User:Ealdgyth/Holocaust in occupied Poland arb com evidence

From The Holocaust in Poland

 * 1) "In the 1931 Polish national census, only 12 percent of Jews declared Polish as their first language, while 79 percent listed Yiddish and the remaining 9 percent Hebrew as their mother tongue." is sourced to the primary source - the 1931 census. This, however, is putting out something without context. There are sources that talk about this and contextualize it (in fact, the source for the sentence right before this) but instead we get it "only 12 percent" which is editorializing. Heller On the Edge of Destruction discusses the language issue on pages 66-69, and comes to the conclusion that most of the Jewish upper classes and middle classes spoke Polish, whether or not they also spoke Yiddish and Hebrew. Heller also concludes that many lower class Jews were able to communicate in Polish, although they probably only used it as a second language, not their first.
 * 2) "The vast majority of Polish Jews were a "visible minority" by modern standards, distinguishable by language, behavior, and appearance." is sourced to On the Edge of Destruction p. 65. However - nowhere on page 65 is the phrase "visible minority" nor does it state anything about behavior or language on that page. The gist of page 65 is that the majority of Polish Jews were "distinctive in culture" - but that culture is not defined in these terms. Also not brought out in the wiki article is that the process of assimilation of the Polish Jews was accelerating .. they were becoming more like the surrounding Poles and this process was becoming faster than in the past -- for the period between WWI and WWII. Nothing on the page, however, supports the "by modern standards" statement.
 * 3) "In the labour market of many cities and towns, including Poland's provincial capitals, the presence of such a large, mostly non-acculturated minority" is sourced again to Heller p. 65. There is nothing on that page about labor markets or such.
 * 4) "Polish nationals account for the majority of rescuers with the title of Righteous Among the Nations, as honored by Yad Vashem." however, Yad Vashem makes the point here that "The numbers of Righteous are not necessarily an indication of the actual number of rescuers in each country, but reflect the cases that were made available to Yad Vashem." and "Before drawing any statistical conclusions about the proportions between different countries, one should bear in mind that although the Holocaust was a global and total attempt to annihilate the Jews all over occupied Europe, there were important differences between countries – differences in the number of Jews, the implementation of the Final Solution, the type of German or other administration, the historical backdrop, the makeup of the Jewish community, Germany’s attitude to the local population and the extent of danger to those who helped Jews, and a multitude of other factors that influenced the disposition and attitudes of local populations and the feasibility of rescue." So just citing the fact that Polish Righteous are the biggest is a bit misleading without the further context.
 * 5) see below for further on this....
 * 6) "In his work on Warsaw's Jews, Paulsson demonstrates that despite the much harsher conditions, Warsaw's Polish citizens managed to support and hide the same percentage of Jews as did the citizens of cities in reportedly safer German-occupied countries of Western Europe." is sourced to a book review published on h-net, which is not exactly the highest quality source .... [[John Radzilowski] is at least a historian, but no where in the review can I find a statement that supports "managed to support and hide the same percentage of Jews as did the citizens of cities in reportedly safer German-occupied countries of Western Europe" - the closest is "Warsaw, despite an extremely harsh occupation, compares favorably to Holland and even Denmark in the record of hiding Jews." which is not quite supportive of the sweeping statement in our article.
 * 7) "Over 700 Polish Righteous among the Nations received that recognition posthumously, having been murdered by the Germans for aiding or sheltering their Jewish neighbors." is sourced to an archived document from this personal site.. which appears to be authored by Terese Pencak Schwartz, not sure how that site is a reliable source.
 * 8) "About a fifth of Poland's prewar population perished." is sourced to here but it should be made clearer in our article that about half the total population losses were Jewish victims.
 * 9) "Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence, the survival rate among the Jewish fugitives was relatively high and by far, the individuals who circumvented deportation were the most successful." is sourced to two sources - this book review by Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books and this article by Paulsson. Nothing in either source supports the first phrase "Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence" (we'll leave aside that I'm unclear what "this occurrence refers to since the previous (and only) sentence in the paragraph is about hiding children in convents) and the next part is also not clearly related to the previous thoughts - are these fugitives ... fugitives from the ghettos? Or fugitives who fled to the Soviet Union? The last part is again, not supported by either of the sources given - neither source talks about fugitives vs. non-fugitive survival rates... so ... what's this supposed to be sourced to or discussing?
