User talk:Swawa

Welcome!

Hello, Swawa, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! VQuakr (talk) 04:06, 12 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A Home-made Barnstar for you

		Home-Made Barnstar
		After following your latest efforts in the Syria conflict related articles, I wish to award you this Home-Made Barnstar for editing in difficult areas, for "thinking outside the box" and for doing it well IMHO. Blade-of-the-South (talk) 21:12, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, sir!--Swawa (talk) 23:34, 15 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Misrepresenting sources

I am not quite sure I understand what issue you have with the Le Monde article, but here you (again) misrepresent the source by inaccurately summarizing it. I have repeatedly corrected you elsewhere with quotes from the source's body, but you seem to have a severe case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT. At this point, your ongoing efforts to remove cited content from the article based on nitpicks appears to be a case of tendentious POV pushing rather than a genuine effort to improve Wikipedia. I could be wrong, though - can you explain why you continue to make inaccurate claims about the content of this article even after being provided with quotes?

Now, if your only concern with the article is that the sarin attacks are described as against fighters rather than civilians in most of the source, how about just removing the two words "on civilians" from the first of the two relevant sections in the article? VQuakr (talk) 17:33, 23 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess there's some misunderstanding. I never saw a quote from the body that supports this claim. Would you mind quoting it again? Thanks. --Swawa (talk) 21:16, 23 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This reply was partly quoting the summary, partly from the body. Additional quotes were provided to you here, to which you in part replied, There's also a weird sentence "Reporters from Le Monde witnessed this on several days in a row". Without explaining what "this" is. The sentence before it describes evacuation. If that's what they witnessed, it's not very interesting. I am not quite certain how the source confused you, but here is the context:

Searching for words to describe the incongruous sound, he said it was like 'a Pepsi can that falls to the ground.' No odor, no smoke, not even a whistle to indicate the release of a toxic gas. And then the symptoms appear. The men cough violently. Their eyes burn, their pupils shrink, their vision blurs. Soon they experience difficulty breathing, sometimes in the extreme; they begin to vomit or lose consciousness. The fighters worst affected need to be evacuated before they suffocate. Reporters from Le Monde witnessed this on several days in a row in this district, on the outskirts of Damascus, which the rebels entered in January.

(quoted from [1]). Anyways, this has been provided to you more than once, and shouldn't have had to have been provided at all - you are fully capable of reading the source yourself. In any case, the summary in the Ghouta article is pretty clearly a faithful summary of the Le Monde article, to the degree that your repeated, unsupported claims are bordering on disruptive. Would you say we can move on now? VQuakr (talk) 03:08, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Great, thanks. I went to the links you provided and collected all quotes that are not from the summary:

1 - Le Monde's reporters visited eight medical centers in the eastern part of the Ghouta region and found only two where medical directors said they had not seen fighters or civilians affected by gas attacks.

2a - Searching for words to describe the incongruous sound, he said it was like 'a Pepsi can that falls to the ground.' No odor, no smoke, not even a whistle to indicate the release of a toxic gas. And then the symptoms appear. The men cough violently. Their eyes burn, their pupils shrink, their vision blurs. Soon they experience difficulty breathing, sometimes in the extreme; they begin to vomit or lose consciousness. The fighters worst affected need to be evacuated before they suffocate...

2b - ...Reporters from Le Monde witnessed this on several days in a row in this district, on the outskirts of Damascus, which the rebels entered in January.

3 - Le Monde's photographer suffered blurred vision and respiratory difficulties for four days.

4 - In Jobar, the fighters did not desert their positions, but those who stayed on the front lines – with constricted pupils and wheezing breath – were ‘terrorised and trying to calm themselves through prayer,' admitted Abu Atal, one of the fighters of Tahrir Al-Sham

5 - In the morning, ambulances managed to get through by driving at maximum speed under tank fire and reached the front, where a new chemical weapons attack had just taken place. ‘When we arrived, we found everyone lying on the ground,' said an orderly from another hospital, in Kaffer Batna.

Of these, 1, 2a, 4, and 5 are reported by rebels, 2b is ambiguous as to what was witnessed (cans falling? symptoms? evacuations?), and 3 describes symptoms. The only thing we can write and remain responsible to our readers is "Le Monde reporters heard claims from opposition fighters and doctors of chemical attacks, and have witnessed in at least one occasion symptoms of respiratory distress and nausea". Is there anything else that you wish to see added and is supported by the quotes above?--Swawa (talk) 22:09, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Only a portion of 2a is credited to the fighters. My only quoting portions of the article here does not somehow make the rest of the article irrelevant or inapplicable. I do not agree that your summary above is neutral or faithful to the source. VQuakr (talk) 23:40, 24 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The rest of 2a still describes symptoms, so it doesn't change the bottom line. If you don't feel these quotes are enough, please suggest others. At this point it is clear this is a standard journalistic piece which takes the evidence and tries to present it to be more sensational. That's how mass media works, and we should be responsible and filter accordingly. So how do we move forward with this? Is there some arbitration process where we both present our cases and a third party decides what's the correct description?--Swawa (talk) 00:31, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We don't. You are attempting to apply an arbitrary, personal standard that is not in compliance with Wikipedia's policies. If your belief structure includes a perception that all news is inherently exaggerated that is fine, but it becomes a problem if you try to grind that axe here. VQuakr (talk) 01:45, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to be more interested in winning the argument then furthering the debate, which makes it very difficult for me. This is not a contest. This is about providing quality information to the public on what is a very important issue.

