Talk:Debra Cleaver

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Vaticidalprophet (talk) 13:50, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

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• ... that when Vote.org's board fired founder Debra Cleaver, donors claiming to represent 60 percent of its funding threatened to withdraw their support? Source: Vox "in a letter in September that urged Vote.org’s board to reconsider Cleaver’s ouster, donors who claimed their donations and pledges accounted for 60 percent of the group’s funding warned that they would no longer back Vote.org if her firing wasn’t explained."
  • ALT1:... that donors withdrew $4 million in funding from Vote.org after its board fired its founder and CEO, Debra Cleaver? Source: Vox

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/WBPX-TV
• Comment: Article is currently subject to an AfD, which is trending keep, but this should still probably be put on hold until it formally closes.^withdrawn I prefer ALT0, since even though the phrasing is a little clunkier, "60 percent" gives a better sense of the impact than "$4 million" out of an unspecified total budget.

5x expanded by Sdkb (talk) and Beccaynr (talk). Nominated by Sdkb (talk) at 09:23, 28 June 2021 (UTC).

• Long enough, 5x expanded, not a stub, QPQ done, no copyvio. Hooks are cited and interesting—I prefer ALT1 as more direct (it describes something that happened, not something that was a potential future outcome at some point in the past). If $4 million is (verifiably) 60% then you could combine the best of each, but otherwise that's my preference.
  I'm going to be very critical on NPOV: I don't like "One colleague described Cleaver's personality as ambitious and pragmatic" because it's the sort of thing you say in a job interview or profile and often not accurate/the most relevant descriptor (and this is Cleaver talking about the colleague talking about her!). I'm similarly not a fan of "brings a technological mindset to her work" (the source says something more concrete about internet use being an overlooked medium in 2008—say that in the appropriate paragraph, or say nothing). But "her personal politics are liberal" is really important to mention so it's good that that's there (I was wondering this through my whole reading of "Career"). I notice that we don't say what she was concretely doing in her political volunteering in 2000–2008. Working for the Democrats? Something non-partisan about registering electors? If the source says, it's probably necessary to mention. — Bilorv (talk) 12:08, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks for the review, Bilorv. For her personality, I'll see if I can find something more removed from her to quote. She seems very type-A, which seems relevant, but I understand the concern. For the technological mindset, the paragraph from which I drew that was this: “One of Debra's real strengths in this space is that she didn't come up through campaigns and that sort of professional campaign world, frankly, in the way that I did before I went back to being a professor,” says Chris Mann ’94, an assistant professor of political science at Skidmore College who became a consultant and advisor to Cleaver’s ventures after the two Pomona College alumni were introduced through professional circles. “She brings this very Silicon Valley, very entrepreneurial mindset to thinking about how to do things.” Would there be a better way to phrase this? I don't recall seeing anything about 2000-2008 but I'll double check. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:48, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

  For the latter, I was looking at the passage Among innovations that are now commonplace in politics, Cleaver pioneered the use of the internet to aggregate state-by-state voter information about registration, absentee voting and voting by mail in 2008 with her first nonprofit, Long Distance Voter. (It also says something about Cleaver supporting cold calling via text in 2016.) — Bilorv (talk) 16:18, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

  I commented out the first sentence since I'm not really invested enough in this to be willing to go through all the sources again to try to find something better. I slightly rephrased the other sentence, but I don't really see any issues with it; it reflects what the source says as closely as is possible without plagiarizing. Do you have any further concerns? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:58, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

  I'm still not comfortable with the "entrepreneurial mindset" sentence. Perhaps I wasn't clear: the problem isn't the phrasing, but that the very "fact" is POV. Some colleague was asked to say something flattering about Cleaver for a profile written by her uni to portray her positively (because it looks good for them to have successful alumni), so the claim is inherently puffery. If it's an important fact then we convey the information by concretely describing something she did where someone with a different approach may have done something different (e.g. the 2008 website or 2016 texts). Or, you can remove it entirely if you want. — Bilorv (talk) 12:16, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks for elaborating. That's a fair enough concern; I've commented out the sentence. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 13:03, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

  Okay, that's all the issues I had so good to go on both hooks, with a preference for ALT1. — Bilorv (talk) 13:34, 7 July 2021 (UTC)