Talk:Landmark Worldwide

Accusations of Being a Cult & Marketing Practices

It seems to me the material under the sections 'Accusations of being a cult' and 'Controversial marketing practices' would be more appropriate for presentation under the 'Reception' section. Some examples of articles organized in a similar manner are: Tony Robbins, Personal Development, Lifespring, and Alcoholics Anonymous. Coalcity58 (talk) 19:04, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

We should follow WP:LEAD and add the criticism of it being a cult to the lead section. Also those articles you list are far from perfect. Polygnotus (talk) 21:48, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Actually, it has no place in the lead unless you're committed to presenting the organization in a negative light and reinforcing the idea that the company is a cult. Positioning the information in that manner introduces de facto bias. As for the articles I pointed to as examples, what qualifies you to determine how perfect or imperfect they are? Make your case for them being imperfect. Coalcity58 (talk) 16:51, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

I will donate 100 USD to a charity of your choice if you send me a perfect Wikipedia article. To qualify it should at least do my taxes and some light chores around the house. Polygnotus (talk) 17:29, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

You have not answered my question. But you get some points for a marginally creative dodge. Coalcity58 (talk) 15:19, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I hate unloading the dishwasher. Polygnotus (talk) 15:20, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it does belong in the lead, per policy. Per WP:MOSLEAD: "In Wikipedia, the lead section is an introduction to an article and a summary of its most important contents." ... "The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:43, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

@Coalcity58: A debate about content doesn't have to be "settled" to include or remove it. Due to its nature, much of the content on Wikipedia is constantly debated. But that doesn't mean we delete all the content that someone might disagree with or object to. See for example WP:NOTCENSORED. The beatings debates will continue until morale improves the heat death of the universe. Polygnotus (talk) 20:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I think the recent addition to the lead is POV pushing plain and simple. It has been turned into a "prominent controversy" by the two primary editors over the last year through what appears to be a concerted effort to paint this organization in a negative light. I have been checking in periodically on this article since User:Polygnotus posted on the NPOV notice board asserting this organization was a "weird cult" (Hardly Neutral). I tried to make some completely reasonable neutral and sourced edits that were reverted almost immediately and personally lost any enthusiasm for trying to improve the article. In the last year, this article has been bent in a highly negative direction. Rather than engage other editors as collaborators, two editors, Polygnotus and Avatar317, have pushed their negative POV of Landmark removing sourced material from the article that doesn't conform to this POV. This has taken place while while Polygnotus bites newbies, makes uncivil and personal attacks on other editors, and claims that other editors have COI without evidence. I do not think they have been editing in good faith. This really warrants an RFC. Elmmapleoakpine (talk) 21:29, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

@Elmmapleoakpine: If you make accusations you better have some WP:DIFFs. Accusations without evidence are no better than personal attacks. So lets see the diffs. Polygnotus (talk) 21:40, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I have been checking in periodically on this article since User:Polygnotus posted on the NPOV notice board Interesting. That was September 2023 but according to your contribution list you were already defending Landmark in August 2009. It is 2024. Polygnotus (talk) 22:14, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, and to be clear, and contrary to the editor's statement in the history recent edit that was made to the lead section was not made from consensus. I support an RfC on this article. Coalcity58 (talk) 21:41, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Last time the wider community took a look at these articles a bunch of Landmark sock- and meatpuppets got banned. An RFC would not make sense, but I already predicted another ARBCOM case which might be a good idea. Polygnotus (talk) 21:44, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Yet another edit war sigh

@Coalcity58: even when you feel you are righting great wrongs you can't just editwar to get your way. You will get blocked. What is your relationship with Landmark? Polygnotus (talk) 21:38, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Should probably mention the Abgrall bribery scandal from the documentary