 * 10) "Historian Richard C. Lukas(source for the 3 million figure is here) gives an estimate as high as three million Polish helpers; an estimate similar to those cited by other authors. The part from "an estimate similar to those cited by other authors." gives two sources - handily the first gives a quote from the source also. The first is Smith's Moral Geographies ... and the quote is "It has been estimated that a million or more Poles were involved in helping Jews" which flatly contradicts the "three million helpers" statement. The second source given is Lukas again... which can't support the "given by other authors" part of the statement.
 * 11) "The Polish Government in Exile was the first (in November 1942)" is sourced to the primary document that the Polish Government in Exile put out. This document cannot be used to source that this was the first time a government brought up publicly the existence of the extermination of the Jews.
 * 12) "Once the ghettos were sealed off from the outside, death by starvation and disease became rampant, alleviated only by the smuggling of food and medicine by Polish gentile volunteers, in what was described by Ringelblum as "one of the finest pages in the history between the two peoples". - this is sourced to Ringelblum's work ... which dates to the 1940s (as Ringelblum was one of the Jews detained in the Warsaw Ghetto ... who died before the end of the war). While Ringelblum's work is important, it's definitely out of date and should be treated as a primary soure, not a secondary one. Also - "alleviated only by the smuggling of food and medicine by Polish gentile volunteers" .... while true, is not the complete story. There were plenty of Jewish smugglers involved in the movement of food and supplies into the ghettos and not all the smugglers (of any ethnicitiy) were motivated by altruism - there were plenty of them out to make money too. I would also suggest that the quote is probably undue - Ringelblum in other places is rather scathing towards both Jewish and Polish smugglers so it's kinda cherry picking to only highlight his praise.
 * 13) "Initially, the Jews were legally banned from baking bread;" is sourced to this source. Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and as such, he's a primary source. It is unclear if the regulation forbidding Jews to bake bread only applied to the Warsaw Ghetto or across the General Government or across all of occupied Poland.... Edelman's account isn't clear. This is why you use secondary sources, not primary sources - because historians understand how to use the primary sources ... we are not historians, and we shouldn't be interpreting primary sources in this manner.
 * 14) "Also during Operation Barbarossa, the SS had recruited collaborationist auxiliary police from among Soviet nationals." is sourced to two sources - Poland's Holocaust and 'Trawniki' from the US Holocaust Museum. It should be noted that "Soviet nationals" is somewhat misleading - there were also some Polish citizens of German descent, as well as people from the Baltic states (who were  considered Soviet nationals only by the Soviet government). Likewise, they are "auxiliary police" only because they were put under the control of part of the SS that also did police duties - these men were primarily death camp guards, and only secondarily did concentration camp guard duty and ghetto liquidation duty.
 * 15) " herding them into makeshift ghettos, and forcing them into slave labor." is sourced to Jewish Forced Labor which supports the "forcing them into forced labor" ... but only for the General Government, not the entirety of pre-war Poland. Nor does this source support the "herding them into makeshift ghettos". I'll also point out that this statement in the book is for "through the end of 1940" which is a bit of a stretch from the chronology of the article. This is an example of stretching information that is sourced ... to cover more than it should. Strictly speaking, the source given only supports that the 700,000 Jews in the General Government were put to work in both ghetto based and outside the ghetto work projects.
 * 16) "Most ghettos were set up in cities and towns where Jewish life was already well organized. For logistical reasons, the Jewish communities in settlements without railway connections in occupied Poland were dissolved." is sourced to The Holocaust Chronicle which does not support anything in the wiki article.
 * 17) This source, which appears to be a Danish site for educators. the page is used to source:
 * 18) "he food aid was completely dependent on the SS." This is kinda supported - the source says "The food supply was completely dependent on the good will and possibilities of the Germans", which is not quite the same as being dependent on the SS.
