Talk:Casualties of the Iraq War/Archive 2

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This is an encyclopedia not a press release.

Wikipedia is not supposed to be the house organ of any one government, but this article uses a lingo/doublespeak/racist term that the USA uses to describe mercenaries of any country other than a predominantly Caucasian political ally.

Wikipedia should be filtering out spin words an translating them into proper English.

I suggest that "contractor" only be used for unarmed non-military non-police contractors.

This simple rule should apply: If the term "mercenary" would be used to describe the job or person if the person were being paid by an agency working for an African government, the term "mercenary" should be used to describe the job or person working for a non-African government.

End the racism. Speak in plain English. This is an encyclopedia not a press release. 50.71.210.133 (talk) 23:29, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

"Contractor" (or 'private military contractor') is the common term for these people in news reports and books. Nick-D (talk) 23:32, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

There weren't truly mercenaries in Iraq, as I said above in another entry. A mercenary is defined under international treaty as a person in a foreign conflict whose nation is not a party to the conflict.

So any American contractors working for PMCs are just contractors, they can't be called mercenaries because the USA was obviously a party to the conflict. Also, the American contractors were being paid by their own government, generally working for their own US State Dept. to be bodyguards for diplomats, State Dept employees, and other civilian VIPs. When the American government hires an American to fight in an American war, then that's not a mercenary. (I think there might have been a few Chilean soldiers hired by Blackwater, and they could be called mercenaries, but I don't recall that there were very many. The overwhelming majority of contractors were US veterans.) Walterego (talk) 16:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I had to undo some additions to Casualties of the Iraq War. There was nothing new. They referenced http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/HMCHART_2.pdf - and it references IBC, and even Wikipedia! Wikipedia is not accepted as a reference here.

I suggest looking at the various individual categories of deaths from the HMCHART_2.pdf and seeing if there is anything new (with references) that can be added separately to the article.

"National Military and Police" is confusing since "Military, Insurgents/Militants" is similar. The notes on both are even more confusing.

"CostsOfWar.org (Crawford) is referenced for "Military, Insurgents/Militants" in the above-linked HMCHART_2.pdf. I can't find a search tool on their site. Google site search finds some stuff when looking for Crawford:

• http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/articles/15/attachments/Crawford%20Iraq%20Civilians.pdf

I do not see the same numbers in that article as I see in the HMCHART_2.pdf. That Crawford article frequently says the actual number of deaths in most categories is higher than the sources she could find. So there is a disconnect between the stats in HMCHART_2.pdf and its sources. HMCHART_2.pdf looks like some chart put together by the costsofwar.org webmaster or some grad student who did not connect all the dots. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:20, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

The CoW was an academic project to establish the costs of war, including the Iraq war, established by Brown University. It brought together 30 academics from various disciplines to crunch the numbers and determine what the Project as a whole felt were the most credible numbers. The number of Iraq deaths settled on by the CoW project is unique to that project. It references a variety many sources, though its conclusions favor some as more credible than others. The final CoW number is not the IBC number, but uses IBC numbers for certain categories because the CoW project overview concluded that they were the most credible available for the category. However, their final number is unique. This is, in effect, a large academic project to sift through a wide range of, sometimes conflicting, information on the conflict and determine what is credible to conclude and what is not. This is in the tradition of other academic efforts to reconcile various numbers and claims about different wars, such as the CRED estimates for Darfur (cited here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur#Mortality_figures) which are based on an evaluation of a range of other sources, and which (like CoW) produced final numbers that are the unique judgments of CRED itself about the numbers. The CoW findings have also been widely reported in WP Reliable Sources. As to the HMCHART, I don't think this needs to be the link used on the page. We could just use the homepage and perhaps some of the prominent press reports or press releases that discuss the findings, such as http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/03/warcosts or http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2013/0317/Iraq-war-10-years-later-Was-it-worth-it.

The table at the top and the Overview currently includes long discredited stuff like the ORB poll, which is rarely if ever cited in any serious circles (and can't even be found anywhere on ORB's website anymore). So it's hard to see why the conclusions of a major academic project like CoW should be suppressed while something marginal like that is featured prominently. That seems like pretty inconsistent and dubious inclusion criteria for the page.Billbowler2 (talk) 00:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

The Costs of War project has been mentioned mainly for its estimates of the total financial costs of the war. I can find few mentions of the total number of Iraq War deaths other than in minor publications. Those minor publications and blogs often reference a press release.

There is a March 2013 press release mentioning a total number, 190,000. The press release actually says "at least 190,000 people". It discusses "a new report". The press release mentions Neta C. Crawford.

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/03/warcosts

Here is a Google site search for Crawford:

https://www.google.com/#q=crawford+site:costsofwar.org

It finds her reports from previous years with different estimates, and also her March 2013 report:

http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/articles/15/attachments/Crawford%20Iraq%20Civilians.pdf

The total numbers of Iraq War deaths in some of the references you used is not stated. Only one of the references you used states a total number. That reference is the March 2013 press release written apparently by Courtney Coelho:

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/03/warcosts - it states "at least 190,000 people".

Since it was reported in a few blogs and very minor publications, though not in any mainstream publication I could find, it merits inclusion in the article, but not at the top. It can be put farther down in the article, along with the other minor tabulations of Iraq War deaths. And it should mention the fact that Neta Crawford thinks the total number could be much higher than 190,000. It should also summarize her sources.

All the other stuff at the top of the article was widely reported. It is there because it was widely reported. All of the estimates have been highly criticized. I personally favor the Orb survey numbers. The Orb estimate is not some derivative number taken from other estimates. I think they did a fairly broad survey. Their methodology seemed sound overall to me. But that is just my personal opinion. Much broader surveys are needed, but that is difficult since there is still fighting going on.

