JAY JG (jayjg@hotmail.com) [050125 02:53]:
It is completely unacceptable, in my view, to add caveats to cited references as you did, stating "Attempts to verify Bard's attribution to the UN Mediator's report have so far failed (http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/ab14d4aafc...)", or as Bjorn did ("Attempts to verify Bard's attribution to the UN Mediator's report have so far failed: see Talk:Estimates of the Palestinian Refugee flight of 1948."), simply because you are unwilling or unable to expend the necessary energy to look up the primary sources. Moreover, telling people to refer to Talk: pages is bad form, particulary (but not exclusively) because Talk: pages change all the time, and are often archived.
However, you didn't have the primary reference either, which would have avoided a great many problems.
In general, questioning a reference shouldn't provoke this level of defensiveness. It did turn out to differ in small but important ways from the original citation.
There must be an NPOV way of dealign with secondary references like this - of indicating one is quoting a secondary reference and naming the reference they claim.
- d.