Talk:Douma chemical attack

Background

There have been several reversions by the same IP user. There are a huge number of adequate citations on this section, but the prose does not always reflect the content of the citations. For example, in background, after Human Rights Watch documented 85 instances, there was previously no mention that HRW says majority CW attacks were by the government (which seems a vital fact). Similarly as background that UN NGO has reported CW attacks from both sides. Instead of reverting and removing perfectly good citations (and inserting information which belongs in the OPCW investigation section) please comment below if you wish to discuss how this section should be worded. Please refrain from personal attacks on me or any other editor. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 18:13, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Let the section follow the Reuters source which is the most pertinent to the article subject. Perhaps you can set out which part of the sources you are using for your 'background' edit about how rebels and regime alike use cw. It seems you want to make a point about a kind of equivalence of cw use, or something , but that is a tendentious pov , and not supported by RS. your 'background' edit is just an obvious ploy. By following the Reuters source, which perpends exactly on OPCW concern about cw attacks , and chlorine , it better suits the article imo. You obviously got some kind of weird animus against Bellingcat also, but wp is not Sputnik, Bellingcat is not regarded like Sputnik. 78.144.95.235 (talk) 18:33, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Please stop removing two citations. Whatever your reasons for doing so, they have been in the article for some time, are from mainstream reliable news sources, and are available via the archive link. Citations from more than one news agency are preferable.

To answer your question which you have now deleted "U.N.-OPCW...concludes that Syrian government forces used chlorine...militants used sulphur mustard." (Reuters, your preferred source). There is also ample documentation in the main CW in Syria article.

Kindly refrain from positing your imagined motives to my editing. If I were seeking to make a point about equivalence I would not have inserted a sentence about HRW's sources saying majority of CW attacks are by government. I am editing to restore the prose to be faithful to the citations given; it is currently missing context and obviously biased in several vital areas.

As an introductory sentence the fact that both sides are alleged to have used chemical weapons is important background to the subsequent sections on OPCW investigations etc. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 19:01, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Finally, I have no "weird animus" — whatever that means — regarding Bellingcat. In fact I know very little about it other than that it is not a mainstream organisation. Impetus for removal is the previous discussion — to which I was not a party — in RS, where there was a very clear majority indicating it was not regarded as a reliable source. If you read WP:BURDEN you will note that if someone wishes to include a source previously disregarded it is their responsibility to raise a request thereto. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 19:08, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

How is sulphur mustard relevant to the background to this attack? You know Bellingcat is not 'mainstream organisation'? Wtf are you on about. Ive just added sentence or two to the Skripal poisoning page about a joint BBC/Bellingcat investigation into a GRU agent involved in that attack. It is 'mainstream' enough I think. You just keep revealing how far off in your biases you are. Go edit articles about sulphur mustard attacks, stop making dumb edits here that are meant to deflect. You don't know what an 'animus' means? Fucking hell. 78.144.95.235 (talk) 19:16, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

@Cambial Yellowing: can you link that discussion? I don't see it. Remember that a source isn't generally "unreliable"; context matters. VQuakr (talk) 15:07, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

@VQuakr: Sure, I linked one (of several) RS discussions when removing the link initially here. While context certainly matters, self-published sources are not considered reliable, and per WP:BURDEN, the use of a source with a previous understanding as not reliable requires those advocating its use to establish it as RS. It also fails several of the tests of WP:ELNO. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 16:20, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I see that RSN discussion is from 2015, so it is pretty dated since IIRC Bellingcat was basically just Higgins's blog at that point. It also doesn't show any consensus, so please ease up on the attempts at burden-shifting. This isn't a SPS. Which specific points of WP:ELNO do you think it fails? VQuakr (talk) 19:50, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

The burden is not being shifted; it lies on the editor advocating the source's inclusion by default, because of the previous 14-5 RfC discussion toward it not being a reliable source — this is unrelated to its status as an SPS. "use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research. "Blogs, personal web pages and most fansites (negative ones included), except those written by a recognized authority." While no doubt a highly interested party, the individual operating the site has no special scholarly qualification or recognition in the field. If you are keen to include the link by all means have the discussion, but it is not a foregone conclusion when the source has already had a strong consensus against, your denial notwithstanding. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 22:35, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm not quite clear on what you're trying to say. Are you claiming that Bellingcat is a SPS? VQuakr (talk) 22:55, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Bellingcat just won a Peabody Award. how open source reinvented investigative journalism. The idea that this is some kind or 'fanzine' or some such , if that is CambialYellowings delusion, is beyond ridiculous. 78.144.83.73 (talk) 23:26, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

