrorist group, the "Revolutionary Army."" These are the reasons: It introduces Brandt without context; it abuses the term "member"; it ridiculously elevates and selects "brainwashing" as a primary characteristic the SLA "was known for," when that clearly contradicts the record; it flips chronology by placing "Revolutionary Army" after SLA; it fails to provide facts that put that so-called "Army" into perspective (there were at most five people involved in all the "Army's" planning and actions). I also deleted the closing sentence, which simply cherry picks details included in a single Patrick Hoge article and asserts them as verified and worthy of inclusion in the intro.

Revolutionary Activity: I deleted the intro "Patty Hearst has described Yoshimura as an "explosives expert,"[1] but on Larry King, Hearst backtracked and distinguished her from other SLA members, calling Yoshimura "fundamentally a good person."[3] Because she has refused to name participants in crimes or discuss the victims of those crimes, the San Francisco Chronicle has described her as tight-lipped and "an enigma."" It's incoherent. A book reviewer, in the process of describing a novel, made reference to Hearst's appearance on Larry King's TV show in which Hearst supposedly called Yoshimura "a good person." How does this tertiary reference rebut Hearst's own characterization of Yoshimura as an "explosives expert" in "Every Secret Thing," Hearst's own non-fiction account? Why does the Wikipedia citation justifying "explosives expert" point to Hoge's article when he took it directly from Hearst's book? Why should the term "explosives expert" survive in the article as a valid characterization of Yoshimura when, as noted above, the same book explicitly states that in fact Kilgore was the group's explosive expert, not Yoshimura? This segment is just a mess before even taking into account the "living person" standard (which does not say "if anybody said or wrote it about them, it's a verified fact").

Revolutionary Army: I deleted the self-evident adjective "radical" from the article's description of, ahem, a group calling itself "The Revolutionary Army"; I added the adjective "so-called," and added the factual statement that the so-called "Army" never had more than five "members" -- a fact that seems to provide the reader with information useful in determining how to appraise and understand the nature of this "Army." I also deleted a reference to Brandt having been arrested while "driving a car belonging to Yoshimura" because, while it could well be true, I could find no authenticating source for that information.

Symbionese Liberation Army: I deleted "The four were abandoned during the summer of 1974 by other radical underground groups, a key factor leading to the capture of Hearst and Yoshimura" because, although the cited Time Magazine article did describe pragmatic disaffection (the Weathermen were afraid Hearst was too hot), it doesn't make a case that 1) the group was widely supported by the left in the first place (it wasn't), 2) the Weathermen keeping their distance was an instance of a widespread sea change on the part of the left (it wasn't), 3) the split was "key" to the subsequent arrest. The fugitives' residency in rural Pennsylvania and upstate New York was made possible entirely as a result of outside leftist support, coordinated by Jack Scott, who supplied Yoshimura as part of his effort to keep the group from too much public contact. These facts appear in multiple sources including the Time article, which does not state or support the Wikipedia article's "key" assertion.

Symbionese Liberation Army II: I delete unsupported statements (it is by no means clear that Yoshimura headed to the West Coast in advance of the others, only that she went alone). I note that the group departed from a second rural hideout, one in Upstate New York (the Wikipedia article notes only the Pennsylvania location). I state that Yoshimura went to San Francisco, the others to Sacramento (verifiable via multiple sources, including Every Secret Thing and The Voices of Guns; these two books, Anyone's Daughter, and court transcripts, combine to provide the actual source material for almost all the secondary citations in the Wikipedia article).

Symbionese Liberation Army III: I try to synthesize and summarize all authoritative accounts of the Sacramento bank robbery that finally resulted in the group's relocation to San Francisco.

Arrest and Conviction: I provide the full Shana Alexander quotation, since if it has any validity at all with respect to explaining public support for Yoshimura the whole section does a better job than the first part does on its own.

Grand Jury Investigation: Yet another of 15 instances where Wikipedia cites a single SF Chronicle story, this time asserting as fact what a former Assistant DA claims is in the sealed GJ record. What is known is that Yoshimura was granted limited immunity, she testified, no indictments resulted, her immunity remained intact -- and when indictments were issued a decade later and the defendants were convicted, her status did not change.

I have to submit that my revisions eliminated speculation and rumor misrepresented as fact, and added clarity and balance without bias. I'm going to revert (and maybe slightly edit).

Hilarie.lang (talk) 00:05, 10 March 2008 (UTC)hilarie