Here are some more direct sources for numbers that I have found:

http://costsofwar.org/iraq-10-years-after-invasion - click on the link for "Iraq Direct War Deaths":

http://costsofwar.org/sites/all/themes/costsofwar/images/Direct-War-Deaths(2).pdf

That costsofwar.org chart says: "Iraq, 2003-2013, More than 189,000 Direct War Deaths. Does not include indirect deaths, due to war-related hardship, which may total many hundreds of thousands more than this estimate."

March 20, 2013 article posted by Neta C. Crawford on the Foreign Policy magazine website:

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/20/the_iraq_war_ten_years_in_ten_numbers

"190,000 ... And, as Neta C. Crawford from Brown University discusses, there are disagreements about how many civilians have been killed directly by violence because documented deaths may be a fraction of the actual number of people killed."

From the bottom of the same article: "Neta C. Crawford, a Professor of Political Science at Boston University, is Co-Director with Catherine Lutz of the Costs of War Project based at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University." --Timeshifter (talk) 19:19, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Here's some other RS reporting on CoW, including the death toll numbers. There's probably more -

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/03/14/293593/us-war-in-iraq-costs-over--2-trillion/

http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/costs-war

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/report_iraq_war_costs_u_s_more_than_2_trillion_so_far/

http://rt.com/usa/us-wars-most-expensive-109/

http://www.arabnews.com/iraq-war-bill-2-trillion-and-rising

Billbowler2 (talk) 19:42, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

They are all minor publications.

wire service

, and does not publish its stuff itself in the print or broadcast media. I see also, that Reuters is the source of the number of 176,000 to 189,000 people. Reuters did not mention the hundreds of thousands of indirect deaths. Reuters was not clear that there could be many more direct deaths due to violence. Its range number contributed to that lack of clarity. Some of the articles you linked to did mention the number of 189,000 by itself, and that there were many more deaths not included in that number.

Neither the Brown University press release, nor the Reuters article, linked to the Crawford primary source. So I see the problem. But that problem has been solved now that I found the Foreign Policy article by Crawford, and the buried PDF charts and articles on the costsofwar.org site.

I guess since there are more minor publications than I previously noticed these Iraq War death numbers may merit inclusion in the top chart, but only if the Crawford source numbers are used along with the very important points about hundreds of thousands of more deaths. I still say this is nothing new, and just a new shuffling of the source data, as interpreted by one professor. Are we going to add every new summation of the same source data by a professor? --Timeshifter (talk) 21:37, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

You're spinning at this point. The range of "minor publications" here are more than the bogus ORB poll ever received. The page about the ORB poll even cites people whining about how little any mainstream sources reported or payed attention to it. The CoW conclusions were that of the project team, not "one professor", regardless of who was tasked with doing the media interviews for it. Most of the listed sources do not offer any number for "indirect deaths", and many of them hedge about uncertainty in the numbers or speculate that there "may" be more deaths. You're pushing a POV here and spinning to have this suppressed because you "personally favor the Orb survey numbers". Serious academic work on this should not be suppressed because you happen to want to believe - or want other people to believe - the most baseless and discredited assertions ever made on the topic.Billbowler2 (talk) 09:02, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

(unindent). The Orb poll had its spate of discussion in the media and blogs. Just like the Costs of War stats. Both got far less coverage than the 2 Lancet surveys. The CoW stats come from one person, Neta Crawford. I found no one else mentioned on their site concerning stats. Neta Crawford, the co-director of the project, is the main one getting interviews too. For example;

• The Costs of War: 10 Years After Iraq Invasion, New Study Tallies the Massive Human, Financial Toll. On Democracy Now!.

I am not trying to suppress her info. I am just saying that I question whether it belongs in the top chart. Your case is a little stronger now that you have found more minor publications. Try not to be so emotional. No one knows the true number of casualties. True believers in the Iraq War try to deny that many hundreds of thousands of people died violent deaths. Plus hundreds of thousands more from indirect deaths. But any thinking person can see that if at least 80,000 people have died violently in a smaller country, Syria, in a couple years (Syrian civil war), then far, far more have died in a far bloodier war in Iraq over a far longer time. A war with the full weight of the U.S. military involved. Similar Shi'ite-Sunni civil war being a large part of both wars. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:18, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Neta Crawford seems to be the main spokesperson for the project. It mentions 30 other academics involved. Your attempts to turn it into something one professor says is nonsense. And I suppose IraqBodyCount, the WHO, and all the scientists, journalists and others who are on the record rejecting the Lancet study are "True believers in the Iraq War". Yeah, right.... On Syria, there's no basis for the claim that it's "at least 80,000" killed there. There was a recent estimate of 60,000 made, which then got loosely extrapolated to 70,000 by a UN official, but neither qualify as "at least". And there's also no basis for your claim that one is "far bloodier" than the other, unless you start by assuming your own premise and use circular reasoning: Iraq was "far bloodier" than Syria because the Orb poll is true: therefore the Orb poll is true because Syria is already "at least 80,000".

The numbers that have been claimed for Syria are pretty similar to the numbers that IBC, UNAMI, CoW and others have for the worst years of Iraq's civil/sectarian war. Is Syria's civil war "far less bloody" than Iraq's was? You seem to think you know. I don't think you do.Billbowler2 (talk) 16:11, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

It is obvious that you are ignoring the source documents on the Costs of War website from Neta Crawford. Hey, you have the right to your biases. But Wikipedia links to references not biases. Wikipedia lets readers make up their own minds. As at Syrian civil war Wikipedia provides the various estimates with references, and lets readers make up their own mind. Obviously, we disagree as to which estimates to believe. They are all estimates. None are firm numbers for the total of actual deaths in either war since that would require a very, very large survey bordering on a census. Even a census would have problems since many people have left both countries. How would you know if someone is dead or has left? That would require looking worldwide, contacting relatives, doing missing persons searches. Syrian civil war death estimates currently range between 70,000 and 120,000. For the period between April 2011 (when fighting started) and May 2013.

