Talk:Clint Reilly

Death date

Owing to discrepancies between various sources, I have removed the specific death date of Reilly. Only the NYT source gives Saturday as that date; the rest say "over the weekend." I have contacted the Times and await a clarification. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 03:44, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

The Examiner originally announced simply that he died at the weekend (i.e., either 18th or 19th), and the Chronicle and others reported that. However, the family obituary added by Rusted AutoParts has the 18th, and that's a reliable source for the death date (and presumably the NYT's source). ... Iseult, I edit conflicted with you attempting to save my own initial expansion of the article. You've covered material that I had in hidden notes, and you've used different major sources. So I plan to attempt to combine the two versions, but I'm out of time now so saving my version off-wiki. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:48, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Yngvadottir, ah, unfortunate. I'll shove that back in. I dislike using Legacy, so let's see if I can find the source. As for the NYT, no, not the case; Legacy lists the family obit as being published from 7/24-26, and the NYT piece was published on the 23rd. Perhaps Trip Gabriel got a unnamed source, but that would be weird, as he credits Frank Holland with giving the cause of death. But I've restored the date and Legacy source and have submitted a request via the SFPL for an obit search; check back in four weeks.

As for expansions, I've been eager to take this to DYK for some time (see source access dates and my draft history). I'd be happy to take this to GA with you. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 14:20, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

@Iseult: I was hoping when I made my quick and dirty re-expansion from the redirect that someone(s) else would come along and use the now available sources—and what I'd found from earlier. So thank you very much! But my version is different in balance, even aside from the fact that you cover the accusations that I had in hidden notes for my intended Phase 2. (And thanks for the offer, but I don't do GA.) You've got me a bit over a barrel with the DYK nom, since if I make my planned edit, the article will change quite radically. I'll start a new section below, so that others reading this page don't miss it. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:55, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. Track your hook after promotion. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Beta Beta Beta (talk) 02:50, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that one of Clint Reilly's clients called him "Satan"?

• Source: He is “Nixonian,” says one colleague. “Queeg-like,” says another. State Sen. Quentin Kopp, a former client, refers to him fondly as “Satan.”

• • Reviewed:
  • Comment: Please be on the lookout for close paraphrasing, as my brain is irretrievably contaminated by copyrighted material after having read nineteen sources and sixty pages. Also, let me know if you consider there to be BLP issues in the personal life section.Moot following a few rewrites.

Converted from a redirect by Iseult (talk) and Yngvadottir (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.

In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 14:48, 28 July 2026 (UTC).

• Comment. Please hold off on reviewing this for a day; I had been working on the article with different sources and need time to merge in material. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:59, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Endorsing Yngvadottir’s request; not my intention to place them “over a barrel”. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 16:08, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

And rescinding the request; I've made my big edit and Iseult and I are not wrestling with each other over the article. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:29, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

• Full review needed; edit conflicts were resolved a month and a half ago. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:28, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

The article has been sufficiently and recently expanded. Sources abound and it passes spot checks. The hook fact is also supported by the cited source. I see no copyright or neutrality concerns, but the domestic violence bit is unclear. During his 1999 run for mayor, opponents turned his own hardball tactics on him, resurfacing the accusations;[6] a former associate now working for Willie Brown said that Reilly had broken the woman's ribs and jaw.[25] Which accusations? Which woman? This seems to be the only time this incident is mentioned in the article. The lead should be expanded, although this is not a DYK issue. Surtsicna (talk) 13:33, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

Surtsicna, turns out that was removed here. I’ll think on this. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 20:25, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

Surtsicna, clarified. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 01:14, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

It's better, though not perfect, but will do for DYK. I am tempted to suggest something like this as a 1 April hook:
ALT1... that Satan helped elect United States senators?
Surtsicna (talk) 20:38, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

I wish I'd seen Dizzycheekchewer's edit, or had been pinged when it was discovered during the evaluation for DYK. I'd have withdrawn my name from the DYK. It was mostly Iseult's work anyhow, I wish I'd just withdrawn when it became a GA candidate. Yngvadottir (talk) 07:34, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Out of curiosity @Yngvadottir, what's your opposition to the edit? It was meant to help it go forward in DYK, as it had sat for some time without a review. I appreciate your concern about slash and burn, but the only real removals were of things that a) were genuinely not clear to me as a reader or b) skirted NPOV. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 11:00, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

