From: David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au>
JAY JG (jayjg(a)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/ab14d4aaf…quot;,
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.