 * 19) "they were sealed off from the general public in an unsustainable manner" is ... mostly supported, although the source makes it clear that the sealing of the ghettos wasn't finished until late in 1941 in some places, but our article implies that the ghettos were all sealed within the first year and a half, which is a slight stretch, but not horrid
 * 20) "The most prominent ghettos were thus temporarily stabilized through the production of goods needed at the front," sort of supported, although the source does not talk about "most prominent ghettos" as being the the only ones stabilized (which is the implication of our article)
 * 21) "In December 1939 around 100 Jews were shot by Wehrmacht soldiers and gendarmes at Kolo" is sourced to this source which is just a primary account of the shooting. One - why is this shooting highlighted? And it is not clear who the gendarmes were - the article text seems to imply that they were part of the Wehrmacht but one of the witness statements implies that the gendarmes were local - it isn't clear if they were Polish or Volksdeutsch or something else. It's also not clear who did the supplementary text here - who's saying the Wehrmacht was involved? Is this some subject matter expert? The entry for Kolo in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos doesn't mention any shooting in 1939...we should be using secondary sources, not primary sources for this information.
 * 22) "In what became known as the "Holocaust by bullets", the German police battalions (Orpo), SiPo, Waffen-SS, and special-task Einsatzgruppen, along with Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, operated behind front lines, systematically shooting tens of thousands of men, women, and children, the Wehrmacht also participated in many aspects of the holocaust by bullets." is sourced to this US Holocaust Museum page. The problem here isn't so much sourcing as ... the main locations of the "Holocaust of bullets" were not within pre-war Poland. The vast majority of the shootings of Jews after Barbarossa took place in Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union - so why is this being presented at length without making it clear that it mostly didn't happen in Poland?
 * 23) "Because of sanitation concerns, the corpses of people who had died as a result of starvation and mistreatment were buried in mass graves in the tens of thousands" is sourced to this source (I believe that pages 6 and 7 are intended as the source, but that isn't stated in the citation) but the first part "Because of sanitation concerns" is not supported. Our article is also unclear - is it that there are tens of thousands of mass graves? Or tens of thousands of victims? And where is our article thinking these graves are - just in Poland or throughout the Eastern European areas occupied by Germany in WWII? There is another problem in that the source is covering the entire area of German-occupied Eastern Europe - and it doesn't discuss any specific numbers for Poland at all - so it's unclear if it does support any way of quantifying the number of mass graves in Poland.
 * 24) "in June 1942 the Polish National Council's Samuel Zygelbaum reported that these had murdered 35,000 Jews in Lodz alone.[57] He also reported that Gestapo agents were routinely dragging Jews out of their homes and shooting them on the street in broad daylight." is sourced to the original JTA report from 1942 - why are we using a primary source here? And I'm not sure why we need to highlight that it was a member of the Polish National council that reported it ... we should use recent secondary historians to see whether or not this is significant - instead of the original primary account (which isnt even an eyewitness, but rather a person who was in exile in England at the time...
 * 25) "By December 1941, about on million Jews had been murdered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.[58] The 'war of destruction' policy in the east against 'the Jewish race' became common knowledge among the Germans at all levels.[59] The total number of shooting victims in the east who were Jewish are around 1.3 to 1.5 million." - this is all mostly concerning non-Polish areas... why is it here in this article?
 * 26) "The industrial killing by exhaust fumes was already tried and tested over several weeks at the Chełmno extermination camp in the then-Wartheland, under the guise of resettlement." is sourced to Masters of Death but this doesn't completely support the text - the only thing Masters says on page 233 about Chelmno is "Gas vans at Chelmno, near Lodz, had begun exterminating Polish Jews on 8 December 1941."
 * 27) "All condemned Ghetto prisoners, without exception, were told they were going to labour camps, and asked to pack a carry-on luggage." is sourced to The Train Journey but no where on page 45 is any of this supported. And why are they "condemned Ghetto prisoners"? that's very loaded language - for a bunch of people who had never been through any judicial process at all before being herded into ghettos...
 * 28) "Meanwhile, the idea of mass murder by means of stationary gas chambers was discussed in Lublin already since September 1941. It was a precondition for the newly drafted Operation Reinhard led by Odilo Globocnik who ordered the construction of death camps at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka." (note that 'in Lublin' is linked to Nisko Plan which doesn't really make sense - I'm pretty sure the discussions didn't take place in Lublin - they probably took place somewhere in Germany ... this sentence is pretty mangled) is sourced to "https://books.google.com/books?id=va3CMvKMGj0C&q=technical+prerequisite#v=snippet&q=technical%20prerequisite&f=false this source] which is a bit ... different. It states that the idea of stationary gas chambers must have developed BY September 1941 at the latest, nor does this source support the statement that the development of the gas chambers was a precondition of Operation Reinhard. Nor does it support the statement that Globocnik ordered the construction of the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (although this is something that could be sourced ...).
