Talk:Steele dossier

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by TheTimesAreAChanging (talk | contribs) at 22:01, 9 December 2023 (→‎Update needed: Deeper look at the systemic problems with this article.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

New lawsuit from Trump

Saving this here:

  • Trump suing ex-MI6 officer who alleged he was 'compromised' by Russian security service[1]

Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:22, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Badshah, Nadeem (September 28, 2023). "Trump suing ex-MI6 officer who alleged he was 'compromised' by Russian security service". The Guardian. Retrieved September 29, 2023.

Dolan article

Interesting mentions of dossier:

Dolan denies being a source for the pee tape.

  • Nora Dannehy made the right ethical decision], by Charles Halliday Dolan, Jr.[1]

I provided one piece of information about the 2016 campaign to a person, who unbeknownst to me was working on the Dossier – a publicly sourced analysis of atmospherics within the Trump Campaign over Paul Manafort’s firing, from POLITICO and Fox News that was arguably the most accurate item of information in the entire Dossier.

After citing no evidence Durham falsely pronounces that, “In light of these facts, there appears to be a real likelihood that Dolan was the likely source of much of the Ritz Carlton …information in the Steele reports.” That’s just an unmerited supposition couched in vaguely conditional language but illustrates how Durham stretches to reach preconceived conclusions that are not supported by any evidence. As such, after reading the entirety of Durham’s report, it seems more reasonable to conclude its title should be changed to “Grasping at Straws.”

Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Dolan, Charles Halliday (October 9, 2023). "Nora Dannehy made the right ethical decision". Hartford Courant. Retrieved December 4, 2023.

Update needed

The last two sentences in the opening paragraph are as follows: “While Steele's documents played a significant role in initially highlighting the general friendliness between Trump and the Putin administration, the veracity of specific allegations is highly variable. Some have been publicly confirmed,[7][11][6][8] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[12][13] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[14][15][16]”

All but one of those sources is from the 2010’s. Perceptions have since changed, per CNN and NYT:

  • Jonny Hallam, Kristen Holmes and Marshall Cohen. “Trump sues former British spy behind controversial Russia dossier”, CNN (29 Sep 2023): “over the years, the credibility of the dossier has significantly diminished. A series of US government investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources. Trump has repeatedly denied the claims Steele put forward.”

We should update accordingly, to something like this: “Many of its central allegations have been discredited, its sourcing was thin and sketchy, it was an unreliable source of information, and Trump denied its claims.” Anythingyouwant (talk) 05:18, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing has substantively changed since the last time this was discussed I don't think. We do largely treat the dossier as untrustworthy, but it's not discredited wholesale; much of it turned out to be accurate, and some of it remains unknown. See Talk:Steele_dossier/Archive_27#RFC_on_lead Andre🚐 06:10, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That RFC was specifically about the first sentence of the lead. I’m talking here about the fourth and fifth sentences which I quoted at the outset of this talk page section. I suggest leaving the first three sentences of the lead exactly as they are, and replacing the next two sentences with the following: “Many of its central allegations have been discredited, its sourcing was thin and sketchy, it was an unreliable source of information, and Trump denied its claims.” This reflects more recent reporting from the New York Times and CNN. Anythingyouwant (talk) 07:08, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No, that RFC was about any use of discredited or controversial; there was no consensus to add either descriptor. You can start a new RFC or a new discussion but I do not see anything much new in the 2 articles above, so I'm not in favor of a change at this time. The reporting isn't really any different, it's just lazy recycling. Andre🚐 07:20, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It isn't really very recent (the latest is just recycling old statements) and it's not "reporting" but just voicing opinions. It's not specific, just bellyaching about disappointed false expectations.
BTW, I assume you're referring to changing "Some have been publicly confirmed,[7][11][6][8] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[12][13] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[14][15][16]" Is that correct? -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 07:34, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Anythingyouwant, you may benefit from reading the recent RfC about adding general opinions and controversial, imprecise, unclear, and contentious labels like "discredited" to the lead. (We already mention them in the body where such opinions and labels can be dealt with much better.) There was no consensus to do so. See Talk:Steele_dossier/Archive_27#RFC_on_lead. Unless you can provide some other arguments and better sources, you are unlikely to get a different result. AFAIK, nothing new has popped up to change the situation, but we're always open to the possibility, and if it happens, the article will be revised again, as has happened many times.

These are the opinions of some writers, not facts, and the lead isn't the best place to highlight such controversial and disputed opinions. Also, the addition of Trump's denial is counterproductive to attempts to add wording like "discredited" to the lead as his denials lend credence to the oft-proven fact that any misdeed he denies usually turns out to be true. He is the ultimate unreliable witness. It's often best not to bring up his denials. His multiple denials and lies to Comey about the pee tape changed Comey from a skeptic who thought the allegation was BS to a "maybe peeliever"(!) who now believes it's possible the pee tape allegation is true.

When one accepts the fact that the dossier is not a perfect, finished, and fully vetted report, but "an unfinished 35-page compilation of unverified raw intelligence reports—"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation"," the "discredited" description is revealed to be a misjudgment based on false expectations.