For one, the removal of a chunk of information that was pointed out by the reviewer when it finally got reviewed for DYK, because it left a statement hanging that had been dependent on that information. That degraded the article. I see you had concerns about NPOV; since two experienced Wikipedians had been working together on the article, including discussing how best to present the accusations mentioned in the sources, don't you think it would have been a good idea to at least outline your concerns on the talk page after making the edit; it's possible that your lack of understanding, also mentioned in your edit summary, was easily fixed or rested on a wrong assumption. You left the article with something genuinely unexplained and by not explaining your decisions adequately, didn't provide an opportunity for it to be fixed. And what on earth do you mean by "SF examiner tsuris"? Could be anything from "I couldn't access the links" to "I dislike that source". Finally, something on which opinions differ: your removal of refs that you saw as excessive. I've encountered this at DYK before, but did it occur to you that there might be more than a couple of references on a sentence because it was built up from multiple sources? or that having a choice might enable a reader to access at least one or two of the refs? I do object to the blanket reduction of references based on personal taste, although as I say, I recognize that tastes differ here.

Overall, your edit seems to me to have been largely based on just that, personal taste. The way Wikipedia works, it is of course your right to edit as you see fit; but without a detailed justification, and especially after all the careful work Iseult had put in, that's just high-handed, and in my opinion you didn't help the article, you messed it up. Especially the parts that I'd worked on. That's the risk with "being bold", and that's the risk with submitting to a scrutinizing process like DYK. But I regret leaving my name associated with the article—it was a nice gesture to include me in the nomination, so I decided to leave it in place long after bowing out—and I greatly regret having been credited with it after you'd unintentionally destroyed what I'd worked to lay out clearly and neutrally. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:15, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I fear you come to this with more grievance than is warranted. SF examiner tsuris is nothing to do with any of your unfair guesses—which is clear in the context of the edit summary and the page. It's instead me noting that more space could be spent on Reilly's troubles (ie tsuris) with and his eventual buying of the SF Examiner. It is one of the main things in the coverage of him, moreso than some stuff that is well-covered here. It had nothing to do with not liking SF examiner or wanting to cut sources. I also didn't cut sources for the hell of it. Looking back I cut one dupe source and then one source that barely talked about Reilly. So if 1 cut source is your line, I suppose I crossed it.

I see the DYK question, but it's a far stretch to say that it degraded the page. It was a minor confusion that was easily resolved. I do apologize for the disturbance it caused. If I had DYK reviewed the page before my edit, I would have expressed more serious concerns, as it read like a puff-piece in areas. The DYK hook itself was saying that he was known as "Satan", but the page had little to nothing that wasn't explained away one way or the other. With the allegations section, which remains imperfect, if RSs covered the allegations and found them credible, more detail is warranted and it shouldn't be dismissed as karmic or as a dirty trick by Willie's people (that's narrative/spin, not encyclopedia). If it is just bogus, then it should get little to no space (i.e. it's one of the instances where multiple sources would be warranted/helpful to justify whichever path).

The main disconnect that drew me into a bigger edit than I originally intended was the lead. It originally said Reilly helped "Senators" Boxer and Feinstein when, in reality, he was fired from Boxer's campaign a decade before she ran for Senate and unpleasantly quit Feinstein's while she was still SF mayor. The lead as it is now even—clearly, given the ALT1 suggested by Surtsicna—hints that he helped elect them senator, when he simply didn't. That alone (in the lead) frankly misrepresented his career in a borderline inaccurate way, that unintentionally or not embiggens the feather in his cap. And instead of failing the page as not presentable or having a negotiation on the talk-page, I tried to make it better. I could go through these issues point by point, but it's not a project based on deferring to your experience when the result is an unencyclopedic page.

Genuinely, credit to you both for the considerable research and initiative behind building and expanding the page. But your behavior here specifically—throwing what can be reasonably described as a fit over a pretty moderate edit—is one of the more severe instances of WP:OWNBEHAVIOR I've personally encountered on the site. I changed a handful of individual words/phrases for neutrality purposes, created subsection headings to make the page more navigable, and added probably 5-6 sentences worth of info meant to help the balance shift from the too-positive to the middle. In deference, I preserved a lot of stuff I didn't think met the mark or matched my taste. And then weeks later, you're here using words like slash and destroy and implying that I simply couldn't grasp the grand design of this page. Besides being rude, it's just unproductive behavior. It's not about your honor or "your" version of the page versus Iseult's. It's about a page that meets the needs of Wikipedia-users and finding consensus based on guidelines followed in good faith. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 06:44, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