You started by claiming that you provided quotes from the body. I showed that none of them support the claim "reporters witnessed chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian Army", but you insist on a vague "I do not agree that your summary above is neutral or faithful". What am I supposed to do at this point? How do we reach an agreement as to what the article really describes, when you refuse to provide evidence and logical arguments?

And I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. I'm really asking you as a more experienced user: What should I do when another user fails to provide contradicting evidence but still refuses to change the text?--Swawa (talk) 02:24, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

From my perspective, I believe I have provided support for the claim that the summaries in the article are faithful to the Le Monde text and other sources, specifically, that that source very much does state that their reporters witnessed chemical attacks by the Syrian Army. That is the entire thrust of the source, and it is completely adequate make the summary in the Ghouta "verifiable" which is our threshold criterion for sourcing as discussed formally and at length here, in one of our core content policies. What you seem to be after is The Truth, which as a tertiary source is not Wikipedia's goal. To use an analogy, if Wikipedia had existed in 1952, plate tectonics would have been identified as a minority viewpoint because that was the scientific consensus at the time. VQuakr (talk) 03:14, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I understand this is your perspective. My perspective is that the text doesn't describe a reporter witnessing chemical weapons (and not say riot control agents), or the Syrian Army being involved. Furthermore, the fact that the summary claimed "on civilians" gives you a good indication to its reliability. My question is how do we bring an experienced unbiased opinion here to help us?--Swawa (talk) 03:35, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We already did at the reliable sources board, where a new poster agreed that the statements in our article are adequately sourced. This isn't a borderline case - the source states, consistently, that multiple (daily) tactical chemical attacks were performed by the Syrian Army. Wikipedia does not care whether you read portions of the source and say, "no, this sounds like tear gas to me," because the analysis must be performed by secondary sources and not our editors. It is time to drop the stick and move on, not time to try to find another venue in the hopes that your opinion will get more traction. VQuakr (talk) 03:55, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Your request was written in a manner that misrepresented the nature of the disagreement. How do we do it in a way where both sides get to present their side, and not only one?--Swawa (talk) 12:30, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As I noted on the board, your claim that I misrepresented anything is completely baseless. All I provided was the source, and the two pieces of text it is being used to support in our article. Those are both completely neutral pieces of information that were provided without any "spin" whatsoever. VQuakr (talk) 17:14, 25 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Except that there was a specific claim being made about the source, which required people to pay attention to the differences between the summary and the body. This is not something people would have noticed by themselves without reading carefully. Anyway, I don't see a point in this debate. You know very well that Le Monde tried to sensationalize the article (e.g. "civilians"), but insist on using bureaucracy against the WP spirit. You cannot be convinced by common sense. What is the standard procedure in WP in such cases?--Swawa (talk) 00:20, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So in your opinion, parroting your line of reasoning in the noticeboard post would be more neutral than posting the background material and letting editors independently reach their own conclusions, and in fact my (quite sterile) post was indeed misrepresentation? How silly. No, I do not "know" Le Monde tried to sensationalize anything, and neither do you. The source makes a very clear claim that civilians were hospitalized as well. I already told you what the normal process is at this point, which is to drop the stick and walk away. This is not a bureaucratic issue; your beef with the source is just baseless. Forum shopping is what you seem to want instructions on how to do, which is discouraged and with which I am not going to assist you. VQuakr (talk) 00:39, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nope. Parroting BOTH our lines of reasoning would have been more neutral.--Swawa (talk) 00:45, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Noticeboard discussions are supposed to be terse. I presented the question drily and simply; no one wants to read a history of the dispute. It of course doesn't help your case that your claim (that the summary conflicts with the body of the source) is false. Sorry to hear you hold our editors in such low esteem that you think they only read the summary at the top of a source, but I can tell you from experience this is not the case. Look at it from my perpsective - you are new here (nothing wrong with that), and have said multiple times that you need input on how things are done. But when I try to explain something to you, you come back with accusations rather than listening. Frankly, I value my own counsel more than yours as to how to write a neutral noticeboard request. VQuakr (talk) 01:03, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. I guess Wikipedia is not what I thought it is. I'll contribute my time elsewhere.--Swawa (talk) 02:05, 26 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interception

Hi As you find some amazing material Id be interested on your take on this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ghouta_chemical_attack#Alleged_Intercepted_Syrian_military_communication

Blade-of-the-South talk 01:38, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Blade-of-the-South. I decided to stop contributing time to Wikipedia, after seeing that WP:COMMONSENSE is not respected. I just can't spend the amount of time needed to convince people of trivial stuff like the wind statement being a mistake, or that we should filter out obvious exaggerations in the Le Monde article. I better invest my time getting my research into reliable sources. Good luck!--Swawa (talk) 02:35, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lol know what u mean. The returns are indeed small. Blade-of-the-South talk 03:03, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]