Talk:The Last Days

Censorship?

I have just attempted to add mention of doubt cast on the testimony of one of the participants in this film, along with a reference, but this was removed after a few minutes by an editor who seems familiar with this Wikipedia entry. The text I attempted to add was the following:

"The authenticity of the testimony of one participant, Irene Zisblatt, has been cast into doubt, at least concerning certain details that seem to be variously impossible or highly unlikely."

The reference I included was by George R. Mastroianni, and was published on the Times of Israel website:

The user who felt justified in removing this statement and this reference, named James James Morrison Morrison, gave the following reason:

"Blog post of opinion about blog post of opinion is not a reliable source"

The author of the article that was cited as a reference has the following bio:

"Dr. Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the United States Air Force Academy, and currently teaching in the M.P.S. Psychology of Leadership program in the World Campus at the Pennsylvania State University. His recent books include Of Mind and Murder: Toward a More Comprehensive Psychology of the Holocaust; Misremembering the Holocaust: The Liberation of Buchenwald and the Limits of Memory; and Rumors of Injustice: The Cases of Ilse Koch and Rudolph Spanner."

I have no interest in engaging in Wikipedia disputes, which seem to be a most painful process. Clearly this user felt justified in simply deleting this material without any process and purely for the reason given. To me, there is no basis for the claim that Dr. Mastroianni's investigation is not reliable, or that the place of its publication is not a reliable source. The questions raised by Dr. Mastroianni are pertinent, argued and backed by evidence, and there seems to be no reason not to take Mastroianni seriously as a commentator and investigator of these questions, which are important ones. I leave it to Wikipedia and its users to decide whether this is really something that must be excluded from this encyclopedia. 175.33.171.21 (talk) 22:04, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

References

You need a better source than the one you added, especially since the text you added is highly controversial and feeds into Holocaust denial. The source you referenced is a Times of Israel Blog opinion piece by George Mastroianni, and in it he mainly discusses a blog post by Joachim Neander that is also inflammatory. This is in violation of WP:BLP and WP:RS. Please edit your contribution to adhere to Wikipedia standards for living persons and reliable sources, or else it will be removed. JJMM (talk) 22:40, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

What is your evidence that Dr. Mastroianni's article is controversial, or that the questions that he raises are not legitimate, or have been questioned or responded to? I do not see how it is a violation of standards to say that the claims made by a participant in a documentary have been called into question, especially when the person calling them into question is an expert author of books about psychology and the limits of reliable testimony concerning the Holocaust. It is your assertion that calling these claims into question "feeds into Holocaust denial". I would assert the opposite: the reason Dr. Mastroianni wrote the article, and the reason it was published on the Times of Israel website, is because this author and this newspaper know that the refusal to allow claims to be examined, when they are patently worthy of examination, is itself something that has the potential to feed into Holocaust denial. These are important and difficult questions. I would propose to you that these questions are important enough and difficult enough that you should refrain from unilaterally deciding that this material should be removed from the pages of this encyclopedia with the wave of a "policy violation" hand, and that, instead, other users should be encouraged to consider these questions and how they relate to the decisions to be made about the content of this entry in this encyclopedia. 175.32.221.98 (talk) 22:54, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I am not going to debate the Times of Israel Blog piece or anyone's qualifications. This is a warning because you are in violation of WP:BLP and WP:RS. Either you edit your contribution or it will be removed. Thank you. JJMM (talk) 23:03, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

"I am not going to debate" and "This is a warning" says it all. Yet was it not you who started "debating", declaring things to be "highly controversial" and asserting as fact that they "feed into Holocaust denial"? All I did was ask about the basis of that declaration and suggest that there is a counter-perspective to that assertion. Perhaps the mechanisms of this encyclopedia will support your attitude and tactics, but if so, it reflects poorly on the understanding of the conditions under which knowledge flourishes or dies. By all means, wield your editorial weapons, which, as a Wikipedia warrior, you obviously feel entitled if not indeed obligated to do. I would just reiterate that I disagree with your arguments, and that I was not asking to "debate" with you, but was rather calling for reasoned discussion involving a greater number of editors, on the grounds that these questions are important and difficult. 175.32.221.98 (talk) 23:13, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

