Talk:Mary Bastian

Use of the hoax tag, redux
Please, please, please do not use use the hoax tag for rhetorical effect. If you dispute the factuality or neutrality of an article, disputed or totallyDisputed may apply. If you dispute the notability of an article about a real subject, use notability. But if a quick search of Google News turns up reliable sources treating the subject, you can be pretty sure it is not a hoax article and does not merit the hoax template. (Further searches yield a mention by Pope John Paul II, etc.)

Just because an article is not itself a hoax doesn't mean the article is a good one. It may be completely biased, and the subject may have been exaggerated, exploited or lied about for propaganda. By all means, dispute the problems and correct them. But hoax is not the tool for that job. Long time Sri Lanka-related article editors should already know as we've covered this ground before. Where is the remaining ambiguity? -- Shunpiker 22:53, 19 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Two things, first you do not own the tag, so please don't pretend you do. Second, understand what it's purpose is. Read the the template hoax itself really carefully.
 * It is believed that some or all of its content might constitute a hoax.
 * Note the word some', which it appears you haven't seen before. Then, look at the policy on hoaxes itself
 * ''A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real.
 * Wikipedia requires material to be attributed to a reliable, published source. 
 * What might be false in this article?
 * Sri Lankan Army killed 180 Tamil civilians working in their paddy fields.
 * Rev Jeyarajasingham of Methodist Church in Murunkan was shot dead by the army on December 13, 1984
 * his body was burnt along with his vehicle.
 * On December 31, 1984 Rev.Fr Mary Bastian was waylaid by the government soldiers and warned not to interfere in their activities.
 * But the soldiers fired at him pointblank killing him on the spot. According to several eyewitnesses soldiers dragged his body from the site to an unknown place
 * If this stuff is indeed false (and I'm not saying it is for certain, I'm simply asking for reliable citations to prove that it is) then a majority of the article will comprise attempts to trick the reader into believing something false is true, and hence will constitute a hoax.
 * I'm not disputing whether he actually lived or met the Pope or whatever, it simply doesn't matter. The entire article does NOT have to be fake to be given the tag.
 * So simply, if it is not cited in a few days, I will delete the potentially fake claims and remove the tag. Until then, please, please, please don't try to add your interpretations into official Wikipolicy and try to claim ownership over maintainance tags. --snowolfD4( talk / @ ) 23:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Please refrain from attacking fellow neutral wikipedians against WP:NPA and also follow WP:civil and WP:AGF these are as important as WP:NPOV, WP:RS and WP:HOAX. We have rules in wikipedia and all rules are as important not just a select few. Thanks for your consideration RaveenS 13:14, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * If you think I violated NPA or CIVIL or whatever, I suggest you work up the guts one of these days and actually do something about it, like go to AN/I if you want. If you're not willing to do that, I suggest you stop mentioning them instead of wasting everyone's time in so many articles (if I tried, I would honestly have lost count how many times you have mentioned NPA for no reason). --snowolfD4( talk / @ ) 16:58, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Snowolf, I don't claim to own the hoax tag, or to be an authority on wikipolicy. But I have been patrolling Category:Suspected hoax articles for several months now, and I can tell you that an article like this one is quite unlike the other articles that land in that category.

You quote aptly from WP:HOAX that a wikipedia "hoax" is "an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real" (emphasis mine). The word "trick" is significant. Opponents in any POV dispute may accuse their opponents of purveying falsehoods. The disputed template covers that. And in the case of unattributed material, there are templates like Unreferenced and fact.

As I understand it, what distinguishes a hoax from a garden variety accuracy dispute is not the purveyance of falsehood, but a "trick". What constitutes a "trick" is, unfortunately, left to interpretation. But most of the trickery that gets slapped with a hoax tag involves an entirely different interpretation.

I can't imagine a case where it is useful to tag an article totallyDisputed and hoax. Either it is a hoax, in which case NPOV and accuracy are moot. Or it is the treatment of a legitimate subject, albeit biased and unattributable.