The Costs of War project numbers are nothing new really. Iraq Body Count Project and Costs of War Project both have similar totals (174,000 versus 189,000). That is because they use the same sources for the most part. CoW uses IBC as its source for the bulk of deaths. They both say they are undercounts since they are counts, and not surveys. The question is how much of an undercount. No one knows. No one can know at the moment. You can flail around and claim you know, but you don't. All of the estimates, counts, surveys, etc. have been viciously attacked by respected academics from all sides, from media from all sides, from organizations of all kinds. All old news to me. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:48, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I archived old talk that has not had any discussion in the last year. See Template:Talk header and Talk:Casualties of the Iraq War/Archive 1. The archive is named in the standard way so that it is automatically detected by Template:Talk header and Template:Archives. The search form will work after the talk archive is indexed in awhile by the MediaWiki software. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:47, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

This article needs a lot of help to correct improper and poor use of language and terminology. The most glaring and obvious example being that apparently no one knows the difference between "Casualties" and "Fatalities". Anyone that can properly correct that issue should be capable of cleaning up much of the rest of the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.225.135.22 (talk) 04:58, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

There is also an issue with the Opinion Research Business survey casualty estimation which states that the estimation is "widely rejected as credible"; this is a contradiction in terms and should either be "rejected as not being credible" or "rejected as incredible" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.183.194.32 (talk) 02:32, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:

This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:

1. There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
2. It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
3. In the absence of any discussion, or if the discussion has become dormant.

Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 00:39, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Right now, both the Costs of War project and Iraq Body Count are cited as separate casualty figures. They aren't independent counts. The Cost of War project is simply a reprint of the Iraq Body Count casualty figure, with the addition of 12,000 deaths from the Iraq War logs. Even the figure of 12,000 additional deaths is provided by Iraq Body Count, and simply cited by the Cost of War project. This means that we're double counting Iraq Body Count's figure. The list of casualty estimates should only include independent counts, and leave off reprints of the same count. If there's no objection, I'd like to remove the Cost of War figure. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:44, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

I've removed the Cost of War figures, since they're just a citation of Iraq Body Count's figures, which we already list. Listing Cost of War separately gives the impression that it's actually an independent count of civilian deaths. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:53, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Restored CoW info. This was addressed in previous discussion long ago on the talk page. The CoW was a large academic project evaluating all the varying information on deaths in Iraq to arrive at their own total number of war deaths that best reflects the reality according to CoW's analysis. The final CoW numbers cited here are not IBC numbers, nor is it IBC numbers with an addition of 12,000 as claimed above. CoW wound up using IBC numbers for the civilian portion of their total because the CoW team judged those numbers to be the most reliable for that portion of their total. CoW's numbers as cited here reflect civilians, combatants and insurgents on all sides, based on a variety of sources as judged according to the CoW team. They do not reflect the judgments of IBC and nor do those totals come from IBC.Billbowler2 (talk) 15:39, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

The CoW numbers used previously in this Wiki article were, indeed, the IBC numbers. It's inappropriate to list citations of one count as a separate count. CoW deferred to IBC for its count of civilian deaths, and so did not produce their own estimate. Since they did not produce an estimate, there is nothing to list here. Readers will get the impression that there was a second count, which there was not. -Thucydides411 (talk) 16:02, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

You are just mistaken. The CoW numbers cited here appear nowhere from IBC (If they do, go ahead and provide a citation of IBC giving those numbers). The only kernel of truth in your false argument is what I stated above. CoW chose to use IBC numbers for a portion of their count because their team judged it to be the most reliable numbers to use for that portion of their count. This has no relevance to whether the CoW findings should be cited here.Billbowler2 (talk) 16:31, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

You say I am mistaken, and then repeat exactly what I said, namely that "CoW chose to use IBC numbers for a portion of their count." If you take a look at the most recent CoW paper, their tally of civilian deaths is a direct citation of the Iraq Body Count. All they do in addition to that is to add in other groups' counts of military and "militant" deaths, to arrive at the final figure they cite.

CoW cites other figures, beyond the IBC numbers. Neta Crawford, in the most recent CoW paper, summarizes her findings as

If a full recording of Iraqi violent deaths due to war were to be made, the toll could be twice as high, according to Iraq Body Count (IBC), the one organization that has attempted to document all the violent deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the initiation of war ten years ago. Thus, the toll of violent death due to war may be 250,000 or more people.

Neta Crawford goes on to discuss the figures given by statistical studies, and to say that they show tallies, like those produced by IBC, are underestimates:

Whether or not the resulting numbers from the cluster sample survey research are valid, cluster sampling from Iraq and other conflicts does show that reliance on media reports of death undercount the true number of dead.

So when discussing CoW, should we cite Crawford's absolute lower bound, 134,000 civilian deaths (a repeat of the IBC figures), or the figure she says is more credible, 250,000 (about twice the IBC figures), or should we cite the figures she gives from statistical studies (approximately half a million to a million)? The CoW papers are discussions of various estimates produced by others. The figure we are citing is simply the IBC count, with a number of official tallies added in to cover other Iraqi soldiers and "militants."

I think we should only include independent counts of war dead in this Wiki page. If we include secondary compilations, we are effectively giving the counts they are based on extra weight.

