[WikiEN-l] New standard for citations?

Sun Aug 29 21:31:01 UTC 2004

--- Harry Smith <lance6wins at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Copied from
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Violence_against_Israelis#Lists

Where it should stay, but nevermind; I'll explain here
but request that any further discussion go to the
appropriate talk page.

> (posted here so I don't have to repeat myself five
> times) I dispute the factual accuracy of the various
> terrorism against Israel in {year} pages because
> sources for the reports therein are (apart from the
> word of a single Wikipedian) fragmentary or
> non-existent. I will happily withdraw the accuracy
> disputes when each item on each list is annotated
> properly. —No-One Jones 10:37, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)
> 
> Mirv has added the "factually disputed" tag to this
> set of articles without disputing any individual
> item.

Well, here are some examples, which I'll copy to the
talk page:

* August 23: A female motorist was wounded by large
rocks thrown at her vehicle while traveling late at
night. ([[Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
2004]])

Here we have no name for the victim, no location for
the attack, and no word other than that of the author
(whose political views and agenda are well-known to
anyone who watches Wikipedia's articles on the Middle
East) on who was responsible. Without a source we
don't even know that if the item is anything other
than word-of-mouth rumour. 

*April 28: An Israeli woman stabbed to death in
Karmiel, Galilee. ([[Terrorism against Israel in
2001]])

This item at least has a location, but the rest of it
suffers from the same vagueness: no name, no way to
confirm that this even happened, and no way to tell if
it even belongs in the list.

> Are we to annotate each item in each article to meet
> this criteria?  
>Are we to apply this level of
> citation
> to a set of articles?  Is this level of citation to
> apply to Violence against Israelis alone?

In controversial and politically-charged articles,
citations are of paramount importance but are all too
often omitted. The set of articles in question is just
a particularly egregious example of the problem. 

> I would like the disputed tags remove till a
> factually
> inaccuracy is found.  At that point I would like the
> inaccuracy corrected, so that the tag would not
> apply.

And I would like to see the disputed tags stay.
[[Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute]] says the following:

*begin quote*

The accuracy of an article may be a cause for concern
if:

* It contains a lot of unlikely information, without
providing references.
* It contains information which is particularly
difficult to verify.
* In, for example, a long list, some errors have been
found, suggesting that the list as a whole may need
further checking.
* It has been written (or edited) by a user who is
known to write inaccurately on the topic.

*end quote*

Reasons #2 and #4 (and perhaps #1) apply to the lists
in question, which I think is ample reason to keep the
disputes in place.

--Charles Podles ([[en:User:Mirv]])

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