Talk:Wendy Yoshimura

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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)

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

[edit] 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