As I said, that's your right. (And correct, my regret about not pulling out of the DYK earlier is nothing to do with you.) But if you don't bother to amplify your concerns on the talk page, there's a risk you'll get something wrong and it doesn't get fixed. Did you see the section below this, where we started talking about balance from the get-go, and about finding more sources because they gave conflicting pictures? And in any case, how did you think making an edit of your own to improve the article would get it reviewed faster? It was simply stuck in the backlog (plus I imagine seeing my comment requesting a day's delay, with a little conversation below it, may have put off a potential reviewer who took it for a start on a review, or something). For posterity, here's your (unintentionally?) hostile edit summary: "started fixing MOS:SEAOFBLUE and WP:OVERCITE issues before falling into a rearrangement. there are good bones, but was some npov line-skirting and organization issues. not perfect now, but more navigable. could use more detail to mayoral run, SF examiner tsuris, prob other stuff". If you only took out one or two refs, why did you invoke OVERCITE? If you made few changes and inserted a few subheadings, why does your edit summary talk of rearrangement and organization issues? I admit I misunderstood "could use more detail to ... SF Examiner tsuris". I thought the "could use more detail" applied only to the mayoral run (Iseult and I discussed that and they were going to consult newspapers in a library) and the "Examiner tsuris" was just another problem you had with the article. My apologies for triggering your dread of OWN by objecting to a not very good edit with no communication. I hope I've managed to explain how your drive-by edit with no flag for your having wiped something that was referred to later in the article was a missed opportunity for really improving the article, and that your edit summary presenting the article as badly organized and biased was less constructive than you presumably meant it to be. After reading your response, I can better see how it came about and I seriously suggest you use the talk page to amplify/explain in future; or if it's one editor's work, ping them using "User: " in the edit summary. Iseult had to scramble to fix the mess you'd accidentally made. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:52, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

The talk page edits were more than a month old and frankly seemed over-wrought in my skimming. It's better to actually make edits than to try and beg permission to make edits that you missed. I have no interest in going ten rounds over commmas or wikilinks. If my edit is so bad and you so own the page, you'd see the edit and reject the changes as you saw fit (and fwiw Iseult sent a thanks after the edit, making me think it was at least okay) and everyone can move on. That edit summary isn't hostile, it was just a statement of my read and explanation for a bolder edit than I planned. I can see resenting a big, unrequested change and reading into that edit summary as negative, but that's on you, not me. I put rearranged because that's partly what I did (added section headings and moving things to those headings). Overcite likewise drew me in because you were using the same 3-5 obits over and over again for non-controversial info in what frequently is/was Gish gallop coded. I maintained many as they were, but that overciting (the reuse of sources) plus the aforementioned lead question mark is what drew me in.

It's not about my "dread" about OWN. I get having pride in what you wrote or wanting it to continue to meet the mark that you feel it does. But your approach is just plain unpleasant. I've absolutely bristled at and contested edits, but the objective is a better page. Not getting your desired amount of credit or trying to make the talk page into a message board where people come to ask if they can make changes. Your approach instead is whinging about a weeks old edit that made one minor mistake, I guess trying to make me feel bad for my attempt? Trying to make yourself feel put upon? Some continued beef with Iseult's edits? Either way, it's energy that can be spent on editing or, at the very least, on articulating a change the current page needs. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 16:41, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

All right, I think this won't be productive anymore. DCC, thanks for the lede change; I think prepended "future" in my head but not on the actual page. Yngvadottir, sorry about the trouble. I hope this won't preclude future collaborative work on Bay topics. I don't live anywhere near San Jose presently, so the Mercury News is right out for now. Wish me luck in my career so that I can get that article? In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 18:16, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I agree that it's not productive and hadn't planned on replying after my last. I appreciate the interest in moving forward, but I wanted to register my disagreement with an apology to the person who started this. Yngvadottir tagged me twice to complain about edits after assuming bad faith in relatively moderate cuts. They then proceed to be unrepentant about that approach and condescending in general. If anything, they should be apologizing to you and/or me for making the DYK and good faith edits into an opportunity for a great big whine. None of this is against you certainly or the intent/work of you both. Any critiques of the page were meant only to justify my edit and to demonstrate that the flaw I introduced certainly wasn't its only flaw (as is true with many, many pages). Either way, whatever this was has left a nasty taste in the mouth. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 19:12, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Sourcing and balance