 * 29) The same source as above is used to source "At Majdanek and Auschwitz, the work of the stationary gas chambers began in March and May respectively, preceded by experiments with Zyklon B." but the only thing this source supports is that the work on the Birkenau gas chambers began in May... there is nothing here about Zyklon B nor about Majdanek.
 * 30) "Between 1942 and 1944, the most extreme measure of the Holocaust, the extermination of millions of Jews from Poland and all over Europe was carried out in six extermination camps. There were no Polish guards at any of the Reinhard camps, despite the sometimes used misnomer Polish death camps. All killing centres were designed and operated by the Nazis in strict secrecy, aided by the Ukrainian Trawnikis." is sourced to Rethinking Poles and Jews which is a problem, because the one bit that might support it - "there were no Polish guards at the camps" is pulled out (you can tell because the google books snippet is from a search for the phrase "There were no Polish guards at any of the camps") but the context is missing. The phrase isin a paragraph that is discussing how Polish accounts of the Holocaust differ from non-Polish accounts. So the phrase "there were no Polish guards in the camps" is what the partisan Polish accounts state, not a fact that can be stated in wikipedia. And the rest of the information given in these sentences cannot be supported at all by the source given. I'll also point out that this US Holocaust Museum article on Belzec specifically mentions that some of the guards at Belzec were "However, the bulk of the guard unit, between 90 and 120 men, were either former Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) of various nationalities or Ukrainian and Polish civilians selected or recruited for this purpose." which would seem to contradict the statement our article makes that there were no Polish guards in an of the Reinhard camps (for those not aware, Belzec/Sobibor/Treblinka are collectively known as the Reinhard camps - for Operation Reinhard which operated those three death camps).
 * 31) "and the remaining subcamps of KL Lublin/Majdanek camp complex including Poniatowa, Budzyń, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa, and also during massacres in Łomazy, Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations, augmented by members of the SS, SD, Kripo, as well as the reserve police battalions from Orpo (each, responsible for annihilation of thousands of Jews)" is sourced to [https://books.google.com/books?id=bNzq9wHv4jUC&q=SS+SD+Kripo+Orpo+Amt+IV#v=onepage&q=three%20million&f=false The Gestapo but nothing on the pages given supports the information given in our article (the link does not have page numbers so I had to search for the quote that's given in the footnote, but nothing on that upage nor the previous page or later page gives support to the information in our article).
 * 32) "The Chełmno extermination camp (German: Kulmhof) was built as the first-ever, following Hitler's launch of Operation Barbarossa. It was a pilot project for the development of other extermination sites. The experiments with exhaust gases were finalized by murdering 1,500 Poles at Soldau." is sourced to this source which only mentions Chelmno once in a listing of all the death camps - nothing from our article is supported by this source. Other soures are given - this one doesn't fully support the information either - on page 26 it merely supports that Chelmno was the first extermination camp but none of the rest of the sentences. The other source given is a post on a WarRelics bulletin board system from a user known as "Carl" that also merely supports that Chelmno was the first extermination camp - I have no words that this sort of source is considered reliable by editors of this article. I'll note that the [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/chelmno US Holocaust Museum article on Chelmno does not mention any non-Jewish first victims ... in fact it states that "During the first five weeks, the victims were Jewish residents of nearby areas in Wartheland District."
 * 33) "Additionally, 20,000 foreign Jews and 5,000 Roma were brought in from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia." is sourced to a a post on JewishGen by Shirley Rotbein Flaum. This is not a good quality source at all.
 * 34) "All victims were murdered with the use of mobile gas vans (Sonderwagen), which had exhaust pipes reconfigured and poisons added to gasoline" ... this is the first I've ever read of poison being added to the gasoline used at Chelmno - I would think we'd have some ironclad sourcing for this - but the sourcing is to the original JTA news report of the trials in 1963 and a German source that I'm unable to read. I'll note that the US Holocaust Museum article on Chelmno gives a pretty detailed description of the usual execution procedure at Chelmno.