And a European Press Prize. Please remember to be WP:CIVIL IP, but yes citing an old RSN discussion (that even then contained mixed results) that this source can never be used in any context seems a bit of a stretch to say the least. VQuakr (talk) 00:35, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

The Daily Mail has won Newspaper of the Year seven times. Its journalists have won numerous awards. Winning an award is not the test for assessment as a reliable source.

As to whether it remains a SPS - clearly, the division between SPS and professional publishing is one which involves shades of grey. Bellingcat has a similar model to sites like Global Voices (in fact they're even funded by some of the same foundations). Its reliance on "citizen journalism" rather than professional journalists (or, more relevant to this case, IS scholars and CW technical & proliferation experts) means they and their methods lack scholarly credibility.

On a more technical point - the specific link used is a tag result, i.e. a search page within the site, which is specifically prohibited by WP:ELNO. The link can go to anything and everything published - old and new - on the site, with no assessment of the accuracy of the specific articles located. We might just as well link to a list of CNN search results for Douma. Links to all results are prohibited for good reason - the relevance and accuracy of published information and links are to be assessed on a case by case basis, with RSN as a starting point. While you may have blind faith in everything bellingcat publishes, that is not how wikipedia operates.

Finally, the notion that a link to a specific video interview, of a veteran professional journalist with particular expertise on the region, by a 20+ year news organisation with wide syndication, is not relevant, but every article published from the "citizen journalist" of 3 years standing whose narrative you happen to prefer, is relevant, is really beyond parody. Your desire to push your POV is clear; this is not the place. WP:JDL Cambial Yellowing(❧) 17:05, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

And , to dip down to your level of argument, - 'while you may not have faith in anything Bellingcat publishes' - , is not how wikipedia operates either. Bellingcat is acclaimed - for a reason. Deal with it however you like, but please don't make wp articles trashier with your pov driven pushing of 'fringe material. In the meantime one can wait for the OPCW IIT to report. 78.144.83.73 (talk) 17:23, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

'Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) would be sending the newly created Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) to Syria to determine who was responsible for nine recent chemical attacks in Syria, including the one that took place on 7 April 2018 in Douma:

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - A new team established by the global chemical weapons watchdog to attribute blame for the use of banned munitions in Syria will investigate nine alleged attacks during the country’s civil war, including in the town of Douma, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. Both Russia and Syria opposed the formation of the IIT, or any fault finding mission. While consistently claiming that the US lead terrorist jihadists are behind every chemical attack in Syria, they have just as consistently opposed any investigation of these attacks with the power to place blame. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of member states to the OPCW voted to give the IIT the power to find fault. Now it is beginning its investigations and has named the CW attacks it will be investigating. And now the Syria government is refusing visas to the IIT investigators, and is refusing to turn over relevant materials to them. This would seem to be very strange behaviour to come from a government that insists none of the evidence should indicate it was responsible for any attack.

This is one reason Russia, and its minions, have been making war on the OPCW. They need badly to discredit it ahead of any finding of the obvious, which is that the same war criminals that have been massacring civilians from the air with conventional explosives, have also occasionally done the same by dropping chemical weapons on them. (Clay Claiborne). 78.144.83.73 (talk) 17:27, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

None of which has any relevance to the specific question under discussion, but thank you for your input, copypasta and spittle notwithstanding.' Cambial Yellowing(❧) 17:40, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

What is the specific question. Is Bellingcat good enough for this wikipedia article? Well, yes it is. 78.144.83.73 (talk) 17:48, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

@Cambial Yellowing: your analogy to the Daily Fail is inapt: consensus about it as a source in general was determined by a pair of meticulously closed and massively publicized RfCs, not by your vote count. WP:ELNO doesn't say what you imply it does, assuming your handwave is at ELNO#9. I am open to further discussion on Goodman, though I am unclear on why it is better as an EL vs a source I also don't see why it needs to be an either/or situation. You don't believe Bellingcat has consulted subject-matter experts in their articles? Based on what information? VQuakr (talk) 01:51, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Kindly refrain from making edits which you know are currently under contention. That is what talk pages are for: once content is known to be disputed we use the talk page rather than trying to deliberately start an edit war.