This is partially related to the documentary, but is also covered in the 2011 book The New Heretics of France by Susan J. Palmer. I'm not quite sure how to add this, but I added it to Jean-Marie Abgrall's page a while back (because it's related to my interest in the Solar Temple); I do feel like the fact they bribed a cult expert to declare them not a cult to be relevant information about their tactics so to speak. This page is very intimidating to edit so I'm not sure how I feel about adding it myself. PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:06, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Good point, that would indeed be a great addition. It may also be contrasted with how they treated that other cult expert, Margaret Singer. Bullying a grandmother is not a good look. See the litigation archive. Polygnotus (talk) 01:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus I tried to add it. Might not have done very well but hey. PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:41, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA Excellent, thank you. Polygnotus (talk) 01:57, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA What do you think about this edit? Perhaps not everyone knows who Guyard is. Polygnotus (talk) 02:01, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus That makes sense, I edited it to be clearer as well. I think the auditing may have been in the late 90s, since that's when they were taken off the list, and they only paid him later?? the sources are unclear I may have to watch the documentary later since IIRC he talks about it there. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:23, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Also, unrelated, but the reason I said Guyard commission instead of Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France is that there were actually three "Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France", of which we only have an article on one for some reason. Guyard is the 1995 one. PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:27, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

It could be interesting to look for sources for the other two. I think "the 1995 Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France" is easier to grok than "the Guyard commission". There is also activity on a European level btw. I'll take a look. Polygnotus (talk) 04:43, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough as long as we specify the year. That whole page is kind of a mess. Someday I'll rewrite it. PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:44, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Citation style

The citation style used here drives me mad. it's inconsistent, and also a mixture of short form and long form citations, which can be justified sometimes for sources that aren't paginated but we are using them inconsistently with no rhyme and reason for whether they are or aren't paginated. Some of the sources are in the footnotes section, some are in the references section, some are in both duplicated, some are in one when they should be both. While given the contentious nature of the topic I can see why quotes are needed even more contentious topics don't have quotes on everything, much less free to read online news articles that you can click on (and maybe the same problem could be dealt with by holding POV pushers to account). Is anyone in agreement with me that there is an issue here? PARAKANYAA (talk) 06:44, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA: I had to use wikEdDiff to see what actually changed. Of course more consistency is always good. Have you seen https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Sub-referencing ? They say it will be made available soon. Polygnotus (talk) 08:24, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus "soon" can mean many things for the WMF. Could be six months could be ten years. Not holding out hope.

As far as I see it, the standardization options we have are

1 - Standardize as sfns (harvnbs for citations that need quotes, which we should only be using for offline sources). The page uses a handful of these. Has the advantage of being able (with harvnb tags) to use multiple quotes for different references, however using non-paginated sources with this is weird to me

2 - standardize with r templates. I personally do not like r templates, but they are usable, and what most of the page uses already.

3 - mix of either r or sfns for paginated sources and long cites for non paginated ones, e.g. web sources. For an example of what this looks like with sfns, see any of the Order of the Solar Temple pages which I have worked on. Some people hate this, but I think it looks good

I would contribute to this page more if it didn't use the most cursed referencing ever. I am willing to do work to get it to whatever we want to standardize on, but we have to choose something. I personally would prefer option 3 with sfns. Thoughts?

I also think we should cut down on the amount of quotes, especially for free to read online sources. For ones that are offline or hard to access it makes sense but do we need a quote for the ones that you can read in a click? The whims of bad faith editors should not make it so we have to include a massive quote on every. single. reference. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:47, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Very true. I was led to believe it would happen this year, but no guarantees! I am here as a lightning rod for Avatar317; I haven't actually done anything with the article except remove some WP:PROMO. @Avatar317: what do you think? Polygnotus (talk) 03:28, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

I am the one who has included quotes on every. single. reference. - that is my work; my reason being that in contentious articles like this I have often seen well supported text removed by those who don't like it, (maybe IP editors) and withOUT source quotes, uninvolved editors who are unfamiliar with the topic are unlikely to revert such removals unless the supporting text (the quote) is readily available in the viewable diff. Articles like this often see NON-good faith edits, where an editor will remove something with an edit summary like "not supported in the source" when in fact it is clearly and indisputably supported in the source.

