Talk:Andrew Saul

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Good article Andrew Saul was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
An entry from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on August 10, 2007.
This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.
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Andrew Saul is included in the 2007 Wikipedia for Schools, or is a candidate for inclusion in future versions. Please maintain high quality standards, and make an extra effort to include free images, because non-free images cannot be used on the CDs.
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Contents

[edit] older entries

Couldn't believe this was previously speedied. Its said that some people are trigger happy, instead of google-happy (improving this stub took all of ten minutes). MrPrada 00:14, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The previous speedied version was not about this person, but about a high school student with the same name. I am the person who speedied the article about high-school Andrew Saul... would you consider withdrawing your characterization of me as "trigger happy?" -FisherQueen (Talk) 00:23, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA Review

GA review (see here for criteria)
  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    a (fair representation): b (all significant views):
  5. It is stable.
  6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic.
    a (tagged and captioned): b lack of images (does not in itself exclude GA): c (non-free images have fair use rationales):
  7. Overall:
    a Pass/Fail:

Nice work very nice. --Tλε Rαnδom Eδιτor (tαlk) 20:40, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] TSP

As I do not want to overburden the FAC page, which is primarily for assessing FA criteria rather than specific article content, I add these comments separately here.

The first thing that stood out for me was the word-for-word duplication between the section "Thrift savings plan" and its subsection "TSP funds" with the article Thrift Savings Plan. Saul is not mentioned until the 6th paragraph in the TSP section and not at all in the subsection. A biography needs to emphasize the person, not emphasize peripheral items involving the person. For example, I do not need to know, and should not know all the details of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the biographies of Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley. I won't go so far to say there is a coatrack, but I won't be surprised if someone else says so.

If Saul himself (not just the organization) had a large role in shaping the current TSP and other Federal Thrift Retirement Investment Board actions, that needs to be clarified, summarized, and stated concisely. The rest needs to be trimmed or placed elsewhere; Thrift Savings Plan and other related articles could benefit from the additional citations. In other words, Saul should be present in the entire article, not only through representations of the board or the organizations he presided over. TLK'in 05:02, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article quality and importance ratings

This article is in eleven WikiProjects. I have never seen an article included in so many subject areas. A pretty prominent Republican named Abraham Lincoln is only in six. What's more, where an "importance" rating is given, Andrew Saul is listed as "High" importance in most cases. If you look at the relevant category, it quickly becomes apparent that Andrew Saul is simply not as "important" as the other subjects he is rated with.

Until a few moments ago, Andrew Saul was rated as "Top importance" for New York City Public Transportation; I changed it to "Low importance." Click here for a list of the other Top-importance NYCPT articles. Can the nominating FA editor have possibly looked at the contents of these categories before putting Andrew Saul in them?

I bring this up because if the principal contributor is so blatantly mis-classifying the subject in relation to other articles to which it's related, it makes one wonder what other kinds of subtle POV bias might be buried in the article, that only someone familiar with Andrew Saul could know. Marc Shepherd 13:07, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

  • So the MTA board is of "low" importance? How exactly is one supposed to solicit contributions from other editors by burying them? And no, I did not look at the contents of the categories, I looked at the standards for them, which clearly say that it would be of interest to a large number of people (oh, say, 600,000 CD residents, or 4 million pensionees, or 7 million train riders) other than subject-matter-experts. I should revert that change, but I'm confident someone else will.
  • What started as some questionable opposition by you to this article is beginning to turn into a personal campaign against me with statements such as "that only someone familiar with Andrew Saul could know". I can easily prove who I am and that I have no affiliation/association/connection to Andrew Saul other then that I live in his CD, and am a TSP participant. By casting aspersions such as "one can only wonder", it comes off as groundless to me. I'm unsure why you're threatened by a "75k article appearing out of nowhere" but if you go over the article history you'll see that I built it up to 75k sentence-by-sentence, each time I found a source I would take whatever I thought was pertinent to Saul and insert it into the article. It doesn't get much more subtle than that. MrPrada 12:24, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Conflict of Interest

The principal contributor to this article may have a conflict of interest. On the featured article discussion page, the contributor wrote, "Andrew Saul is important to me, he manages my pension." I'm actually not convinced that is the only conflict, but it is a conflict nevertheless. Marc Shepherd 13:11, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

