Talk:1985 Beirut car bombing
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Are the numbers in there accurate? A BBC article initially included noted 45 dead and more than 175 injured.
Can some sources be cited for the new, higher, numbers?
The writing is really confusing. Maybe someone could rewrite the article? Also, it's pretty widely accepted now that the sheik was the intended article. Maybe someone could get a source to confirm?
[edit] Citation
I added a citation for the death toll and consequently adjusted the numbers. Did I do this properly? DreadSam 01:05, 18 January 2007 (UTC)DreadSam
[edit] Plagiarism?
An article with exactly the same text can be found at http://www.lebwar.org/lebanese-war/massacres/lebwar_massacres_id_9.htm . Is this plagiarism? Actually, I think this site bills itself as an encyclopedia, so maybe not. However, on this site, there are no citations with the article either. DreadSam 00:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)DreadSam
- Good catch, although I believe the opposite has happened. It's impossible to determine definitively which came first, but if you look at http://www.lebwar.org/lebanese-war/massacres/, you'll notice that that article is timestamped with "18-Nov-2006 09:07". Now obviously that doesn't prove anything, but then you might also see that http://www.lebwar.org/lebanese-war/massacres/lebwar_massacres_id_8.htm is the same text as 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. Now that article developed slowly over the years, and it's almost inconceivable that it slowly matured into a plagiarized version of Lebwar.org (mostly it's inconceivable in that I can't conceive of why someone would do that--there's nothing technically infeasible about the prospect).
- Another point to consider is that lebwar.org is pretty much an Arabic-language site, and yet there are two full-fledge English pages that have identical copy as the Wikipedia. If the whole site were like those articles, or there were a number of other articles on the site, I'd be more inclined to think that the text had been copied to the Wikipedia. Given that those articles stand out the way they do, I'm more inclined to think that they are mirroring Wikipedia content as so many other online encyclopedias do. Jun-Dai 18:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/8/newsid_2516000/2516407.stm Sherurcij (Speaker for the Dead) 17:38, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Proposed renaming
Being as there were scores of carbombs going off in any given year in Beirut back in that era, perhaps a better title would be "March 8, 1985 Beirut carbombing." Thoughts? Whiskey Pete 20:39, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
- I'd only be in favor of that if we had other articles on other car-bombs in Beirut in that year. If the notability of this one dwarves the other significantly enough that they would not likely be considered viable as an article, then I don't think the disambiguation is necessary. As a point of comparison, I'm sure there were other attacks on September 11, 2001, but the Wikipedia powers-that-be felt no need for further precision on the topic, and I'm not sure we need any here. Another way to think of it is whether more than, say, 1 in 50 (or some other arbitrary number) people are going to come to this article looking for a different one, then we'd be in need of disambiguation. Jun-Dai 09:22, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
