Talk:Everyone Hates Elon

Pineapple Storage (talk) 14:19, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

This is a belated note to say that I posted at WikiProject London, WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom and WikiProject Visual arts to let participants know this article may be of interest to these projects, and I have also requested an assessment of this article at Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia/Assessment#Requests from May 2025. Pineapple Storage (talk) 08:31, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

@Pineapple Storage I understand if this is difficult to do, but I would like to see more info about the group in general, not just political events (C2). Possibly expand on it's platform - the lead talks about it, but the lead should be a summary of the article, so it could be expanded turned into its own section (and summarized for the new lead). Won't say big issue for B-class but C3, from what I see the London vs. Musk campaign is a campaign, so could be merged into campaign section. Cheers, GoldRomean (talk) 14:42, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

@GoldRomean Thanks so much for this feedback! I've added a bit of detail to the Background section to reflect the summary in the lead. London vs Musk was a one-off event rather than a campaign, so I've added the phrase "one-off" to that section to make this clearer. Is there any other info about the group in general that you would like to see in the article? Given that they are a political campaign group (so almost all of the relevant events are political) and the members have chosen to remain anonymous, I'm not sure there's too much more information available... Also, apologies if this is a silly question, but what do you mean by the group's platform? Thanks again! Pineapple Storage (talk) 10:53, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Nice, I've reassessed as B-class (though technically you know you are allowed to just self-assess, but I respect you for not doing so). By "platform" I know there might not be much to talk about since it is quite obvious, but I mean kind of like what the group is advocating against/for. Similar to the whole "Policies" section in Project 2025. GoldRomean (talk) 13:02, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

@GoldRomean Oh amazing, thanks so much! Yes, I was reluctant to self-assess as I don't even have any experience assessing articles written by others—let alone ones I've written myself! I will work on including some more information about the group's intentions etc. based on what they have disclosed in sources (mainly THR-Ford and NewYorker-Russell). This has been really helpful, thank you again! :) Pineapple Storage (talk) 13:18, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

@GoldRomean I've now expanded the Background section to explain the group's intentions and strategies in a bit more depth, so hopefully that covers some of the topics that were lacking? Thank you so much again for your feedback! Pineapple Storage (talk) 14:10, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Very nice! GoldRomean (talk) 14:14, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks again for your help! :) Pineapple Storage (talk) 15:12, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

@RogueScholar Hi! Thank you for adding the WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom banner! I noticed you changed the rating of the article from  B-class back to  C-class. If you wouldn't mind, please could you provide some feedback as to your reasoning behind this change? As you can see from the discussion above, the article was only rated a few days ago, but if there's any concern over whether it meets the B-class criteria then I'm keen to address this by improving the article. Any feedback you can offer would be very much appreciated! Pineapple Storage (talk) 11:27, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

Just a quick note following GA Nomination. Earwig's copyvio analysis of the article identifies it as "Violation unlikely", but still there are several sources with quite high similarity percentages (up to 22.5%) so I just wanted to put an explanatory note here to avoid confusion. The vast majority of the text highlighted by Earwig as "similar" to the sources is from direct quotations of the slogans used on the posters, as well as some instances of overlap with the titles of works listed in § Further reading. Pineapple Storage (talk) 14:45, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

GA review

I wanted to add my thoughts about the RS status of Left Foot Forward, which is the origin of four sources cited in the article. It hasn't been listed at Perennial sources, but the only mentions of it I could find in WP and WT archives were negative.

The site is very open about its left-wing/progressive viewpoint, so WP:NPOV might be an issue for comment pieces, which aren't cited in this article. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it as "Mixed for factual reporting"; this is "due to a lack of hyperlinked sourcing", as well as one "failed fact check". However, the MB/FC assessment only links to a this correction by Full Fact of a claim from The Mirror, without providing a link to a relevant LFF article; from a brief search, I found this article, which doesn't seem to make any of the claims criticised in the Full Fact correction. This makes me question what the "failed fact check" mentioned by MB/FC actually refers to.