 * 35) "with a maximum capacity of 22,000 executions in twenty-four hours" is sourced to A History of Europe, which I can only see in snippet view - but that says "The maximum capacity of the camp was probably the 22000 executions in twenty- four hours" ... that probably is kinda important.
 * 36) "The dead were initially buried in large mass graves, but the stench from the decomposing bodies could be smelled up to ten kilometers away. As a result, the Nazis began burning the bodies on open-air grids made of concrete pillars and railway tracks." has two sources. The first sentence is sourced to History vs Apologetics but the source basically says the smell was a sign of the other serious environmental effects that were occurring (at Auschwitz they had issues with the drinking water getting polluted, for example) as well as the burial pits being evidence of the crimes being committed at the camp. I can't access the second source - but I'll note that there is no page number for this source (which I actually own ... I just can't access it right this moment - but it's a BIG book - so it needs a page range so it can be verified).
 * 37) "The lack of verified survivors however, makes this camp much less known." is sourced to the the US Holocaust Museum article on Belzec, but I've read the entire article twice and still don't see where this fact is verified by the article.
 * 38) "New arrivals were forced to split into groups, hand over their valuables, and disrobe inside a walled-off courtyard for a bath. Women had their hair cut off by the Sonderkommando barbers. Once undressed, the Jews were led down a narrow path to the gas chambers which were disguised as showers. The victims were murdered with carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust pipes of a gasoline engine removed from a Red Army tank." is sourced to this website which reprints testimony from the guards of the camp - this is a primary source and again, we shouldn't be using this for details of the camp operation - historians are trained to interpret primary sources ... they are the ones who should be determining how to weigh the bias of the testimony and the weight to give to the perpetrator's accounts vs. the victims accounts. At the very least, the wiki article should make clear that this is based not on secondary historians but the testimony of the guards/etc.
 * 39) "10% of the Polish Army which fought alone against the Nazi-Soviet Invasion of Poland were Jewish Poles, some 100,000 troops" is sourced to this news article, which states something slightly different - "According to Polish documents, the percentage of Jews serving in the Polish army in WWII—both when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and in the ranks of the Free Polish Army organized in the Soviet Union and in England—came to 10 percent of the total forces." the article is a bit unclear, but I think it's saying that 100,000 of the polish forces throughout WWII were Jewish - while I believe our article is trying to say that 100,000 Jewish troops were in the 1939 Polish army that fought against a Nazi-Soviet invasion. So... the source doesn't support the "fought alone against the Nazi-Soviet invasion" part ... leaving aside the issue of the implication that there was a "Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland" - when in fact it was very much more complicated than that...
 * 40) "even though the elders were terrified by the prospect of mass retaliation against the women and children in the case of anti-Nazi revolt" is sourced to Trunk's Judenrat which I do not have with me, but this is a major simplification of the situation in a wide variety of ghettos - it's a gross oversimplification of the situation and has a bit of POV that's not exactly fair to the enormous scholarship on the issue of Jewish responses to the ghettos and possibilities of revolt.
 * 41) "As the German authorities undertook to liquidate the ghettos, armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Soviet border of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland." is sourced to this archive of a US Holocaust Museum article. However, the USHM article states "Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union." which is not the same thing. Nor is "overwhelmingly in eastern Poland" supported by this source.
 * 42) "The Polish Government in Exile, headquartered in London, also provided special assistance – funds, arms, and other supplies – to Jewish resistance organizations such as the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union." this is sourced to Contested Memories, specifically the article by Dariusz Stola entitled "The. Polish Government-in-Exile and the Final Solution" which article is much more than just a discussion of some funds/arms/etc provided to the Jewish resistance movements. On page 86 Stola says "But the government in exile paid less attention to Jewish matters than one might have supposed, particularly from today's perspective." and then on page 90 "Jewish leaders abroad were prodding the government in exile to broadcast by radio an appeal to the Polish population to aid Polish Jewry. But for several months the government resisted, offering various explanations. Eventually, General Sikorski made such an appeal during his speech broadcasted to Poland on 4 May 1943...." which came after news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began...(it began 19 April 1943 and was mostly over by 29 April, although the command bunker wasn't found by the Germans until 8 May) Stola also notes that Zegota didn't start giving aid to Jews until 1942. I'll note that Stola goes to some length into WHY so much of the aid/efforts were late or didn't accomplish much - and that not all of the reasons were antisemitism, but I would expect that more of Stola's nuance would come through in this section, instead the article is just used to source the fact that some aid went to Jewish resistance groups (while other sources dispute how much actual aid actually went to the fighters or ghetto inhabitants...but that's probably a bit beyond the scope of this particular article - like many things Polish-Jewish-in-WWII, its very ... complicated and full of grey areas).