Iseult and I overlapped in working on this article, and wound up using a different balance of sources. I prioritized documenting his career, using the obituaries, earlier articles in the SF Chronicle, and the two extended sources that I found had been there in barelink. Some sources, including the SF magazine article, which I found at Wayback, mention the accusations that Iseult has included, but I had left those and his philanthropy—which I had intended to merge into Personal life, since he received recognition for it together with his wife—in hidden notes for me or others to fill out later. The two of us wound up using quite different sources; some of those that are now in the article, such as Mission Local's retrospective, I hadn't even looked at yet, just noted the URL. I'm concerned that there's a complex story here and while we don't want to write a hagiography, there's also a risk of making it too much of a hit piece. Since it's been nominated for DYK, there's a bit of urgency because the DYK reviewers are going to have to look at it all over again after I get finished merging in my material and rephrasing. But it will take me hours to do that, and I can't begin right now.

So I'm going to ask them to hit the brakes at DYK. And I'm going to make two edits in quick succession to the article itself, replacing the text with the version I had tried to save 8 or so hours ago, and then self-reverting. So that folks know what I'm talking about (and can eviscerate my text here if they so desire). Yngvadottir (talk) 15:55, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir, thanks for your work! We (you? I?) will merge the content over the next few weeks (or after it hits the main page?).

I don’t know that it’s too much of a hit piece; I think that, as the press thought it pressing enough to press him on during political campaigns, it bears mention. Maybe there’s a weight issue, which we ought to work out before the nom.

Then there’s the other set of allegations in Wallace’s long profile. I don’t know what to do with that and have defaulted to omission. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 16:13, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

I see you've kept most of the changes from my big edit merging the two versions. I think the DYK evaluation can go ahead now; for one thing, I'm no longer being credited for what was in fact 90% a pre-existing version that I restored from the redirect. (And parenthetically, I think that redirection is a good demonstration of how if you don't reference everything, and especially if you leave the refs as bare links, people tend to underestimate notability. There were 2 excellent refs in that draft, I found almost nothing that was actually not covered in one or both of them, but the case for GNG was overlooked because the article didn't use the refs right, perhaps in large part because it didn't identify them.) I have more references I can and should add; I have a subscription to the Chronicle and I suspect access to SF media (I can't see articles in that SF business rag, unfortunately; they even come up blank for me on Wayback) fills out the picture of his decades in real estate (and philanthropy). I (or someone else who can see more newspapers) need to expand the real estate accordingly; it was far from just the Mercantile Exchange. The consolidation of Bay Area news is also a big regional story, plus the obvious human interest aspect of his having bought the Examiner when he once sued it. After reviving the article, I searched for mentions to convert into incoming links, and the resulting pattern says something about the traces left by his publishing purchases, while the real estate has fewer incoming links because, understandably enough, Wikipedia has fewer articles on San Francisco buildings than Manhattan buildings.

I think I've got the publishing adequately covered, but I suspect someone with Newspapers.com access would find a trove of coverage on that and the real estate transactions, and on his political consulting too. (I searched for the Murky News article with the inflammatory question—presumably by some headline writer in 1999—about whether he was a "testosterone-crazed" bully. No soap, probably as well.) There is coverage in books of his campaign management; some of it is in works on SF politics / California Democratic politics, and at a fast glance some of it looked to be in passing, or crediting him for an apposite term for a strategy, but there may be an extended treatment or two of his use of voter roll analysis and targeted mailing. Note that I found a source that enabled me to link our article on narrowcasting. ... The foregoing, plus what I wound up doing in my edit (which wound up including putting in material on his philanthropic activities that I hadn't included in my edit-conflicting version), shows that although you have a more discursive style, Iseult, I wound up rebalancing the article in a different way than I'd thought I would, mainly by adding more elsewhere rather than by shrinking the sections on the accusations, although I redistributed some of the material, leaving only the drinking in Personal life. That included adding a couple of quotations about him rather than shortening or removing the quotes you had, as I'd originally thought I would. So even though I think there's more that should be added, I don't think the article as it is now is unbalanced toward either adulation or criticism, and I think it's complete enough to be evaluated for DYK. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:50, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

Yngvadottir (do you prefer pings?), thanks for your work and thought; I'll see what I can do about newspapers.com. I applied a few days ago for access through The Wikipedia Library, but things appear to be a little slow on that front. I also know that the LA Times, to which I have access, covered a lot of state politics back in the day, so there might be something buried deep within their archives, if tangential.