Yes, the citations are inconsistent. The inconsistent style is something I was hoping to fix, and had thought of moving to sfn style (because of my (over)use of quotes), but editor Grayfell had commented that the r style is easier for new editors, so I hadn't gotten around to consistentifying the references.

The reason for the reference mess, from what I've seen from the ancient history of this article, is that a lot of this article (before I came to it) was written WP:BACKWARDS, whereby someone added a statement, and later people would add "sources" and then someone else would move those sources around.

Maybe choice 3 above? The Footnotes and References sections do need cleanup, and I never got around to de-duplicating those sections.

Thanks for your help here! ---Avatar317^(talk) 19:39, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

One additional comment: in comparison to the Order of the Solar Temple article, about a group with ~70 DEATHS from mass suicides means that there have probably been 10-100x the number of academic investigations into that group, vs. Landmark with >2M attendees and 0 known deaths. Most of the mentions in academic sources I have found on Google Books have been just mere mentions of Landmark as to where or what type of org it is classified as. There is some Israeli study specifically on the group, and the book Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training, but other than those, I've not seen academic research for which the entire focus of the work was a study of Landmark. ---Avatar317^(talk) 21:51, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

There used to be an article about this courtcase. https://horizonsmagazine.com/blog/estate-of-jack-slee-vs-werner-erhard-death-during-est-training-set-a-precedent-for-the-james-ray-lawsuits/ There were also a bunch of psychotic breakdowns attributed to the Landmarkians but they were mostly mine I think. Polygnotus (talk) 21:55, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

@Avatar317: Here ya go: Estate of Jack Slee v. Werner Erhard. Look at that AfD... now where do I remember those names from... Polygnotus (talk) 21:56, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Psychiatric disturbances associated with Erhard Seminars Training: I. A report of cases

Psychiatric disturbances associated with Erhard Seminars Training: II. additional cases and theoretical considerations

Observations on 67 patients who took Erhard Seminars Training

A psychotic episode following Erhard Seminars Training. Polygnotus (talk) 22:02, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Documentary notability

For context there was a deletion discussion in 2014 that came to the consensus to merge the documentary to this article. See here. This article was an utter disaster so honestly I can't blame anyone for deleting it, it was a coatrack where almost none of the sources in the article actually talked about the documentary, it had random unsourced asides about the BLPs contained in the documentary, was full of OR and was generally a disaster (also the writer was later topic banned from NRMs and alleged NRMs). However I think it might be notable and an article about it that doesn't suck can be written. I just want to see what people think of these.

Some sources were brought up in the nomination that were not yet in the article, but, they were assessed as merely pre-release pieces which is not true (for some of them). For the purposes of notability we can count all the lawsuit related pieces about the eff/google as one source, though there are a lot of them, so I am not going to address those.

Here are the sources brought up in the afd and my assessment

• Le Parisien - short statement, pre release announcement), doesn't cover content that well so not helpful, maybe good for a few details
• Le Point short but still evaluative imo, better than the above piece, contributes to notability i think, but not amazing
• L'humanite provides context, sigcov, but little evaluation on the documentary
• Le Soir not very long, but an actual review with commentary, and definitely long enough to be sigcov.
• Huffpost there is sigcov but this is kind of weirdly personal so idk how we would use it in the article

I am pretty decent at finding French sources, so are additional reviews/sources I have found:

• a 450 word piece from Le Monde, probably the most reliable paper in France; not very evaluative annoyingly, but discusses it and the context
• this from tele-satellite, reliable and sigcov but not very evaluative
• about a one paragraph mention in The New Heretics of France (OUP book) about a different lawsuit that resulted from this documentary, not sigcov but interesting
• some sigcov (partly about the censorship admittedly, but some not) in a phd thesis (?)
• retrospective article from telerama in 2010, discusses the documentary and its effects on Landmark in France, listing it among "The documentaries that changed the world"

It's not really a pressing need but I think an article that doesn't suck could be written from it. Thoughts? PARAKANYAA (talk) 08:10, 23 September 2024 (UTC)