Talk:Law School Transparency

Deletion of Criticism Section of LST wikipedia site

LST is a commercial website and a blog. It's founders are semi-unemployed bloggers who recently graduated law school.

The criticism section of this wikipedia page was wholesale deleted by Epeefleche on the grounds that the sources were unreliable blog posts. However, many of those posts were sourced to newssources or were blog post by established professors at well regarded universities. Others were stories by leaders of LST writing in their own words. The sources critiquing LST are more reliable than LST itself. Deletion of the criticism section was inappropriate.

The criticism section is provided below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Unemployed Northeastern (talk • contribs) 19:40, 21 May 2015‎ (UTC)

(Replaced with a diff, here; it's sometimes appropriate to copy-paste disputed material into talk, but the criticism section with all its subsections and refs was so huge that it would make the talkpage unwieldy.) --Aquillion (talk) 23:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The problem is that the news sources don't seem to generally discuss LST itself; as far as I can tell, what the section does is cite news stories saying things like "law degrees are not worthless the way people are saying" (without mentioning LST), then cited blogs making a link between these articles and LST. The problem is that this does nothing to establish the notability of these critiques, since the arguments themselves have only been posted in blogs; see WP:RS for what qualifies as a reliable source, and WP:SYNTH for the problems with this kind of synthesis. Now, in some limited cases we can rely on self-published information from very highly-regarded figures talking within their field of expertise; but never when making controversial claims about others, as they are here -- see WP:UNDUE; we have to be careful not to give undue weight to the personal opinions of individuals (even professors; a professor may be a well-regarded expert, but they are only at their most reputable when publishing somewhere where we know their words are reviewed.) Whether or not LST itself is a reliable source is irrelevant; we still need high-quality sources for negative stories about them to establish that those stories are noteworthy -- blogs, even blogs from professors at good universities, do not qualify. The other thing the section seems to be trying to do is to use LST's own words combined with news articles to construct an argument; but this is, again, WP:SYNTH and WP:OR. Beyond that, it's important for any controversial statements to be cited in-text; we can't say in Wikipedia's own text "this place is committing extortion", but we can say "so-and-so said it was a scam", provided we can establish that so-and-so and their statement are notable (which usually it has to have been published in a reputable source, not on a blog.) And an additional issue is that generally, WP:CRITICISM sections are undesirable -- it's not encyclopedic to have a section with every negative thing anyone has ever said about the article's subject. Valid, well-sourced criticisms should be placed in the appropriate parts of the article instead. --Aquillion (talk) 00:08, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Aquillion's patient explanation. See, also, my comments here. Epeefleche (talk) 05:40, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

My name is Kyle McEntee and I am the executive director of Law School Transparency. I created an account to address the edits and comments. We are not a commercial entity. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Neither are the co-founders unemployed or semi-unemployed. I run LST full time, and the other co-founder manages an international nonprofit in Santiago, Chile. One of the quotes attributed to me was in the Washington Post. However, immediately upon seeing it, I responded to the Post on Twitter to say that I had been misquoted: https://twitter.com/LSTupdates/status/590501154817212417 I also want to add that the extortion allegation was an anonymous source on a blog. Additionally, that anonymous source did not make any case for extortion. We did not demand payment from anybody. We were working closely with several elite law schools, including the University of Michigan, to establish a higher reporting standard. The theory behind the standard -- including the administrative costs, standard among certification marks -- was outlined by me in University of Nebraska Law Review Bulletin http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2290858 There is no fair reading of our effort as a demand. I am not aware of anybody else besides this anonymous source on a blog who said anything remotely similar. I was advised to seek counsel for a libel suit, but decided it wasn't worth the time or effort. Kyle McEntee (talk) 02:04, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

DC and non-profit status

I've tagged the intro sentence claims that LST is based in Washington, D.C. I've found no evidence of being based in D.C. Where is their office? The official not-for-profit status was difficult to find, but I finally found it on the IRS site. They've moved around. Law School Transparency's non-profit corporation in Tennessee has been dead since 2013 but they do seem to be registered as a corporation now as Georgia not-for-profit, entity ID 4580605, and have an IRS tax-deductible status as EIN 46-1898714, but I can't find any Form 990 for these folks, possibly because it's been less than a year since they were actually tax-deductible, since they didn't get their IRS ruling until October 2014, despite all the noise they've made before that. There's also this blog (self-published but by a law professor) which details what's been happening with LST, including that LST hadn't gotten 501(c)(3) status, and that LST could potentially file a 990-N "postcard" report with the IRS instead of a real 990 with their full financial details. (By the way, I can't see who really owns their domain name because they've hidden in behind a domain privacy registration, which seems a bit strange for a "transparency" organization, but that might just be to stop spammers.) --Closeapple (talk) 17:46, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I am LST's executive director. I created an account to address the discussion in the Talk section. Our office is not in DC. It is in North Carolina. I am the only full-time employee right now, and I am operating out of my home. Until we have a physical address, it probably makes sense to just call us a Georgia nonprofit (where we are incorporated) and not make any claims about where we are based. As pointed out, we just got our 501c3 status. But because we have such little revenue, we only need to file a 990-N postcard. The domain is owned by LST and was registered by me. I did not want to use my home address to register the site, and it also is to stop spammers. Kyle McEntee (talk) 01:48, 23 May 2015 (UTC)