The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it. In that light, the last sentence of the first paragraph summarizes the more elaborate analyses of each allegation in the body most accurately. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 07:32, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

People forget that "failure to corroborate" an allegation does not mean it is "discredited" or "disproven". It just means the allegation remains uncorroborated. It may be true or untrue. We just don't know for sure. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 07:46, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

CNN reports that subsequent developments have “discredited many of its central allegations”. That’s not opinion, it’s a news article. If a document (e.g. the Steele Report) is deemed unreliable (which the NYT has done), that means pretty much the same thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean the allegations/accusations have been proven false, it just means that the Steele Report has been discredited as a reliable document, and if anything in the Steele Report happens to be true then that’s merely a coincidence. I again request that we accordingly update the last two sentences of our opening paragraph. Anythingyouwant (talk) 19:45, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
They take the same position we do here. Uncorroborated allegations are not considered RS. They are simply ignored. That's what we do with many of the dossier's allegations. We document their existence because RS do that, but do not consider them as strong evidence for anything. What does your suggested change add, other than confusion, since most people assume that "discredited" means "disproven"? How about first dealing with this in the body? Then it will be easier to see if it needs to be mentioned in the lead. We already deal with this type of stuff in the lead in the last two sentences of the first paragraph, a consensus formulation that was reached after long discussion.
The only addition (bolded here) that addresses what you mention without introducing misleading wording to the lead ("discredited" is already mentioned in the body), would be to say out loud what is currently unsaid and assumed: "While many of the allegations are still uncorroborated, (followed by the current wording) some have been publicly confirmed,[7][11][6][8] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[12][13] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[14][15][16]" Valjean (talk) 20:12, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We could easily add a phrase to address your concern: “Many of its central allegations have been discredited, its sourcing was thin and sketchy, it was an unreliable source of information, Trump denied its claims, and any correct claims in it are coincidental at best.” The opening paragraph currently does not convey these facts. So I’d erase (or move down) the last two sentences of the opening paragraph and insert what I’ve just proposed. We shouldn’t be emphasizing how useful and partially accurate the Steele Report may have been, it was a shoddy bit of dishonest oppo research. It wasn’t even meant to see the light of day. Steele has said that, when he learned of the leak by David Kramer to Buzzfeed, he felt "deep dismay and disappointment... at learning that Mr. Kramer had seriously betrayed his trust.” Anythingyouwant (talk) 20:54, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Valjean states that "The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it." However, this approach is fundamentally flawed (and a core problem with our article), because the bulk of the allegations in Steele's dossier have not been discussed in any detail by major journalistic or academic sources. For example, "While The New York Times and many other news organizations published little about the document's unverified claims, social media partisans and television commentators discussed them almost daily over the past two years." As a result, the sources that are used in this article are mostly not reliable, at least not for the content in question.

At 452,680 bytes as of the latest revision, Steele dossier is nearly twice the size of World War II (252,175 bytes at the time of writing), yet unlike World War II, nearly all of its sources fall into the "generally unreliable" or "marginally reliable" camp of opinion articles/tabloids/blogs (with some day-to-day news reportage for good measure), and the vast majority of all article text has just a single author (Valjean at 79.1% according to the latest estimate). It would be difficult for any person to manually review all 546 (!) individual citations to determine how many of them could be disqualified as opinion articles alone (which "are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact" per WP:RSEDITORIAL), but it could easily be in triple digits.

Is "Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion" from New York's Intelligencer blog a "news," "analysis," or "opinion" source—and how well does it hold up more than five years later? What about this "analysis" article by Luke Harding in The Guardian (especially in light of Harding's debunked report on a closely related topic)? Is Rachel Maddow's opinion talk show a reliable source? The examples are endless...

One might also wonder how these sources were collated, in the sense of using neutral search criteria to generate a representative sample of high-quality sources. Valjean regularly mentions his use of Google Alerts (e.g., "I'm creating more Google Alerts for this."; "My Google Alerts tell me so."; "I have several Google Alerts for this topic."), but, based on the examples above (and others cited by critics on this talk page over the years), it seems like these alerts may be generating a considerable amount of content that is WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and thus an example of What Wikipedia is not. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Allegations section.

Furthermore, contrary to Valjean's statement above, it is not the role of volunteer editors "to examine each allegation and evaluate it," as this often results in original research by way of synthesis. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section.

Although top-level sources, such as The New York Times, unequivocally state that "the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details," Valjean and others have long actively pushed back against including similar language in our article, in part to avoid conflict with the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section, which can be interpreted as presenting many allegations in the most sympathetic light possible.

Notably, even the Steele dossier#Kompromat and "golden showers" allegations subsection spends eight paragraphs on the putative "pee tape" and ultimately weighs the "evidence" for and against its existence more-or-less equally, allowing Steele to evaluate his own work as follows: "As for the likelihood of the claim that prostitutes had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele would say to colleagues, 'It's 50–50'." I submit that, in a normal encyclopedia article with less tunnel vision, this collection of OR/SYNTH (largely supported by a skewed sample of low-quality and/or biased sources) would be replaced with a mere sentence or two, such as "No 'pee tape' has yet surfaced, and mainstream sources consider it to be a likely hoax."

While I support Anythingyouwant's proposal, bringing Steele dossier into compliance with Wikipedia's sitewide content policies would require a vast WP:TNT, particularly of the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section and the huge proliferation of marginal (if not WP:FRINGE) sources. However, there appears to be WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to veto a major overhaul at this time.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:01, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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