User talk:106.72.160.33

Concerning sources on State-sponsored Internet Propaganda
Hi, I'd like to take a moment and explain my thinking regarding the above, where you took issue with my removal of Template:Better source from citations of Electronic Intifada and Jacobin Magazine, while supporting the template on an IMFA press release.

Firstly, Jacobin is not "openly anti-Israel", they're an American publication with a Socialist bend – if you consider any publication that has published articles criticizing specific instances of the Israeli government's behavior to be "openly anti-Israel" and thus unreliable for sources concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then you can go ahead and throw just about every publication covering international events out the window, because they all have them. If you feel you can show a consistent, anti-Israel bias enough to constitute a conflict of interest in the source, then by all means start a discussion on the article's talk page, but frankly, those sources have been deemed "acceptable-enough" through WP:CON (barring incidents of blatant vandalism blanking the entire section on Israel) for years.

Secondly, regarding Electronic Intifada: while EI does indeed have a Palestinian lens on its material, the article being cited is not an opinion piece — it is largely a summary of a report by Michael Bueckert, whose various reports have been referenced by The Washington Post, Middle East Eye, and other high-profile, reputable news sources. It's easy for Israelis to disregard EI as a source when they're the ones that originally broke the news about Israeli edit-campaigns defacing Wikipedia, but their perspective has little, if any, impact on the content of the article in question – it itself even cites documents from the Knesset.

Lastly, why IMFA is not a reliable source: no "closed-source" governmental release is an acceptable source for geopolitical claims in general, much less when the claims are regarding countries that the government has very tense relations with. The difference between EI or Jacobin and a government agency, especially military intelligence whose only source is "interrogations and captured documents" is massive — they're not even comparable. In this particular case, the IMFA can claim whatever they want, because the sources they cite are not independently verifiable.


 * Take this analogy: say you have a magic notebook that reveals the absolute truth of a situation – when tasked to research a subject, you can just flip it open and read through it and you'll have an all-encompassing objectively true understanding of it – but there's a catch: you can't show or tell anyone of its existence. You decide a good job for someone with your abilities is to be an investigative journalist, and you go about writing all of these fabulous write-ups containing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of any given subject. They all get rejected by the Editor. Why? Because you gave him nothing to back up your claims, regardless of whether or not they're objectively true. You know it's true, but the Editor doesn't, and when he asks you for evidence supporting your claims, you can't provide any, because of the restrictions placed upon you by the magic notebook. This is what citing governmental press release that itself cites its own military intelligence is like: you're not citing a rigorously fact-checked, independent publication; you're citing an entity that can't or won't provide evidence to support their claims. That is why it's inappropriate.

I've left your reversion intact, though I hope you will reconsider it after reading the above. If you'd like to have a conversation on this, please create a new section on the article's talk page. 100.16.5.65 (talk) 08:58, 27 September 2020 (UTC)