According to their website, Left Foot Forward are a member of IMPRESS (an independent press regulator) so there's definitely some editorial oversight. As far as I can tell, the articles (1, 2, 3, 4) cited in Everyone Hates Elon mostly just describe the campaigns/posters shown in posts by @everyonehateselon_ on Instagram, but they do also bring in some outside info/data for context as well, so I think they're better sources about the group's campaigns than the Instagram posts by themselves would be.

I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this issue! Pineapple Storage (talk) 13:06, 31 May 2025 (UTC)

Let's start with:

• Who are the members of Everyone Hates Elon? How many are there?
• How many people participated in the destruction of the vehicle? How many observers? What percentage of them were members of the media? (Noting here that the video news reports used as sources show fewer than 100 bystanders, and many of them appeared to be members of the news media.)
• How much money was raised for the sale of the remainder of the Tesla?

There are a few other questions, such as why a group of unnamed individuals (who on the other hand seem to have pretty good media contacts) rates a Wikipedia article, but let's stick to how it managed to get to Good Article status without anything more than a few publicity stunts. Risker (talk) 21:55, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

@Risker Thank you for this feedback! I've just added some details to the article, so hopefully this has covered the first two points you listed? On the third point, I haven't been able to find any sources confirming that the auction of the destroyed car has actually taken place yet, but I will keep an eye out and if/when sources say this does happen, I'll incorporate it into the article.

Re why a group of unnamed individuals (who on the other hand seem to have pretty good media contacts) rates a Wikipedia article and how it managed to get to Good Article status without anything more than a few publicity stunts: I'm not sure what you mean here, please could you expand on these points so I can get a better idea of your concerns? Pineapple Storage (talk) 23:05, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for adding those points, Pineapple Storage. As to the issues about the article passing GA, I refer to the point that there was zero information about either the identities behind the group or the size of the group, which are actually relatively key points in the determination of notability. We must remember that the national press in London are also the local press, and this appears to be a matter that local press would cover. If it happened in Manchester, or Devon, would any of those media outlets have covered it? Given the incredibly small size of this group, the essentially local coverage of the matter, and the lack of information on the outcome on the sale of the "performance art", I'd venture to say we're really skirting the edges of notability. I mean, it's cool and all; but I've seen significantly larger turnouts for performance art situations in my local area (with about 5% of the population of London), and they certainly never got mentions in anything but the local media. The New Yorker references do make me reconsider the notability issue, but I still find it pretty borderline. Risker (talk) 23:21, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

@Risker Thank you for explaining this. Re the "performance art" aspect, it was specifically an invite-only event (participants had to sign up in advance) in a "private space" (per the poster about the event) so no audience (of non-press/non-participants) was present, as far as I can tell. Also, there are no sources saying it explicitly but I think the point of the event seems to have been the social media "viral" spectacle (including coverage by the press etc.) rather than there being an emphasis on the extent of the event's in-person attendance.^[a]

I would argue that The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, The Independent, Euronews, etc. are very much not local news sources... (Let alone Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, who covered the London vs Musk event.) Of course, some local news sources, like MyLondon and Evening Standard, have also covered the group's activities, but these sources aren't relied on as much in the article.

I'm not sure about the merit of an argument against notability based on the fact it's a small group; if a single anonymous individual were responsible for the same campaigns (kind of like Banksy but for anti-billionaire campaigning) and received the same level of media coverage, then I think that article would also meet the notability criteria—the size of the group doesn't really come into play, in my view. Would you disagree? Pineapple Storage (talk) 23:59, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

@Risker I've only just seen your edit summary NewYorker ref may raise the notability bar, but I don't think it was really met beforehand so I just wanted to clarify that the New Yorker ref isn't new, it's been one of the main sources since the article was created. Pineapple Storage (talk) 01:20, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Let's circle back. There is no discussion whatsoever about how the group is funded; this is kind of curious, because they are running multiple funding campaigns. At least one Go Fund Me campaign is specifically designed to collect funds to support the work of the organization, including payment for design. There is no audit trail of whether the funds collected on behalf of certain charities have actually been sent to those charities. There is a claim in the article that they expect to collect 150K GBP for one of those campaigns; is there any report of how that is going? (I notice that the GoFundMe campaigns seem to have more or less gone dormant, but I understand there are other campaign platforms in use as well.)