  • I'm not quite sure how to respond to this. Does this mean that all employees of the Federal Government and the Military should be excluded from contributing to this article on the basis that they are Category:Wikipedian military people? I don't see what is wrong with finding a topic, getting interested in it, and writing an article about it. MrPrada 11:56, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
The Featured Article Director—the guy who decides whether this article gets promoted—has a comment on his user page about neutrality (reference here):
“ Raul's Razor - An article is neutral if, after reading it, you cannot tell where the author's sympathies lie. An article is not neutral if, after reading it, you can tell where the author's sympathies lie. ”
By this definition, it's pretty clear that this article is not neutral. It's about as glowing a tribute as Andrew Saul could get. If Saul had written the article himself (I am not saying he did), he could hardly hope for it to turn out better. Placing the article in so many WikiProjects, and rating it "high importance" for most of them, clearly suggests that the writer has an exaggerated sense of this topic's importance.
I am also aware of this subject's role in a forthcoming political campaign. It is well known that modern politicians have supporters and paid staff who "troll" Wikipedia, putting in laudatory comments to help their favored candidate. I have no way of knowing whether that is your agenda, but it would be foolish of us to ignore the possibility.
By the way, I'm not saying that articles on candidates for public office can't be featured. As you pointed out, Barack Obama has been featured. I am only saying that extra caution is required in such cases, especially where, as here, the article has only one principal contributor and seems to be blatantly non-neutral.
Had the article turned out unbiased, it would not matter whether you had any connection to the subject. Indeed, had it turned out that way, the possibility of a conflict would never had occurred to us. But given the bias, we simply have to try to ascertain what is going on here.
Part of the problem is: we don't know what is being omitted. As far as I can tell, Andrew Saul is an extremely minor politician who is not widely known. I'm a New Yorker who follows politics, and I've never heard of him. Maybe it's true that Saul has only ever done good things in his life, and that nobody has ever had a bad word to say about him. But he would be a very rare individual, if that were the case. What is on the other side of the coin? Marc Shepherd 12:32, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

As far as I am concerned, the COI is a small issue; and I praise MrPrada for having done the large amount of research and writing visible in the article. Nevertheless, I dispute the neutrality of the article, as it stands, and think it requires a major rewrite, by an editor who does understand the issues involved. If it acquires another major editor, and these are not fixed, the COI should go, and these stay.

This is what I said at FAC:

  • I agree with Marc Shephard that the prose is tendentious; for example, this passage from the lead, even although sourced, is laudatory and defensive: As Chairman of the Thrift Investment Board, he is responsible for managing the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) which is the retirement savings account for employees of the Federal Government and soldiers of the armed services.[4] The TSP is known to reap higher returns for their retirement than comparable private-sector workers, and is immune from many of the problems that plague mutual funds. This is not a neutral tone; is unlikely to indicate consensus opinion; and is, above all, undue weight where it stands.
  • More seriously, it [that is, the entire discussion of the TSP] is appallingly obscure. This may not be our editor's fault; if all he can find is second-hand government prose, which he does not understand, he's stuck. But the objective of a Wikipedia editor should be to read the sources, understand them, and explain them to the reader. There is nothing wrong with keeping this, if we can't do better; but it is not FA material by any stretch of the imagination.

I consider removal of the tags disruptive, at least while the FAC is active; I trust it will not happen again. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:34, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

I have just removed a considerable amount of the TSP discussion. A lot of that discussion went on at considerable lengths while not mentioning, or only barely mentioning, Saul himself.
I certainly think it would be acceptable for the tags to be removed if a neutral editor believes in good faith that the problems have been resolved. Marc Shepherd 16:47, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Well, it's definitely more readable. Marc's removals are in this diff. Some of them deal with controversies at TSP; it is a sign of the unclarity of the whole section that it is not clear to me, even now, how deeply Saul is involved in them. This may answer the {{cleanup}} tag.
Certainly tags should be removed if there is consensus that they are unwarranted; one neutral editor's opinion is neither necessary nor sufficient. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:56, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
As an uninvolved editor (I commented in the FA, not more), I certainly back up the removal of some of the tags. As all the tags are essentially put up there for one reason (possible COI), the COI tag is the only one that should remain (or, alternatively, the neutrality tag, but not both). The general cleanup tag doesn't add anything useful to the list of tags. Adding 3 tags for one reason causes unnecessary "smudging" of the article, which is never warranted. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 18:47, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
I am uninvolved; I first saw this article when reviewing it for FAC. If any tag should go, it is the COI, which is weak; by this argument, writing George W. Bush would be a COI for any Federal employee. I would dispute the neutrality of this article whoever wrote it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:45, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Several of us agree that the article is over-tagged, so I've removed COI. Marc Shepherd 02:48, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Marc's edits

My vacation ended yesterday so I don't have significant time this evening to delve into what was kept, and what wasn't. I sortof expected a lot of the TSP section to get chopped, which I noted in the FA nom.