What you call an analogy to the Daily Mail was, quite plainly, limited to pointing out that winning an award is not a sufficient condition, whereas you had posited it as evidence for its inclusion. You know that, and it is unhelpful to pretend otherwise. Regards WP:ELNO; I didn't imply it, I directly said it rules out search result inclusion - referring to that as a "handwave" to make it seem ambiguous serves nothing but your own sophistry. "generally avoid providing external links to... Any search results pages, such as links to individual website searches" — this could not be much clearer. However this point is moot as IP user has already amended the link to a specific article in response to my previous comment (I would argue that the only pertinent article for inclusion is this one for reasons I'll discuss below, but will hold off on making that change). Higgins makes no reference in either of his articles to consulting those with expertise in what is a highly complex technical subject area. We do not assume that they have consulted experts unless they state otherwise; that line of reasoning is absurd. We assume they do not, unless they claim otherwise and back that claim up. Higgins also makes a number of unsupported value judgements.

Were the phrase airstrike to be included in the infobox it would require a citation. It needs to be a non-partisan scholarly source (i.e. not yet another news article). There have been a number of academic journal and university press publications on the subject of Douma; I am yet to come across one which specifically refers to it thus, but I have not finished reading them. If you know of one I will obviously not argue its inclusion.

Having been through the bc articles, a good argument can be made for the inclusion of the Keith Ward article, as his expertise is relevant to the subject, and for the time being I think it should be. The caveat to that is that if a scholarly source can be found it would supersede the useful information in that article, given that article's content has not undergone peer review, nor any other professional editorial process.

What you point out about it not being an either/or situation is absolutely correct and I apologise for joining in an unnecessary conflation of the two issues. We should treat them entirely separately. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 07:48, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

The Note by the Technical Secretariat OPCW of 21 May 2019 makes it clear doesn't it that the experts, ballistic, mechanical etc regard an airstrike as the cause?note technical secretariat update opcw fact finding mission syria Answer 3:1 , for example.78.144.83.73 (talk) 09:29, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes Cambial Yellowing(❧) 10:03, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Cambial, it's WP:BRD not WP:BoldAndThenWhateverCambialDoesIsTheDefault. You don't own the article, and you are the one trying to force through your proposed content by edit warring. Respect the status quo and pursue consensus if you desire a contested change - this is particularly crucial in a revert-rule restricted article such as this one. You are reverting multiple other editors without a modicum of support on the talk page. The observations about Bellingcat getting journalism rewards were in response to your calling it (rather bizarrely) a WP:SPS. As it happens, your mention of Daily Mail brought up a totally relevant example of what would constitute an example of a blanket "not reliable" finding at RSN - which is conspicuously absent regarding Bellingcat. The proposed link is not a search results page, and your cite to ELNO#9 is therefore irrelevant. We already cite ABC News which says of Higgins, "He has become in recent years one of the foremost experts on the munitions used in the Syrian conflict and a vital resource to journalists", [1], which I find more convincing than your personal opinion on his expertise. We do not need citations for the infobox if the information is cited in the article per WP:LEADCITE. This isn't seriously contended information. VQuakr (talk) 10:07, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

You are projecting your own behaviour. Do not try to define what is the status quo by "what VQuakr likes". Bar some minor tidying, the page had been stable for ~ 3 weeks (which for Syria articles is significant) prior to 3 days ago. I have reverted exactly 2 editors - you and an IP user who you know canvassed your support because their original account was blocked.

Please refrain from trying to put words in my mouth. I have never argued for a blanket not reliable "finding". I pointed out that given the previous RSN discussion with a consensus against, the burden lies on those advocating its inclusion to show that the specific article(s) are reliable, which would include opening it to RfC rather than you and 1 or 2 other expressly partisan editors' opinion. If I were advocating a "blanket finding" I would not have just advocated the inclusion of the Keith Ward article.

