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

[JAY JG]

>From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
>
>JAY JG (jayjg at 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/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.
>
>
>However, you didn't have the primary reference either, which would have
>avoided a great many problems.

Yes, of course, if we had the primary references everything would have been 
quite simple.  Well, except, of course, in cases like the LaRouche articles 
SlimVirgin mentions, where apparently the LaRouche supporters there accuse 
you of lying until you actually scan the documents and post them somehow.

>In general, questioning a reference shouldn't provoke this level of
>defensiveness.

With all due respect, I think you have it backwards, David.  In general, 
citations, particularly explicit ones like this, shouldn't provoke this 
level of skepticism and caveats.

>It did turn out to differ in small but important ways from
>the original citation.

But its treatment in the article did not, regardless of what the secondary 
source was stating.  The number was correct, it was stated as interim, it 
was made clear in the footnote that the refugee flight was not over, and 
that many more refugees fled after that.  The treatment after the original 
source was located differed little.

>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.

There was, and it was done.  It was only the original caveats that were POV.

Jay.