A larger point is that we should more clearly separate estimates of total violent deaths from tallies of violent deaths. A reader looking over our list of figures might be confused by the extreme discrepancy between the various numbers. Most of the studies we cite discuss the difference between statistical studies and counts of documented deaths. In particular, most sources claim that statistical studies are the most accurate means of determining the total number of people who have died as a result of the war, while tallies based on media accounts and official sources are undercounts. Clearly separating out the two categories of numbers will help the readers understand the figures they are looking at. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:24, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you are mistaken. You claimed the CoW number is the same as the IBC number. It isn't, which is why you evaded my request to support your claim by providing a citation of IBC giving the CoW number. I'll not repeat the explanation above, except to say that part of you may be made up of water, but that doesn't mean you're water. Beyond that, I think you're mistaken about almost everything else you say above. You make weird interpretations of Crawford and suggest we should maybe ignore the headline finding the CoW project settled on as the most credible, and which has been reported as such in reliable sources and is given on the page now, and instead give preference to off the cuff speculations from one of the authors suggesting the true number "may" be higher. Almost all the sources have hedged about limitations and said the number "may" be higher. There's nothing unique to CoW in that really. You're also mistaken that most sources claim "statistical studies are the most accurate". I think you are cherry picking your sources or misinterpreting them. Moreover, the "statistical studies" listed differ from *each other* more than some of them do from the "tallies". For example, the IFHS is much closer to IBC, AP or CoW than it is to the Lancet. That should raise serious doubts about how much your particular distinction matters, or should be elevated to definitive importance above any number of other distinctions that could be drawn between the different sources here. Our opinions on the merits of these sources shouldn't really matter, but you seem to insist on imposing yours, I don't think a distinction between "tallies" and "statistical studies" actually explains much of anything about why the numbers listed here differ so much. The fact that the "statistical sources" don't even come close to agreeing with each other in the first place is just one of the reasons why that explanation fails.Billbowler2 (talk) 19:24, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

You say that I "suggest we should maybe ignore the headline finding the CoW project settled on as the most credible." CoW does not claim that the IBC figure which they cite is the most credible estimate of total deaths. In fact, they explicitly say that it likely underestimates the true figure by a factor of two, and that statistical surveys actually attempt to measure the true death toll. They use IBC because as a lower bound, it is incontestable, not because they believe it to be accurate. It's not merely my opinion that statistical studies of mortality differ fundamentally from tallies of reported deaths. That's the opinion of people who compile these sorts of counts and do surveys. I'm surprised you're not familiar with this very fundamental distinction.

CoW is not independent of IBC. It's simply a reprint of IBC's numbers. Go back to the CoW papers, and look how they get their figures. They don't claim to be conducting original research into the number of deaths in the Iraq War. They are compiling various figures into one report. I think it might be useful to mention them in the section on Iraq Body Count, but to list their numbers gives the false impression that someone went out and did an independent analysis of the number of Iraqis that died in the war, and came to the same exact conclusion as IBC. -Thucydides411 (talk) 22:55, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

I think pretty much everything you say above is incorrect, except the first sentence. I think CoW does say IBC is the most credible estimate of total deaths, or more precisely, of total civilian deaths. If they believed another estimate was more accurate they'd have used that instead. CoW also did not say that IBC "likely understimates the true figure by a factor of two", as you assert. Rather, a spokesperson said it "may" do so, citing IBC itself saying something like that in the past. There's no dichotomy between something being judged the most credible estimate available and speculating that it's too low. I happen to think IBC is currently the best available estimate of total deaths, and I also think it's probably too low. These aren't mutually exclusive propositions, as you imply. I think CoW used IBC in the way they did because they judged that there is no other estimate available that was credible enough for them to actually stand behind as being a more accurate measure of civilian deaths. And I think they were right in that assessment. They can hedge all they want about the uncertainties, as so many of the sources do (including IBC), but if CoW believed there was a more accurate measure, we would know, because they'd have used it. I do not disagree that "statistical studies" differ from "tallies". The sources have a wide variety of differences. That being just one. Rather, I disagree that your particular selected difference is fundamentally so much more important than many other differences that it should be used to divide otherwise neutral introductory references into arbitrary and subjectively-labelled camps. That is just imposing bias about what type of differences matter among many (and just purely coincidentally allows you to place your version of the "best" sources first, and move your version of "not so best" sources to a second tier). I think your favored distinction matters less than some others that could be drawn. There are also many sources cited on this and other related pages that evaluate these studies and judge them on wholly different criteria. In other words, there are other distinctions between the sources that are as or more important than this one. The place to go into all the various methodological differences of the sources, including this one among many others, is in the broader discussion of the sources, which it already does, and from which readers can draw their own conclusions about which methodological differences matter and in what ways and to which degrees.

Yes, CoW is independent of IBC. And no, COW is not "simply a reprint of IBC". Rather, it is analysis and value judgment, an academic judgment made by CoW, independently of IBC, that the IBC numbers are the most reliable numbers available to use for the civilian deaths portion of CoW's broader totals. Yes, they did original research into the number of deaths in the Iraq War, and are not simply "compiling". They're evaluating a range of available material, making their own unique value judgments about their relative reliability and bringing together disparate material into a whole that is different from and broader than anything they used from any one of the underlying sources. For that matter, IBC is also "compiling" and bringing together material that is published already somewhere else. But the final product is not the same as any of those other sources. And i don't think it gives any "false impression", and nor does it give the "same exact conclusion as IBC".Billbowler2 (talk) 06:14, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15881551. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see