The issue is with the source you used. Please stop deflecting. Your edit now reads, "The authenticity of the testimony of one participant, Irene Zisblatt, has been cast into doubt, and evidence presented that some of her claims are either impossible or highly unlikely." That is not a sufficient edit. I will give other editors time weigh in before removing this contribution that lacks a reliable source about a living person. The problem with your contribution is that you used a source that is a blog piece that in itself is a discussion of a blog piece. Please read more about using blogs as sources , especially for living persons. For example, "Never use self-published books, zines, websites, webforums, blogs and tweets as a source for material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject of the biographical material...Some newspapers host interactive columns that they call blogs, and these may be acceptable as sources so long as the writers are professionals and the blog is subject to the newspaper's full editorial control. Where a news organization publishes the opinions of a professional but claims no responsibility for the opinions, the writer of the cited piece should be attributed (e.g., 'Jane Smith has suggested...')." The Times of Israel website hosts a blog platform, and it is not clear what oversight they have over published blog pieces. In the meantime, I made the following edit: "Experimental psychologist George Mastroianni, in his Times of Israel Blogs piece discussing The Last Days and a blog piece by independent scholar Joachim Neander, suggested that "Neander analyzed Zisblatt's testimony and raised concerns about the factual accuracy of some of the elements of her story." JJMM (talk) 00:11, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for providing the quotation concerning the use of "blogs". In my reading, the quotation supports the conclusion that the Times of Israel blog is a reliable source: it states that newspaper "blogs" are reliable sources as long as the writers are professional (in this case, the answer is obviously that Mastroianni is professional) and the blog is subject to the newspaper's full editorial control (although I don't really understand what the phrase "full editorial control" means, it seems undeniable that this is a part of the newspaper's website where it hosts professional writers and has full knowledge of what it is hosting, so whatever the phrase is supposed to mean, surely this qualifies). For that reason, it would seem to be obligatory to accept the inclusion of Mastroianni's article as a reliable source, absent any convincing reason for disqualifying it. Your own re-writing of my edit is fine by me: my concern is less with how exactly this is worded than with the legitimacy of including the fact that the testimony has been questioned in ways worthy of mention. Hopefully this concludes the matter. Thanks again. 175.33.171.21 (talk) 00:21, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

This is just a temporary measure while we are waiting to hear from other editors. The matter is not concluded, because I have found no evidence that The Times of Israel has full editorial control over the published writings in their Blogs section. I have not found anything that says they have full knowledge of what they are hosting. One source cited on The Times of Israel Wikipedia said they publish 9,000 bloggers. In addition, as I have already mentioned, the source you used is a discussion of a blog piece. If you do not understand why this is problematic for a living person, I suggest you do more research in order make informed decisions about whether a source is reliable or not for Wikipedia. I wish you all the best in this endeavor. JJMM (talk) 00:47, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Third opinion is a good way to get a third view in a dispute between two editors. Nobody proposed this discussion there, so I'll chime in. After looking at both blog articles, I don't see the problem. The authors are scholars (that is not in dispute). The points discussed by both blogs are verifiable. However, I see two problems:

1. If blog A discusses blog B and blog A seems worth citing, then blog B (the original source material) should be cited instead. That isn't what's being done here. No need to cite blog A.
2. I don't really like the sentence at the top of this discussion "The authenticity of the testimony of one participant, Irene Zisblatt, has been cast into doubt, at least concerning certain details that seem to be variously impossible or highly unlikely." The testimony is authentic. It's the veracity of the testimony that is being doubted. It might be better to say it with attribution "According to Holocaust scholar Joachim Neander, certain details of the testimony of one participant, Irene Zisblatt, seem unlikely or logically impossible."

That's my opinion. ~Anachronist (talk) 04:37, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for that feedback. It would make sense to cite blog B instead of blog A if blog B was reliable, but it is not. Neander's blog piece was published on a blogspot.com website titled "Holocaust Controversies". He is listed there as an "independent scholar" not a Holocaust scholar, even though he has written about the Holocaust. He has degrees in math and history. Given that the subject of Neander's blog post is a living person, we have to err on the side of caution. If there was a better source about the veracity of Irene Zisblatt's testimony, I could see keeping this information. But I couldn't find anything. That is not to say that all of the details in her testimony are logically possible, just that I think we should wait until there is a more reliable source before adding this information to the article. Maybe other editors will have thoughts on this. JJMM (talk) 05:27, 26 September 2021 (UTC)