The previously proposed link (prior to IP user amendment) was exactly a search result page - a tag page linking all blog content with that tag. So it is relevant, and IP user was correct to change it. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 10:36, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Anyone can review the article history and see who is acting as gatekeeper here. "I purged the source three weeks ago, so that's the new status quo" is not going to convince anyone. The page has been on my watchlist for well over a year; I wasn't canvassed here. A tag page is not a search engine result. Bellingcat is not a blog. Sheesh. VQuakr (talk) 10:50, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

But a metadata index page is an internal search result i.e. an individual website search; its content is subject to change according to whichever posts are added. And they are posts - that is how bellingcat itself refers to them. If you are certain of a bellingcat article's wide acceptance, I suggest you open it to comments at RSN. As I have said since June, the earlier consensus as not reliable puts the burden on its advocates to show an article is reliable. That is not the same as me positing a "blanket finding" or any of the other straw men you wish to conjure. If you are so sure of the reliability and wide acceptance of an article, why not start an RfC? Are you perhaps concerned that not everyone will share your point of view? Cambial Yellowing(❧) 12:05, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Goodman external link

This has been inserted many times, most recently [2]. I think it pretty clearly should be excluded as an EL per WP:ELNO#1 (Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article). It isn't even very good as a source: it is an interview transcript from just after the leaked OPCW memo and should be superceded by later sources with more information per WP:RSBREAKING. Thoughts? VQuakr (talk) 10:12, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

It includes a transcript, but the main subject of the link is the video interview itself. Clearly this cannot be replicated in the article. As before, it is of a veteran professional journalist with particular expertise on the region, by a 20+ year news organisation with wide syndication. The journalist/interviewee has also been following the Douma story closely and goes into detail on the implications of the recent information. What later impartial sources are you suggesting? Cambial Yellowing(❧) 11:44, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

You didn't address the main issue (ELNO#1) at all. All they say in the interview is "this may have significant impact, mainstream news outlets may pick up on this". Such speculation adds nothing to an encyclopedic understanding of the subject. VQuakr (talk) 23:49, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

The interview is 8½ minutes long. They cover significantly more ground and detail than you suggest. Simply lying about the content is not helpful, and is a bit weird. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 05:42, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

RfC: Bellingcat coverage

Should Bellingcat be excluded as a source from this article as most recently proposed here? The two specific articles are [3] and [4], and the info they are used to support is in the first diff. 15:47, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

This concerns the reliability of a source and belongs on the RSN noticeboard. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 16:26, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Bellingcat should not be excluded, the two specific articles look perfectly fine to be included. (The abc article cited above is just one expression of how Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are regarded in general ; - ' vital resource' , 'foremost expert'. Its rather ludicrous to seek to say Bellingcat belongs in a kind of unreliable ghetto, although it is utterly predictable.) 78.144.83.73 (talk) 18:07, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

The RSN does not have a monopoly on RS discussion. Indeed, as stated prominently at the noticeboard: "While we attempt to offer a second opinion, and the consensus of several editors can generally be relied upon, answers are not official policy." Additionally, while reliability has been a concern voiced, it is unclear whether that is the only concern. The article talk page is the place to determine consensus for or against your proposed removals. VQuakr (talk) 23:47, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

• Keep both - the first ref (2018/04/11) is markedly straightforward - it and the ABC source overlap in content but the ABC provides better context and refers to the research done by Bellingcat. The two compliment each other, and no change in article content other than the sourcing is being considered. The second ref (2019/03/01) is already in our external links section and there do not appear to be any ongoing concerns regarding reliability from anyone who has posted on this talk page. Regarding context, neither source is being used to support contentious information - are there any real concerns that the information cited isn't accurate? VQuakr (talk) 23:47, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Plainly, the questionable reliability of the source is what is causing contention, and has been the only subject of detailed debate. This article is not the place for the discussion, and your wish to keep it here is an attempt to serve your desire to limit the breadth of opinion. As such, a 'debate' between you and one banned user here will not serve to show the wide acceptance necessary to overturn previous RSN consensus on this highly dubious blog. Cambial Yellowing(❧) 06:18, 4 August 2019 (UTC)