The initial table in the lead should be split, so that scientific estimates of excess deaths are listed separated from body counts. This is because scientific estimates and body counts are two wholly different methods that measure two wholly different things. Lumping both methods together gives the false impression that the numbers are equivalent, when they are clearly not. -Darouet (talk) 22:26, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

That sort of arbitrary segregation of sources is really dodgy for a variety of reasons. It necessarily imposes bias and POV. Some of the sources you placed into the "scientific" category are disputed by published sources on the very grounds that they are not scientific. For example, see Mark van der Laan's conclusion that the Lancet survey, "is not science. It is propaganda.", cited in the Criticism section of the Lancet survey page. Imposing your classification requires taking a side in such disputes. What exactly qualifies as a "scientific survey" here, and according to whom? It also requires selecting which classification should be highlighted, which means choosing which features are important or unimportant, and which feature is more important than all others. This all needlessly brings in bias and POV and adds nothing besides. You also don't seem to really understand the sources you're trying to segregate. You seem to want so-called, "scientific estimates of excess deaths" separated from "body counts". But you don't even seem to realize that some of the sources you placed into the first category are not "estimates of excess deaths" themselves. I also think you are simply wrong that these sources "measure wholly different things". To the extent they measure different things, that is already noted in the descriptions in the table. And your particular classification doesn't even handle their differences properly. For example, the IFHS is measuring basically the same thing that the latter IBC number is measuring (violent deaths of civilians and combatants), but you place IFHS into the same category as PLOS which is measuring something very different ("deaths in Iraq as direct or indirect result of the war").

I'd also point out that in the past there were debates about how to present the sources in the table, with arguments over which should come first, and this was ultimately settled by putting the opening sources in the table simply into alphabetical order. Your suggestion has the effect of undoing some long agreed upon neutrality in favor of imposing an inherently biased and subjective framework.Billbowler2 (talk) 01:39, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

As I noted at Talk:Iraq War, your objection essentially boils down to two points:

1) you don't understand the difference between a survey and a body count, and

2) you agree with objections, however spurious, to the Lancet study.

Even if those objections legitimately called into question the estimates of excess violent deaths (they don't), there would still be a difference between surveys that estimate violent deaths and body counts that document confirmed, individual deaths. This distinction is crucial enough that, because of your inability to understand it, you should recuse yourself from editing these articles. -Darouet (talk) 16:49, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

By the way Billbowler2, since you mention Mark van der Laan, here is his own published paper on Iraq War excess deaths [1], which are very similar to the Lancet survey: 293,000-988,000 instead of the Lancet's 426,000-794,000. -Darouet (talk) 19:06, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I addressed your "two points" on the other page. My objections have nothing to do with your two points.

On van der Lann, yours is a laughable reading of that text. That paper is not intended to estimate deaths in Iraq, but rather to reassess approaches to constructing confidence intervals. With regard to the Lancet study it concludes those published confidence intervals were wrong. It does not assess the validity of the Lancet study data and instead takes a kind of agnostic approach. Whether the Lancet study has any validity is not the issue in that paper, though it notes considerable concern over that issue. Where van der Laan has discussed whether that Lancet data has any validity, he's quite clear that it does not and explains why it does not: http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-critique-of-lancet-reports-on-iraqi.html

And he's also quite emphatic that the Lancet study "is not science.":http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jewell/LancetNov061.pdfBillbowler2 (talk) 19:44, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't think their results or all the deaths they describe are laughable. It's interesting to me that you want to support your point with blog posts, but just blow off a peer-reviewed journal article from the same author who, using different statistical methods, takes the Lancet data to make more or less identical estimates. -Darouet (talk) 20:08, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Also, not that I should really care about blog posts, but the "propaganda, not science" statement follows a long "musing" about how incredulous the author is that so many people would be dying. Great. In a published journal article, he has to report the same numbers as in the Lancet exactly. His incredulity in a blog post isn't worth anything. -Darouet (talk) 20:13, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I thought we weren't allowed to disagree with experts?Billbowler2 (talk) 20:57, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

A good principle, if it would help you any. The fact that you also don't understand the difference between peer-reviewed journals and blogs, in addition to not understanding the difference between body counts and surveys, is another reason why you are not in a position to contribute constructively on this subject. -Darouet (talk) 22:45, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

As

Darouet says, "the difference between estimating deaths and counting bodies is not such a complicated one".

- "Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count)" - IFHS in New England Journal of Medicne,

- "the estimate of coalition casualties from http://www.iraqbodycount.net is a third to a tenth the estimate reported in this survey" - Lancet 2004 survey

- "The best known is the Iraq Body Count, which estimated that, up to September 26, 2006, between 43 491 and 48 283 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion." - Lancet 2006 survey

Etc, etc, etc, etc. It is apparently more "complicated" than you imagine.Billbowler2 (talk) 17:56, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

You can cite news reports being sloppy with the words "estimate," but a number of editors here and at Talk:Iraq War have cited journal articles discussing the difference between statistical estimates of the war's death toll and body counts, which are lower bounds, not estimates of the total. The distinction is simple: a body count tallies all known incidents, and unless every single event in which someone in Iraq died because of the war made it into English-language media accounts or was documented by the Iraqi Health Ministry, there will be missing events. Authors of statistical surveys, and the Iraq Health Ministry source cited by the AP in the wire describing its tally, think that the undercount due to missed events is significant. On the other hand, statistical surveys attempt to arrive at the total figure by extrapolating from random samples of the population, just like is done in political polling. They don't measure lower bounds: they produce an estimate of the total figure. Body counts and statistical surveys measure different things. This isn't in dispute by anyone, as far as I can tell, with the exception of two editors here, User:Billbowler2 and User:Marytheo45. Citing one or two journalists who in passing refer to a body count as an "estimate" is not evidence against this scientific distinction. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:06, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

