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

[JAY JG]

>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.

You couldn't find the figure, because you didn't find the documents 
themselves.  That's quite a different thing, as I pointed out on a number of 
occasions.  Zero was kind enough to find the documents, and it turns out the 
472,000 figure is in there, and does indeed refer to the estimated refugees 
as of October 1949, which is pretty much what my wording of the footnote 
stated.

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/ab14d4aafc4e1bb985256204004f55fa!OpenDocument)", 
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.

Jay.