 * 43) "The phenomenon of Polish collaboration was described by John Connelly and Leszek Gondek as marginal, when seen against the backdrop of European and world history. Estimates of the number of individual Polish collaborators vary from as few as 7,000 to as many as several hundred thousand." Here is a problem of weight. One side of the debate on Polish collaboration is given more weight than the other side. While the "minimal collaboration" side is given a sentence and a quote, the "large collaboration side" is only mentioned as a high figure of collaborators.
 * 44) "The Polish Underground State strongly opposed this sort of collaboration, and threatened Szmalcowniki with death; sentences were usually given and carried out by the Special Courts." again - this appears to be a weight issue - I don't read Polish so I can't judge how accurately the source is reflected in the article, but I can see some issues here - while the implication is that the Underground went after blackmailers and sentenced them to death - we're not actually given any statistics - how many cases actually resulted in conviction and death? How many cases were actually brought forward and how many were ignored or not prosecuted?
 * 45) "Jewish property, taken over by Poles, was a factor behind the beating and murdering of Jews by Poles between summer 1944 and 1946, including the Kielce pogrom." ... and is still a contentious issue in Polish-Israeli relations to this day.

Gas van
One further example from another article, Gas van. There are 811 words devoted to the Nazi use of gas vans - which was extensive and is one of the defining characteristics of the Nazi Holocaust. There are 468 words devoted to the POSSIBLE use by one NKVD officer of one van in the Soviet Union for maybe as many as 56 executions. And this is a very disputed use ... if it happened. A perusal of the Talk:Gas van/Archive 1 and the talk page will show how difficult it was to even get the possible Soviet use cut down and put AFTER the Nazi use.

More from 1 Jan 2022

 * 1) Let's revisit "Polish nationals account for the majority of rescuers with the title of Righteous Among the Nations, as honored by Yad Vashem."  Yad Vashem gives here a total of 27,961 total individuals honored as Righteous Among the Nations. 7177 of them are given as Polish - either by citizenship or ethnicity. That's a hair over 25% of the total, not nearly the "majority" as claimed by our article. Either Paulsson is wrong, or the citation isn't actually to Paulsson, or something's gotten garbled, but no way we can say that a majority of the Righteous are Polish. (We'll leave aside the issue of whether those 7177 are all "Polish nationals" or if some were Poles living in other countries...). We could say that those Yad Vashem categorizes as being Polish in some form ... are the largest single block of Righteous. Or we could say the same group is plurality of the Righteous. But not majority, no matter what some source says. I'm actually embarrassed I missed this huge ass glaring error earlier... Ealdgyth (talk) 00:09, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Summary
Okay, this is very scattershot and it's taken me approximately 10 hours of time to work through these - and i've not even touched a quarter of the citations in our article on the Holocaust in Poland. I've found issues with between a third and half the citations I was able to check, probably closer to half. I don't have the time to go through wikiblame and try to figure out who put what into the article - it's too depressing. I hope that this demonstrates just how ... difficult the problem is ... I'd say that pretty much every article in the topic area needs detailed checking against the sources, but the problem is that the battleground that the topic area currently is doesn't lend itself to this. BOTH sides edit war, make nasty talk page comments about editors on the other side, and generally impede progress. This is mainly from just ONE article, and I didn't do a complete check of everything, just what sources I had time to pick up before leaving on my trip and what I could check online.

This is 5600+ words, and it's not even more than the tip of the iceberg. Like I said, I didn't dig into who put all these errors in the articles, because quite honestly that'd take another 50 hours, and it's not very productive use of my time. I'd rather that everyone involved in this topic area stopped acting like asses and stopped taking sides, and instead try to FIX THE ARTICLES.