This is a huge article which seems to have most of it's content and sources dating from 2008 or earlier. It needs some serious cleanup. 86.26.236.107 (talk) 15:57, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

The Undercounting section has a Template:POV tag for "neutrality" from December 2010. I don't feel comfortable removing it (who knows what esoteric rules prevail here) but it did seem neutral, perhaps not well-structured or well-written but the details themselves seemed neutral. I don't see why it has this tag. --CáliKewlKid (talk) 18:37, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

PLOS Medicine Survey[2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.60.161.158 (talk) 15:50, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

I have noticed some discrepancies with the total American deaths. Not sure how to change "Coalition deaths by country" and totals. source: http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pregnantembryo (talk • contribs) 11:06, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

I found some interesting things on this webpage: http://www.cjr.org/feature/enemies_and_civilians.php Here's a Nancy Youssef quote:"I wanted to keep following it, but I’ve gone back, oh, maybe four or five times since, and they will not release numbers on their records of Iraqis killed by coalition forces. And no one else has ever reported that number. There’ve been reports of civilians killed, but never that breakdown. Well, [the official at the health ministry] hinted at [why]. He said, “I’m not allowed to release them. I got in trouble, it caused a lot of problems, it went all the way up to the health ministry. You know, the top levels of the government went crazy and were upset about these numbers being released.” --Omgtotallyradical (talk) 13:28, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

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Why is the paragraph with the "data reported by BPW/USA" placed in the Rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment category? It has nothing to do with rape or sexual harassment! It's just statistics about the part of casualties women make up!--Adûnâi (talk) 06:42, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

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Regarding this edit summary, here's how the BBC article currently used as a source in our article begins:

"A recent survey in Iraq found that between 800,000 to a million Iraqi children have lost one or both of their parents.

"According to aid workers this figure is a conservative estimate of the many thousands growing up in the shadow of violence.

"Twelve-year-old Saif lost both his parents in a bomb attack - in which he was also injured - in the province of Diyala in 2005."

The article continues,

"No-one knows the exact number of Iraqi children who, like Saif, have been orphaned by Iraq's unrelenting violence."

And the article also says,

"But with bombs and assassinations still a daily occurrence, the number of orphans is continually growing."

The idea that the BBC doesn't link the issue of Iraqi orphans to the war is specious. -Thucydides411 (talk) 20:56, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

What exactly does this tell us about casualties in the Iraq War? The BBC article itself says that the number of orphans due to violence is unknown.

talk

) 21:30, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

If this was your only concern, why did you mass-revert my entire edit, including the removal garbage sources and total gibberish?

talk

) 21:30, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

@

Snooganssnoogans and Thucydides411: The project censored report on the under-reporting of Iraqi casualties remains removed. Why is this removed? Their report is directly concerned with the issue at hand: casualties of the Iraq War. -Darouet (talk

) 21:44, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Because it's not a RS. If no reliable news outlets or academics cover "Project Censored", why should Wikipedia? If there are reliable news outlets that have covered Project Censored, then text should be added that reflects the language of those sources.

talk

) 21:55, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

The project has historically been housed at either

WP:RSN. -Darouet (talk

) 22:09, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

I didn't restore the "Project Censored" material because Snooganssnoogans disputes its reliability. -Thucydides411 (talk) 22:34, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, please open a discussion on RSN.

talk

) 23:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

If you're concerned with a source, it's your responsibility to post. -Darouet (talk) 01:22, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

And...It's your responsibility to edit war? Several editors have asked you for a well-formed RS, not synth. "Nope" is not a source. SPECIFICO talk 01:29, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

You removed several paragraphs of sourced material with the edit summary, "failed verification." That's simply dishonest. If some individual sentence isn't verifiable, then that's fine, but you deleted material sourced to the BBC, and then tried to cover it up by pulling out a random policy-sounding phrase. -Thucydides411 (talk) 01:44, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Also, if you read the scientific literature on casualty estimates, refugees are an important part of these studies for several reasons. One reason is that higher casualties convince civilians to flee their homes. Another reason is that estimating the number of refugees may be necessary for calculating the number of casualties, or for gauging the accuracy of a casualty estimate. -Darouet (talk) 21:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

That's OR. If credible sources (reported in RS) use refugees to estimate casualties, then those estimates and the methodologies they use should be added.

talk

) 21:55, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

It's not original research only because some guy on the internet isn't aware of it :p I've provided some example text below that's directly relevant. -Darouet (talk) 22:03, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Darouet, your

WP:V. SPECIFICO talk

00:00, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

I cited an expert below, though I'm not surprised you were unable to read / understand the text immediately above and below your response. "Amateur efforts" might describe your bullshit rationale for sanitizing a bloodbath in Iraq, not the research of professionals upon whom we rely. This isn't a neocon blogpost, it's an encyclopedia. -Darouet (talk) 01:29, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Here's a good discussion of one of the reasons that the creation of refugees is pertinent to casualty estimates. This derives from PLOS Medicine (Hagopian et al., October 2013, V. 10, Iss. 10, e1001533):

