Talk:Peter W. Smith

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A fact from Peter W. Smith appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 July 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that investment banker Peter W. Smith contacted Russian hackers in an unsuccessful attempt to locate missing emails from Hillary Clinton's computer system?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2017/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Peter W. Smith.

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Congressman Ted Lieu's tweet about Smith's suicide[edit]

User:FallingGravity: You removed referenced information about Congressman Ted Lieu's tweet, which reads, "You don't need to be a prosecutor to know that someone writing NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER in connection with a death seems awfully suspicious.". Lieu is not a nobody by any stretch of the imagination and I think it should be included. Here are a few RS we could cite:

Resnick, Gideon (July 14, 2017). "A Democratic Congressman Offers Baseless Suspicions Over GOP Operative's Death". The Daily Beast. Retrieved July 16, 2017.
Hasson, Peter (July 13, 2017). "Dem Rep Doubles Down On Conspiracy Theory About Deceased GOP Operative". The Daily Caller. Retrieved July 16, 2017.
Kugle, Andrew (July 14, 2017). "Dem Congressman Insinuates Conspiracy Theory About GOP Operative's Suicide Without Evidence". The Washington Free Beacon. Retrieved July 16, 2017.

Would you please restore the content? Thank you.Zigzig20s (talk) 19:46, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

User:MelanieN: This might make you want to update your DYK even more?Zigzig20s (talk) 19:48, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The content I removed only cited Ted Lieu's tweet and the conspiracy blog Palmer Report, so I definitely won't restore that. WP:BDP applies to this article, and the cited articles condemn Lieu for spreading conspiracy theories. ^Falling_Gravity 20:07, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) I have been kind of expecting something like this, although I rather expected it would be added to the article by anonymous users, not by long-established editors. And I thought it would be coming from dark corners of the internet, not from a congressman. (I see that Congressman Lieu has a reputation as a tireless Twitter troll. Not my word - the Washington Post's and the LA Times's.[1]) But no, I am not going to restore this. No, it does not belong in the article. No, I am not going to add it to the DYK. Not only because I strongly object to publicizing this kind of conspiracy stuff, and find it particularly offensive about a recently deceased person, but because it has not been picked up by multiple reliable sources - just the Daily Caller (which call it "baseless suspicions") and the Washington Free Beacon {"a conspiracy theory without evidence"). --MelanieN (talk) 20:13, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have zero opinion whatsoever about this matter. But isn't a congressman's opinion more valuable than ours (nobodies)? I don't see anything wrong with adding this content as long as we contextualize it properly as per RS. In fact, it seems odd to stray from those reliable third-party sources by failing to mention it.Zigzig20s (talk) 20:51, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry. A single tweet from one congressman, who already has a reputation as a loose cannon, and for which the only coverage is to ridicule it, does not belong in this article. (I note that the sources that did report on this "baseless," "no evidence" "suspicion" are conservative in orientation; my hunch is they are probably publicizing it only because it makes a Democrat look bad.) If it gets covered by multiple mainstream reliable sources, we will have to add it, but not with the degree of coverage it has now. --MelanieN (talk) 01:04, 17 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]