You are quite correct that hoax can be applied to a particular section of the article. But if it is applied at the top of the article without explanation, it appears as if the entire article has been designated as a hoax.

In any case, I appreciate you clarifying the basis of your objections to the article. You and I have successfully collaborated in cleaning up a number of problematic articles in the past. I hope we will enjoy the same results with this article. And maybe, some day, cases like this one can be referenced to draw up a less ambiguous policy concerning the use of the hoax tag. -- Shunpiker 01:09, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Shupniker and Snowwolf, I have removed the hoax tag because I added a RS for his death. If Hoax tag is added agin I think this should be taken to ANI because of misuse of tags in edit wars and a history of such tagging in the past and its notice by neutral editors.


 * But nevertheless I have confidence in both of you to edit this article to a point that it will end up being better than it was when the tagging began. Thanks RaveenS 12:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Microfish of the follwing article will have RS outside of UTHR  Columnist Eric Silver wrote about it on from Mannar, Guardian, 9 January 1985 also another RS source that has been removed from this article RaveenS 13:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Shunpiker thanks for the considerate reply, and I understand your point, but the reason I used hoax was (I believe anyway) that totallydisputed and related tags (which are along the line of "the neutrality of the article is disputed") are normally used when the incident in question is disputed, while hoax is used when the question is whether the incident/s actually took place or not. Like I mentioned above, this article reads like some form of North Korean brainwashing propaganda, and nothing is cited from reliable sources, so I the hoax tag was the best to warn the reader what the are reading may be blatantly false and may never have taken place.
 * I can't guarantee that I won't use this tag again if I come across similar (possibly fake) incidents, because its the one I've found that does the best job on conveying to the reader that the incidents in question may not have actually taken place and may instead be simply propaganda. But if you want I could use the tag so that it isn't included in the Hoax cat. That wouldn't be a problem.
 * In any case, regarding this article, none of the incidents have been cited so I'll just remove the lot of them and eliminate the need for the tag in the first place. --<b style="color:#9696A0; font-family:Tahoma;">snowolf</b><b style="color:#0A0096; font-family:tahoma;">D4</b>( <b style="color:#339966; font-family:Constantia;">talk</b> / <b style="color:#CC0099; font-family:Constantia;">@</b> ) 17:12, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

UTHR citation
For starters I doubt the reliability of citations from UTHR, especially when Jaffna was under influence of the LTTE and the LTTE intimidated all opposing human rights and political groups. Amnesty international and other groups were involved in Sri Lanka at the time, and if this individual is notable enough to have an article about him on Wikipedia, I doubt his death/murder will have escaped all of their many reports of the time.

And even if we use the UTHR document, it states,
 * This brings to mind two killings attributed to the Sri Lankan   forces in late 1984, in which the Christian Church was intimately concerned.    These were the killings of the Roman Catholic clergyman Fr. Mary Bastian, and    of Rev. George Jeyarajasingam of the Methodist Church, both in the Mannar District.

That is far, far from been good enough to be used as a source for such a statement on Wikipedia. So for now, I'll leave the totallydisputed tag on, in hopes that a better citation is added. --<b style="color:#9696A0; font-family:Tahoma;">snowolf</b><b style="color:#0A0096; font-family:tahoma;">D4</b>( <b style="color:#339966; font-family:Constantia;">talk</b> / <b style="color:#CC0099; font-family:Constantia;">@</b> ) 17:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !
In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :) DumZiBoT (talk) 08:57, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * "O'Ballance1989" :

re female Name
One question: isn't Mary a female name?--Auric (talk) 16:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Mary Bastian. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070111152021/http://www.extrajudicialexecutions.org:80/reports/E_CN_4_1986_21.pdf to http://www.extrajudicialexecutions.org/reports/E_CN_4_1986_21.pdf

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Cheers.—<sup style="color:green;font-family:Courier;">cyberbot II <sub style="margin-left:-14.9ex;color:green;font-family:Comic Sans MS;"> Talk to my owner :Online 14:36, 17 January 2016 (UTC)