Talk:Jamil al-Assad

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[edit] Landis claim

Was the Joshua Landis blog actually used as a source for this: "Syria expert Joshua Landis states that Jamil for a period during the 1980s claimed he was al-Mahdi al-Muntadhir, the awaited savior Imam of Shia Islam." If so, did he say it anywhere else? We don't normally use blogs as sources. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 08:04, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, no. That's the only place I've read it. Landis is pretty well known, though, and his blog is one of the better sources of information on Syrian politics. But feel free to delete it, since I don't have another source. I absolutely can see why blogs shouldn't be used as sources. (On the other hand, the only thing the text says is that Landis, as an expert on Syria, claims this. Wouldn't the blog suffice for that?) Arre 08:46, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

We have a few policies on sources, and they more or less rule out using blogs. In case you want to read them, they're Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:No original research (both policy, meaning they're mandatory) and Wikipedia:Reliable sources (a guideline, meaning it's only a suggestion but people do tend to stick to guidelines). However, there's a discussion going on at Wikipedia_talk:Reliable_sources#Blogs about whether we should start to allow blogs from professional people, academics and the like, so long as they have expertise in the area their blog is being used for. I'd definitely rather leave the Landis information in with the blog as a source than remove it. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 08:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, especially since it's so completely outrageous. If Jamil al-ASsad really claimed that he's the Mahdi, the Assad's are a far weirder buch than I thought... But you know the rules better than I do. We can remove it for now, and if the rules change or we find another source, reinstate it. Arre 09:13, 12 November 2005 (UTC)