Talk:Mount of Olives

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This entry incorporates text from the public domain Easton's Bible Dictionary, originally published in 1897.

Does anyone have modern information on this cemetery?

Working on it. --Alex S 23:48, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] added effects ?

I guess this is just a way to use a copyrighted picture ? Would it be impossible to use a picture taken by an israelian wikipedian ? What's wrong with the picture on wiki he: ? I'm not commenting on the artistic quality of the picture, it's just that it's supposed to be an encyclopedic article about the Mount of Olives... My .02€. WikiMoi 22:22, 5 November 2005 (UTC)


"with Jordanians using the gravestones from the cemetery for construction of roads and toilets, including gravestones from millennia-old graves. When Israel occupied the area in 1967, the Israelis painstakingly repatriated as many of the surviving gravestones as possible." Do you have any evidence for this, highly partisan, statement? If so, state it, if not, remove the statement.


-- i want to add to that final comment. The only "references" are to two VERY pro-israeli bias web sites. If you are going to reference it at least use something a bit more neutral. You might as well just reference a Hamas site to back up your facts about something Palestinian.

That the gravestones were used for latrines is a known fact since 1967 and to the best of my knowledge has never been challenged even by Jordan; it is what is called "common knowledge". I have seen many gravestones of my ancestors broken or missing and you tell me who might have done it. When someone wants to challenge anything written; the solution is not to delete (destroy), but to build by adding a "fact" label. If a reference is not given in a considerable amount of time, only then does it makes sense to delete that piece of information.
When it was removed here, I restored it and gave the first three references I found with a Google search. Yes, there should be a proper reference for it, but until then this fact as unpleasant as it is to some, doesn't make the edit partisan, biased or not neutral. Itzse 21:22, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
Itzse, my problem is not that your text is biased. My problem is that it does not meet the Wikipedia policy that statements of fact be supported by references to reliable and verifiable published sources. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources.
Frankly, I'm shocked that you think seeing "many gravestones of your ancestors broken or missing" in a cemetery that is 2,500 years old is in any way evidence that Jordanians desecrated the graves, unless you also saw the gravestones intact before 1948 (your observations are not really relevant, since they aren't third-party published sources, but did you see the latrines, too?). "Common knowledge" is not a published source, as required by Wikipedia policy. As for Internet citations, I looked at the first 25 references to Mount of Olives gravestones being used as latrines that I found in Google (including yours). Not one provided a citation to an eyewitness account, a contemporary newspaper article or document, or published scholarly research. None of those websites stated an editorial policy, and therefore I cannot conclude that any has "an established structure for fact-checking and editorial oversight." The mere repetition of assertions on many websites does not constitute a reliable and verifiable published source. Why is it so difficult for you to identify a source that complies with the Wikipedia inclusion criteria?
As for removing text versus adding a citation tag, here's the relevant portion of the Verifiability policy to which I referred above: "Be careful not to go too far on the side of not upsetting editors by leaving unsourced information in articles for too long, or at all in the case of information about living people. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has said of this: "I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons." Since there are plenty of Jordanians over 60 years old still living, and since the acts you claim some of them committed are singularly odious, I will continue to remove your assertions aggressively until you produce at least one reliable and verifiable source. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.236.134.75 (talk)
Itzse's information is correct. From Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory, by Amos Elon:
In 1967, it was discovered that during the Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem, tombstones had been removed from the ancient Jewish cemetary on Olivet to pave the latrines of a nearby Jordanian army barrack. (At the same time, Moslems were incensed to discover that an equally anciet Moslem cemetary had vanished on the Israeli side under a five-star hotel.) (p. 75)
and
of approximately seventy thousand Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives and its slopes, some fifty thousand were destroyed or defaced during the nineteen years of Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967. (p.170)
nadav (talk) 02:27, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. With a complying source, I no longer have any issues with the statements.