I think the easiest things to help the article are finding a proper source for the passage of SF's Prop M in 1986 (I ought to email the SF elections division, though a Chronicle source might do. I added a Chron source with circumstantial evidence of its passage), finding Eugene Boyle's election results so that we can quantify "a few hundred votes" as described in the sources (running that down via libraries, the state archives, and one Caltech professor emeritus; this is definitely going to lead me to write about 1970s redistricting), and personal initiatives as mentioned in your comment. I think this was touched on in Eskanazi, though I've read so much and the reference list is so dense now that I'm getting a bit lost. But maybe there are SF sources from back then.

I too was unsuccessful in finding the Mercury piece. Hopefully newspapers.com lets me in soon. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 02:58, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

(Yes, pings are best, thanks; I don't subscribe to discussions.) Oh good, I've found the LA Times useful in the past but now I find I can't even get past the demand to surrender all privacy rights, all clicking on that gets me is a "Subscribe!" box. (Eff you very much ...) Can you see this October 1992 article for example? There is indeed material on his personal initiatives in one of the long sources, likely SF Weekly, hence my note to myself and others.

As to documenting San Francisco Proposition M (1986), I'm not as sure as I was that it merits an article, but if you mean simply documenting that it passed, there's a fair bit in the local press; it's had a long tail: June 2018; July 2023, by John King, Chronicle urban environment reporter; December 2019; ... and this is a September 1999 Examiner editorial in the context of the mayoral race where Reilly ran. The best summary I've found is this 1999 article by a slow-growth proponent, linked by King. If you mean linking Reilly to its passage, apparently that's a gripe: opinion article bemoaning the obituaries not highlighting his work on Prop M. That's what I was looking for on Google Books, where I had surprisingly little success; for example Richard Edward DeLeon, Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991, 1992, has a lot on Feinstein opposing Prop M but mentions Reilly once, and not in that connection. (It appears to have broken alliances. Jack Davis, a former Reilly associate, ran the No on M campaign for Feinstein, and I plan to add at least one news story on how Reilly painted Willie Brown as pro-Manhattanization in 1999 as well as associating him with corruption.) Another book that may have something worth citing if one can see enough of the relevant pages: Karl Beitel, Transforming San Francisco: Community, Capital, and the Local State in the Era of Globalization, 1956–2001, 2003. And Google showed me tantalizing snippets of SF magazine from May 1987; sorry, I can no longer make trips into SF to look up things like that in the Main Library. Haven't looked for the Boyle election result, but I imagine either a book or a newspaper will have it. ... That's enough rabbiting on from me for now :-) Yngvadottir (talk) 06:02, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir re LAT, it’s a passing mention of how Reilly used misleading mailers to campaign against Prop N (1992; I presume LA County), working for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association for 11k.

Re SF Prop (measure?) M, I was looking for direct sources about its passage as opposed to sources years after the fact mentioning that it had passed. But Reilly’s involvement bears expansion. While we’re on the topic of SF, we need to, somehow, make clear his alignment against the Brown-McCarthy forces.

I think that Prop M squeezes past GNG, but contemporary sourcing is unfortunately scarce. We can make a case for it given its restriction on today’s development; I found like ten Chronicle stories on that. Then too if we do that we might as well have a map of its votes, and election data, etc. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 18:31, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

Made another addition; that may be my last. Leaving nailing down the election results, particularly Boyle, to you :-) I haven't found anything on why he didn't run for mayor a second time, but if it had been reported on as such, I think my earlier search on his name would have shaken it loose; SFGate was already up and running by then. I'm not good at names, but the SF Weekly source makes it clear that Jack Davis' work for Willie Brown against Reilly was important. The duel between the two top consultants runs through the story (maybe there's even a connection). Yngvadottir (talk) 01:33, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Cool! I guess it’s over to me to take this to GA.

I have indeed found city-county-wide results for every SF election since 1960. Just need my class assignments to be easy and disappear. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 18:08, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir, as it happens, we can’t say that Boyle lost by a few hundred votes, as our secondary sources do. The 1974 data I got from the state archives shows that he lost by ~1500. Will do a bunch of election updates later. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 03:30, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Newspapers.com doesn't have the Mercury News. It'll be San Jose libraries or nothing. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 05:25, 5 August 2026 (UTC)