We estimate about half a million excess deaths occurred in Iraq following the US-led invasion and occupation (March 2003–2011)... Five previous studies of mortality in Iraq were conducted over the course of the war using household surveys. Roberts et al. [31] estimated 12.3 deaths per 1,000 PY (for the period 2003–2004). That finding was reasonably similar to the rate obtained by the study by Burnham et al. [30] conducted 2 y later (2003–2006), which reported 13.2 deaths per 1,000 PY. The IFHS [32] conducted during a similar period (2003–2006) reported a lower crude death rate (5.31 per 1,000 PY), although this survey failed to collect primary data from 115 high-violence clusters (of 1,086), and instead imputed missing data for these clusters from Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) figures. The Iraq Living Conditions Survey [28] conducted in the spring of 2004 attempted to count war-related deaths for the period March 20, 2003–May 30, 2004 (estimated at between 18,000 and 29,000) and war related chronic illnesses (200,000), but did not report an all-cause death rate. At the high end of estimates, an Opinion Research Business poll [29] in 2007 estimated a violent (not all-cause) mortality rate of 10.3 per 1,000 PY for all but three governorates (Kerbela, Al-Anbar, and Erbil). As an alternative to conducting household surveys, the Iraq Body Count used media and other accounts to simply tally civilian war fatalities, arriving at a total of about 116,475 (or about 0.4 deaths per 1,000 PY as of February 2013). We provide comparisons of some of these rates in Figures 3 and 6. We have three hypotheses for the low crude death rates we found in comparison to three previous retrospective mortality surveys: sampling differences, recall bias, and other non-sampling errors, and/or reporting problems related to migration. Our study used different sampling methods than Roberts et al. [31], Burnham et al. [30], and IFHS. Not only did we sample at least twice the number of clusters as Roberts et al. and Burnham et al.—albeit with the same sample size—we also selected the sample using a more sophisticated randomization approach. Our methods may have avoided biases that served to overrepresent deaths in the other two studies. In contrast to IFHS, we skipped only one cluster for security reasons, and did not substitute Iraq Body Count data, which we know underrepresent death rates. The long recall period required of participants in this study likely contributed to underreporting of deaths, and in the setting of a country with increasing sectarian divisions, some people may have been unwilling to report deaths, as well. The war has also caused wide-scale redistribution of Iraq’s population, both internally and externally; we know we missed the families that migrated out of the country, and likely missed a representative proportion of internally displaced people as well. We know the earlier census data did not capture these movements, and our sample was selected using those data. It is highly likely that households experiencing more violence were more likely to migrate, thus serving to reduce our death rates using the retrospective mortality survey method.

I hope that's helpful. -Darouet (talk) 22:02, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

The PLOS Medicine study makes a strong argument for the relation between refugees and casualty figures. The BBC article makes a direct connection between the violence of the war and the enormous number of Iraqi orphans. But beyond that, war casualties and the refugee/orphan problems are intrinsically related. The number of refugees is often given in conjunction with the number of deaths, for example, because they're related outcomes of the war's violence. -Thucydides411 (talk) 22:33, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

No, that's OR and also bad social science. Violence is one of a multitude of factors that impacts refugee rates, and we need RS to touch on the relationship specifically. The BBC source explicitly says the precise relationship between violence and orphans is unknown.

talk

) 23:16, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

The "precise" relationship may be unknown, but the BBC article says several times, in no uncertain terms, that the war spawned the problem of orphans that it discusses. Talking about the "precise" relationship is moving the goalposts. -Thucydides411 (talk) 01:40, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

No, it doesn't say that the violence spawned the problem of orphans that it discusses. Your and Darouet's views are frankly incomprehensible. Why on Earth can't you be arsed to find RS that explicitly connect the two?

talk

) 09:09, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

The RS that I cited at the top of this section explicitly links the two. Scroll up and read. I made it easy for you by picking out a number of sentences that make the explicit connection. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:36, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

That study is a source for text along the lines of "According to Hagopian et al., other estimates may underestimate the casualties of the Iraq War because they do not accurately capture migration". It does not substantiate a relationship between the number of refugees and the casualty rate in general or in the case of Iraq. The refugee rate is on its own irrelevant. The text as written in the Wikipedia article should leave readers wondering "why is this here" at the very least, because we don't substantiate a relationship between refugees and the topic of the article. I'd also like to note that the recent study that I added chides Hagopian et al for profound methodological errors and sloppiness.

talk

) 23:16, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

That is not what they wrote. They wrote that they have underestimated casualties because migration inherently reduces casualty estimates for a variety of reasons. -Darouet (talk) 01:30, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, and what does that have to do with a random-ass section listing refugees? The only thing that text is a source for is the limitations of the authors' estimate and the estimates of other studies.

talk

) 09:09, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

@

The state of this article is shocking, and it's not hard to see why when the editors patrolling it don't understand social science and don't understand reliable sourcing and OR. I encourage you to see outside help.

talk

) 09:09, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Snoogans, why have you removed US casualties, and post 2006 Iraqi casualties, from the lead? And why have you replaced the variety of estimates of Iraqi casualties from 2003-2006 with the mean estimate from the Lancet 2006, and a body count tally, without even distinguishing between these? You either did not read or blatantly misread the Hagopian paper text above, and are not demonstrating that you understand what these different surveys and reports convey. -Darouet (talk) 14:21, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

The gall of someone who brags about having patrolled this atrociously bad Wikipedia page for years calling me out for not understanding this topic or misreading the sources! The text I removed was shoddily written, arbitrary, and on occasion sourced to garbage. This article is an embarrassment to Wikipedia and it's way overdue that someone starts the process of cleaning it up. You have no clue what the Hagopian article says or what its implications for Wiki policy are (no, it's not a carte blanche to set up weird OR sections about refugees).

talk

) 14:27, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Snoogans, I'm happy for you or anyone to improve the wording of information in the lede, but you are not improving wording, you are for the most part simply removing information, without providing any rationale here. What is the basis of your decision to keep certain numbers in the lead, or remove others? Why have you removed US casualties from the lead? Why have you removed the distinction between body counts and epidemiological surveys - a distinction made by literally every academic paper on this topic?

