I've occasionally written "this information has not been independently verified" after a statement made by a source I regard as dodgy or self-interested, but this shouldn't be done often because all sources can be questioned to some degree; and then, as Jay says, it starts to look POV that only certain sources are picked on for that degree of scrutiny.
I feel Bjorn did not come to the mailing list with entirely clean hands in this matter. He has previously used quite questionable sources for other edits himself; he accused Bard, based on nothing solid, of not even having read the UN progress report; and he implied that Bard had been evasive when, in fact, Bard had simply not answered Bjorn's second e-mail. Bjorn also did not tell Bard the information was for Wikipedia, which I feel he should have done. Also, once Zero had obtained the report and suggested a way to word the reference to make it accurate, and Tony had edited that onto the page, Bjorn decided to create an entirely new category, and moved the information out of the UN section and into a new section called "Incomplete estimates" (even though Tony's edit made it clear the estimate was incomplete, and the words "progress report" imply that anyway.) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refug...
This begins to look like POV pushing and not just careful scrutiny of source material.
Slim
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 11:28:51 -0500, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
And the way *not* to handle them is to put caveats beside them stating (in so many words) that "we have not been able to verify these as truthful" (which, of course, we don't do). Doing so, of course, would be highly POV, since it would naturally create the impression that the sources were suspect and untrustworthy, rather than the actual case that certain editors are unwilling or unable to check the primary references.