I think it's perhaps a little premature to compare this group to the very socially conscientious but still multi-millionaire Banksy empire. Perhaps a more useful comparison would be to other guerilla advertising campaigns, and how the posters have a distinctly British/European perspective (the use of the word "bellend", the references to 1939 that are far less understood outside of UK/Europe).

Some mention of similar groups (e.g. Overthrow Musk, Tesla Takedown) may be worth including, as well. (They will be expected for a featured article, if you are motivated to go in that direction.) Risker (talk) 05:30, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for this @Risker, yes I did want to include some more detail about the group's funding (ie. the fact that they crowdfund their actions) and didn't find much discussion of this in the sources originally, but I'll have another look. If it's not discussed in independent sources, would you say it should still be included if the only source cited is WP:ABOUTSELF (eg. their GoFundMe campaign descriptions, or the text of peoplevselon.co.uk)? I've been trying to avoid citing the group's own descriptions of themselves/their campaigns as much as possible, but I'm happy to cite ABOUTSELF sources regarding their crowdfunding, if you think it's warranted?

Just to clarify, my mention of Banksy above wasn't a comparison to Everyone Hates Elon, it was a (playful) comparison to an imagined sole campaigner putting up posters around London (if a single anonymous individual were responsible for the same campaigns). Rest assured, I'm not about to compare this group to Banksy, especially not in the article!

I will have a think about how/where to incorporate discussion of the distinctly British/European perspective... I've been aware of the need for explanation of some of their slogans, hence the explanatory footnotes (a, b and c) but this explanation of context isn't provided by any sources (that I can find, at least), presumably because the assumption by journalists is that most readers will understand what's being implied/referred to. Because of the lack of third-party explanation, I've tried to keep inferred/extrapolated explanation to a minimum to avoid WP:OR/WP:SYNTH/WP:EDITORIAL. There's some discussion of "bellend" in NewYorker-Russell, so I will try and incorporate that. Re the "1939" reference, do you think an efn with (for instance) "A reference to the beginning of World War II in Europe." (including the wikilink) would be enough?

Comparisons to other groups have been made by independent sources (eg. NYT-Shear, Independent-Butler1) so I will have a think about how discussion of these other groups can be incorporated into the article... I'm not sure where this would best fit in though. Do you think it would make most sense in § Background, § Campaigns, or a new section?

Also, just to confirm, do you have any further concerns about notability? If so, I'm keen to discuss how to improve on this, as I want to make sure the article and the sources clearly convey notability in the minds of readers. This is the first time anyone has mentioned concerns over the group's notability, so I'm really interested to hear your point of view. Pineapple Storage (talk) 12:29, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in responding. I think notability meets the standards. Risker (talk) 05:27, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

@Risker Thank you for letting me know! Just to double-check, out of the changes we discussed above (eg. further discussion of the group's funding, outside of what is covered in independent sources; explanatory footnote re 1939; comparison to other groups; etc.), are there any that you would say should be prioritised? I'm keen to address any gaps in the information covered by the article, but only if they can be covered without straying into WP:OR/WP:SYNTH or having to rely on self-published sources (for instance, GoFundMe, which happens to be a spam-blacklisted site). Again, thank you for your feedback; I'm really interested to know your thoughts on this. Pineapple Storage (talk) 09:12, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

@Risker Just checking in, as it looks like I might try to get this article FAC-ready at some point (see Wikipedia:Peer review/Everyone Hates Elon/archive1#Comments) so I'm keen to iron out the sourcing/comprehensiveness issues you raised. Do you have any thoughts on my questions above? Pineapple Storage (talk) 22:28, 28 June 2025 (UTC)