Talk:Togoga airstrike

Orphaned references in Togoga airstrike
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Togoga airstrike's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "brief": From Zalambessa massacre: Brief Information on the Crimes Committed and Horrendous Situtaion Inflicted on the People of Zalambessa and Its Surroundings by the Military Forces of Eritrea and Ethiopia From Casualties of the Tigray War:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 18:47, 4 July 2021 (UTC)


 * OK, addressed; thank you. Rastakwere (talk) 19:36, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Neutrality/POV
This article needs cleanup because it seems to have been written predominantly with self-published sources by someone with non-neutral POV. Platonk (talk) 21:58, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah I was gonna make a section about this. I'll try to rewrite this weekend if no one gets it done. Ue3lman (talk) 00:33, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Set as redirect
This article had a lot of original research cited to self-published sources, and a large POV-pushing slant cited to sources that were unrelated to this event. I have put the relevant content and all the relevant reliable sources into the paragraph at Timeline of the Tigray War (January–June 2021) and redirected this article there. Platonk (talk) 13:59, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Number of dead and wounded
The death/wounded count varies depending on which article you are reading. So far we have


 * sky unconfirmed/40
 * reuters 43/44
 * apnews 51/100+
 * france24 58/200estim
 * aljazeera 64/180
 * guardian 64/180
 * national interest's one-liner links to bbc then says 64/184, but bbc says 60/40, so I'll bet they got the 64/184 number from Wikipedia. (Article wasn't about Togoga anyway.)

We should probably say 64/180. Platonk (talk) 08:19, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

, I don't know why you feel so strongly about this particular event, but your WP:ADVOCACY and WP:OWN editing is disruptive. Now it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things whether the number is 180 or 184, but when you continue to push marginal sources to get your way, this is going against Wikipedia policies.

That 184 number came from the self-published website tghat.com from a June 25, 2021 article which you inserted into the article on 26 June 2021. It remained in the article until I tagged that citation as self-published on 8 December and removed it on 18 December. You restored it, twice ( and ) by reverting my edits.

So I gave you the opportunity to remove unreliable sources yourself, you made three edits, made a snide comment in an edit summary ("was that so hard?"), and left the tghat.com citation in the article along with a glaring red citation error. Having basically announced you were done, I set about cleaning up the article... again... but this time in little steps with edit summaries so you would know why each change had been made. I also documented on the Talk page why I chose the 180 number. But you reverted the 180 number to 184 anyway. No discussion from you.

Now those latest two sources which you added to support "184", neither of which are covering the Togoga incident but which mention it in passing, both use the number 184. But both of these articles were written months after the incident, and no other reliable sources had used the 184 number. So either these two new sources you came up with got their information from tghat.com or they got it from the Wikipedia article (which got it from tghat.com). It doesn't matter which. The result is that the 184 number is not from any reliable source. And both the DW.com citation and the nationalinterest.org citation are inappropriate for the article. They do not support the content in the article. If you're only adding them to try to support 184 over 180, then you are mistaken in their use. Now if you could come up with a reliable source from the time period near the event, or an article "covering" that event (not just mentioning it in passing, like DW's photo caption), then that would be different. I have already searched and have not found any independent reliable source mentioning 184. Most search results showing "184" are in twitter comments or other advocacy blogs or in articles written long after the event during which time the Wikipedia version showed "184".

WP:CIRCULAR cautions us against using a source that has used Wikipedia as their source. And in other policies we are cautioned against publishing wrong information because it gets copied by others and then re-published as [if it's] fact.

User Rastakwere and some others did us no favors by insisting on including several unreliable sources to support their advocacy to use Wikipedia as a news source for the Tigray conflict. I'm trying to help clean up the mess he left behind.

Platonk (talk) 07:29, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

1. I added Tghat BEFORE it was declared a bad source.

2. I added back the ENTIRE article and every source that came with it not just Tghat because you deleted the article without a deletion discussion page.

3.you got rid of DW as a source because you said it didn't mention Togoga. I added it back and told you where it did that's not vandalism, that's a simple correction.

4. I kept Tghat as a source on the identification of the dead because I couldn't find any other sources on that.

5. I don't check talk pages unless someone @me or I happen to look on them.

6. I didn't know how to remove the red error.--Garmin21 (talk) 12:55, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

1. Tghat.com has always been unacceptable because it is an anonymous self-published blog. It falls under the policy WP:BLOGS and doesn't need 'declaring'.

2. You reverted all of my work even when I didn't turn the article into a redirect. I had read every single one of the citations in the article while I was making that edit.

3. I don't recall saying you were vandalizing; edit-warring, yes. The DW source was inappropriate then and now.

4. Couldn't find? Then you didn't read the citations already in the article, because Al Jazeera and The Guardian both mention the dead as being 64 (and wounded 180). This version shows the only decent citations that were in the article.

5. You should, for every article on your watchlist and absolutely before you revert someone a second time. No one is required to tag you on a talk page. Per WP:Talk page guidelines, The purpose of an article's talk page (accessible via the talk or discussion tab) is to provide space for editors to discuss changes to its associated article or WikiProject.

6. No problem. I fixed it.

I highly recommend you start using Talk pages to discuss things when any controversy, reverts, opinions, edit warring, or fights appear. That is the purpose of the talk page. The edit summaries weren't intended for carrying on controversial discussions about edits (see WP:REVTALK).

Platonk (talk) 19:43, 25 December 2021 (UTC)