Steve Vertigum wrote:
I think the point of the argument against is that statistics from an apartheid state (regardless of how much the US happens to sanction it currently) must be treated as suspect. UN statistics should be better--ie, more NPOV--even if they are not as "complete."
The same could in many ways be said for the US as well-- the US until very recently was more or less an apartheid state, and still has lingering aspects of this left over, in terms of its sociological/financial barriers. Etc. If this was the case today in the US--as it was 1950--there would be every justification for Wikipedians to look upon statistics coming out of such a country's official machinery as smelly.
Oh geez... If you have some proof, let's see it. Otherwise you're just spreading FUD. Almost every official statistic in Wikipedia has a political opponent or conspiracy theorist ready to challenge its validity; that's why we say "according to the Census Bureau" or whatever, so if somebody has some differing numbers, they can add those, citing the alternate source, rather than having an edit war. In the case of Israel, there are plenty of reasons to challenge any UN numbers - and plenty of books doing just that, in great detail - so it's not neutral to simply declare that UN numbers must be better than Israeli numbers.
Stan