I would like to inquire:

  • The section on REITs—I believe this section for the most part discussed Saul's actions as opposed to the board in general, or the plan itself. Not quite sure how the part on policy loan restrictions stayed, and this was chopped. Is someone going to rewrite this? If not, I'd just like to hear the logic behind removing it. Probably the only section I was really suprised to see go.
  • The section on L-funds—Also probably worth mentioning, since he seems to have had a great deal of personal involvement with them(I spent two nights reading FRTIB minutes and Senate hearings, which were not fun), although I suppose a good deal of it could end up in the TSP Board article.
  • The section on the TSP volatility in 2007—This issue is what spurred me to write the article in the first place. It was only three sentences long, sourced, and in some ways relevant to the subject biography, although again I could understand why this would be included in the TSP article.
  • The mention of the lawsuit by Roger Mehle and the mishandled computer project for a new record-keeping system were kept, but the description of the incident was gone. The prose may have been less clear then I had hoped, but I think it needs to be described more thoroughly then what is there now, because this was the largest controversy that Saul has been involved in so far.
  • The descriptions of the various funds—There was probably the weakest case of all for keeping this, however the article still goes on to describe the various C-funds, I-funds, L-funds, etc., without really giving the reader any description of what they are. I know its just a click away over at the TSP article, but I felt including them would help the reader. They are not misled by the short overview on the TSP funds.

I'm glad that the COI tag is gone, I'm still a bit confused as to the tenditious editing statement, I have not reverted any edits to this article except when someone (possibly a Saul campaign staffer) created a single-purpose account to chop out anything negative a few weeks ago. I can see how the statement that the TSP is considered immune from the problems of munies would have a difficult time reaching consensus, although I would like to point out that it came from a primary source(Stephen Barr, Washington Post, who is obviously the subject-matter expert) and a U.S. Senator.

As the FA-discussion continues I don't plan to insert anything until it's been discussed here, although I will try and go back to get those citations back that are now missing at the bottom. I'm glad the article is finally getting attention from some other experienced editors. MrPrada 03:44, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Those weren't easy edits to make. I see now that Tinlinkin has followed up with further edits, mostly cuts. The problem is that the lack of neutrality in the original version seemed pretty blatant. It becomes difficult to distinguish what Saul did from what the agency did with Saul as its nominal spokesman. I do think a lot of that material probably belongs in the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board article, or the Thrift Savings Plan. Even in its cut-down form, the FRTIB section reads more like a diary of what happened at the agency, without really illuminating what Saul did. Marc Shepherd 16:09, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Withdrawal from Congressional race

In its current state, this article mentions Saul's Congressional candidacy in the introductory section. It then has a long section just about the race, full of glowing tributes to the "credibility" of Hall's candidacy, along with a lot of campaign minutiae. At the end of the section comes a one-sentence mention that Saul isn't running.

The section has some information about his other political involvements, such as his fundraising for Bush. Most of it is about the hypothetical campaign, however, and most of it should therefore be deleted (and the section renamed). I'll attempt an edit along those lines. JamesMLane t c 21:54, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I took a crack at it. Marc Shepherd (talk) 23:56, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
You pruned an awful lot of garbage, and I largely agree. I think, however, that the political stuff unrelated to the campaign should stay in. Also, the campaign was a major endeavor of his and put him very much in the public eye for six months, so I think at least a little bit more information about it should be preserved. I've put all that in a "Political involvement" section. JamesMLane t c 00:26, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
No problem...you've improved it considerably. Now, if only someone would do the same with all of the "puff piece" material that precedes it.... Marc Shepherd (talk) 15:31, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree with you. The article is still much too fawning. Also, just as a stylistic matter, the introductory section is far too long. JamesMLane t c 15:58, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA Sweeps (delisted)

In order to uphold the quality of Wikipedia:Good articles, all articles listed as Good articles are being reviewed against the GA criteria as part of the GA project quality task force. While all the hard work that has gone into this article is appreciated, unfortunately, as of December 4,

2007, this article fails to satisfy the criteria, as detailed below. For that reason, the article has been delisted from WP:GA. However, if improvements are made bringing the article up to standards, the article may be nominated at WP:GAN. If you feel this decision has been made in error, you may seek remediation at WP:GAR. Ruslik 09:07, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

The reasons:

1) There are two tags at the beginning of the article: NPOV and clean-up, which is too much for a supposedly good article.

2) The lead should be trimmed, it is too long now.

3) The section 'Early career and background' should be expanded. It is too short, especially compared with the next section.

3) The section 'Federal Thrift Retirement Investment Board' is chaotically written. In addition, in the current form it is more about Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board and Thrift Savings Plan than about Andrew Saul.

4) The 'Notes' contain two errors. In addition, citation style is not consistent throughout the article. Direct web links like United Jewish Appeal Federation should be converted into inline citations.

Ruslik 09:07, 4 December 2007 (UTC)