[WikiEN-l] Let us not attack sources as unreliable without reason

[Tony Sidaway]

Robert said:
> Slim writes:
>> Would you please post your correspondence with him on
>> the Talk page, as you indicated you would, so that other
>> editors can judge whether he was evasive in response to
>> your enquiry? Your claims about Mitchell Bard as a
>> source have implications for a number of Wikipedia
>> articles in which he is quoted.
>
>
> This makes no sense.  Are you seriously suggesting that
> Wikipedia should consider sources as unreliable if one of
> our thousands of anonymous editors doesn't get instant
> gratification from a writer and scholar that they have
> never met?

Firstly, a lot of the email content I've deleted constitutes an
unacceptably personal attack.
Secondly, the citation in question has been checked by me and others
against the primary source on the UN site and we cannot find the figure
that Bard attributes to it.
I don't propose that we should class Bard as unreliable, but we must not
claim as a fact that the figure Bard cites is a UN figure.  We must
attribute it to Bard and say that he claims that it originated in the
source material, but this cannot be independently verified.  And we quote
the source document so that anyone who wants to can check that it is not
there.