Talk:Yiddish Book Center

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"The first organization dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish language and culture"? Come on now. I will change to something accurate, like "the first well-funded American Jewish..."Zackarysholemberger 20:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

It appears that a contributor is replacing the neutral tone established earlier with material that resembles advertising. I have reverted some content reflect this and have undone these edits. If I have not recovered some of the interesting and valid seeming criticism, please add the deleted text back. If these types of changes are made again, I believe they should be reported. --Libhober (talk) 02:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

After updates, I have removed the POV dispute from October 2009 in accordance with NPOV policy.--Guldenberg (talk) 17:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

size of Steiner Yizkor Book Collection

In § Collections, the figure of "nearly 700" books in the Steiner Yizkor Book Collection was flagged as "citation needed".

I didn't see any number on the site, but when I saw how the Collection info was arranged, I realized that it should be easy to count them. The Yizkor books are listed in alphabetical order of the names of the communities, spread across four webpages. For each page, I visited it and had my browser display its HTML. I pasted that to a temporary file and extracted the lines of code corresponding to the name of the community, appending them to another temporary file. Then I counted the lines:

grep ') ' foo
grep ') ' foo >> bar 
[iterate for all four pages]
wc bar
477    1982   21710 bar

--Thnidu (talk) 05:50, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Better now?

I have copyedited the article and tried to removed advertisement-like tone. If no one disagrees, I will remove the 'COI' and 'advert' tags. I think that the 'third-party' tag should stay in place Leschnei (talk) 22:40, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

RE: citation clarification

Hi, I’m Lisa (ComCom18) and - full disclosure – I’m an employee of the Yiddish Book Center. I respect the Wikipedia guidelines so I want to make sure there’s no COI. We are at the beginning of our relationship as a GLAMwiki partner organization and are making plans on how best to share expert knowledge and resources relating to Yiddish literature and culture! We are in contact with sadads and PatHadley for advice with this. Initially, I’d like to help provide information and suggested edits to improve and correct the footnote citations for items 4, 5, 6, and 7. I hope that this information will help Wiki editors with clarification that will improve the article and hope it’s the first step in a fruitful relationship between the Yiddish Book Center and the Wikipedia community.

RE: Citation #4:

Lansky, Aaron (2004). Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. pp. 48–49. ISBN 1-56512-429-4.

• Lansky's claims that Yiddish was in a state of obsolescence provoked the ire of many people long-involved in Yiddish cultural activities.
• I’ve checked all four editions of the referenced book and referenced pages and there’s no such claim, quote, or statement on these pages.

RE: Citation #5

Halter, Marilyn (2000). Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York, N.Y.: Random House. pp. 79–80. ISBN 978-0-8052-1093-4.

• His invocation of Yiddish nostalgia for the purposes of fundraising has also been the subject of debate, both among Yiddish cultural activists and by critics of "ethnic marketing".
• I’ve checked the referenced book and pages and see no such statement or invocation.

RE: Citation #6

Jewish Labor Committee press release, May 12, 1995.

• Lansky rankled initial supporters again when the new center was built by a non-union contractor that had no collective bargaining agreement with its workers.
• The citation doesn’t provide any documentation to support this statement or assertion…

RE: Citation #7

"Charity Navigator Rating - National Yiddish Book Center". Charity Navigator. Retrieved 13 September 2015.

• The manner in which the center raises and spends its funds has also been the target of criticism. According to the organization's IRS Form 990, Lansky's 2008 salary was reported as more than $195,000. Since the bulk of the organization's funds are spent on the salaries of the top three employees and on fundraising, the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator rated its efficiency a zero, or "exceptionally poor", and the overall organization as "poor" in 2008. As of 2011 Charity Navigator gives the National Yiddish Book Center an overall score of three stars out of four, based on a financial-performance score of two out of four stars and an "Accountability & Transparency" score of four out of four stars.
• The above paragraph states “The manner in which the center raises and spends its funds has also been the target of criticism.” There is no source or incline citation. The statement seems to be an unsubstantiated opinion of the editor who posted the commentary.
• In the same paragraph, the following statement asserts that the “Since the bulk of the organization's funds are spent on the salaries of the top three employees and on fundraising, the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator rated its efficiency a zero, or "exceptionally poor", and the overall organization as "poor" in 2008. As of 2011 Charity Navigator gives the National Yiddish Book Center an overall score of three stars out of four, based on a financial-performance score of two out of four stars and an "Accountability & Transparency" score of four out of four stars.
• I can’t find any documentation to support the above statement that “Since the bulk of the organization's funds are spent on the salaries of the top three employees and on fundraising, the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator rated its efficiency a zero, or "exceptionally poor", and the overall organization as "poor" in 2008.” This language appears to be the opinion of the editor who posted, and as far as I can tell this is not language that appears on the Charity Navigator site.

Thanks! I look forward to working with you to improve things ComCom18 (talk) 16:05, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, citation 7 appears to be original research combined with a promotional message (or an axe-to-grind). Staff salaries in a majority of non-profits is roughly 2/3 of the budget. Overall Charity Navigator gives decent-to-good grades for Yiddish Book Center. - kosboot (talk) 16:24, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

• sadads contacted me on this - I suggest you make the edits you think are neutral and appropriate, referring to this talk page in the edit summary, & I will review them. Please let me know when you think you've done all the edits. Johnbod (talk) 18:00, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

@Johnbod: - I made the edits. Take a look. - kosboot (talk) 19:02, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm I've been poking around, & I'm not entirely happy with these edits. this Boston Globe story does substantiate some of the bits removed, as does the history page of the Charity navigator site. Some of this is pretty old, and I think we can let the Jewish Labour League of whatever stuff go, but I think too much has been removed. I am frankly dubious that the original edits were especially "original research combined with a promotional message (or an axe-to-grind)". What does Lansky say on the cited pages of the book? If "Yiddish was in a state of obsolescence" was all wrong, would there be a need for the centre? Clearly, it is a language with a greatly reduced number of natural speakers, as Lansky says in interviews, and any fule kno. In interviews he seems to like to make great play of how much opposition he faced. Could you try again? Johnbod (talk) 23:20, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Kosboot: Hello, hello? Johnbod (talk) 03:09, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

 Request withdrawn I don't see a current edit request here, so I'm deactivating the template. Feel free to reactivate it for future requests. Those requests, as a reminder, will be expedited if they follow certain patterns such as the following example:

LIST OF PROPOSED CHANGES

Current text	Replace with
Tate purchased, then lost, a yellow ball.	Tate purchased, then lost, a red ball.
Tate lost the yellow ball after he purchased it.	(delete)
(blank space)	Tate lost the red ball after purchasing it.

Regards,  Spintendo  ᔦᔭ  00:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

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