And can you explain how your interpretation of Hagopian, "According to Hagopian et al., other estimates may underestimate the casualties of the Iraq War because they do not accurately capture migration...",

is supported by the Hagopian et al., text

"We have three hypotheses for the low crude death rates we found in comparison to three previous retrospective mortality surveys: sampling differences, recall bias, and other non-sampling errors, and/or reporting problems related to migration..."

They are explaining why their estimate of mortality, made later and following longterm displacement and migration, is lower than previous epidemiological surveys. -Darouet (talk) 14:54, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Darouet, I wouldn't patronize Snooganssnoogans; he's one of our best and sharpest editors. And given that Snooganssnoogans has already conceded your point, writing "Yes, and what does that have to do with a random-ass section listing refugees? The only thing that text is a source for is the limitations of the authors' estimate and the estimates of other studies," why don't we move on? You could start by answering Snooganssnoogans's question!TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 15:26, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, so nice to hear! This goes into my real endorsement list.

talk

) 16:22, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

And by redacting all the disgusting personal disparagement that's smeared about this thread. SPECIFICO talk 15:52, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

No, no, this doesn't matter to me. I'm unfortunately prone to be a bit nasty to editors in talks, as well.

talk

) 16:22, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Well Snoogans I nevertheless apologize for getting aggravated. Some of the changes you've made are certainly positive. Others are misleading and uninformed by the most important sources used in this article. I will write a longer review of available sources to help move discussion forward. -Darouet (talk) 17:49, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

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We need to remove and/or trim most of the block quotes in the article. There is also a duplication of text, such as multiple sources saying essentially the same thing (e.g. different sources saying that US government estimates X at time Y). We also need to summarize numbers for the conflict as a whole. Unfortunately, a lot of the article and text is about outdated numbers based on contemporary reports (e.g. "In May 2007, X estimated Y casualties for type Z", "In November 2007, X estimated Y casualties for type Z").

Can someone help me get rid of the tables? They duplicate information and reduce the readability of the page.

talk

) 17:02, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree that there is a lot of outdated and superseded material - specifically, item like a 2008 TED talk, a long quote from a 2006 Los Angeles Times article, a long quote from Juan Cole in 2006, a long quote from The Australian in 2007, etc. Neutrality^talk 01:21, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree that the article is a jumble right now. There's a lot of random and redundant material. The article could use a fundamental reorganization and consolidation - keeping the various points of contention (discussed above) in mind, of course. -Thucydides411 (talk) 01:25, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

• 1: Remove the tables or get someone who is good at making tables to incorporate the information in a clearer way. Currently, the tables make the article largely unreadable. I mean, tables are meant to simplify text, yet the tables are smack-full of mostly duplicated text.

• 2: Start the article with the section "Total Iraqi Casualties" (that's what most readers are here for)

• 3: Strongly look at whether sections can't be incorporated as sub-sections under "Total Iraqi Casualties", especially these sections: "Additional statistics for the Iraq War", "Iraqi invasion casualties", "Iraqi civilian casualties", "Iraqi refugees crisis", "Iraqi insurgent casualties", "Contractor casualties" and "Health outcomes".

• 4: List the years that each subsection survey / estimate of casualties cover in the section "Total Iraqi Casualties" (e.g. the 2006 Lancet study covers the period 2003-2006).

• 5: Add recent comprehensive overviews from academic sources on various types of casualties, so that we can begin to remove outdated and partial information which has no long-term encyclopaedic value and reduces the readability of the article.
  talk
  ) 01:30, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I made a number of changes recently. Firstly, I restored an older version of the lede, which was much more informative. This version of the lede incorrectly declares that the "official" range of civilian casualty estimates is 110,000 to 460,000. The ORB study and the 2nd Lancet study both have higher estimates than that, yet they're somehow demoted and listed as "other" studies (presumably less reliable) in the lede. This is not a consensus view among researchers, who were divided on the subject of the 2nd Lancet study. It has received both criticism and support.

In the section on the 2nd Lancet study, I made the discussion more rounded. In the previous version, two paragraphs of that section were devoted to the views of one person, Michael Spagat. That's undue weight. His views are still noted in the current version, but the focus is on the range of views, rather than one particular criticism. In that vein, I also included responses from US and UK government officials, which were a notable aspect of the story surrounding 2006 Lancet study. I included Bush's widely included remarks, as well as the opinion of the scientific advisor to the UK Ministry of Defence.

In short, the previous version seemed to go out of its way to bash the 2006 Lancet study, separating it from the "official" range of estimates in the lede (with no sourcing to justify that decision), spending two paragraphs on criticism from one researcher, referring to its "alleged methodology," and excising most mentions of support for the study's methodology. The 2006 Lancet study has been criticized, but it's also considered one of the highest-quality studies on the subject. There were serious problems with other studies as well (the Iraq Family Health Survey did not even survey the highest-violence areas of Iraq, for example, and Iraq Body Count is widely considered a gross undercount of civilian casualties), but somehow, in the previous version of this article, the 2006 Lancet study is singled out for inordinate bashing. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:00, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

This is an attempt to reignite a discussion from last fall, and I have zero interest in going through all the points again. The 2006 Lancet Study is not credible per all experts on this. One of the authors of the 2006 Lancet study literally did a separate study years later that downgraded the casualty figures (the lede does mention those updated figures).

talk

) 18:13, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

"The 2006 Lancet Study is not credible per all experts on this." That's simply not true. You've cited one researcher who criticizes the 2006 Lancet study, and then decided to declare that that researcher represents all experts. They don't. The 2006 Lancet study cited in almost every paper on the subject of post-invasion mortality in Iraq. The Hagopian et al. paper you're referencing (which supposedly "downgraded the casualty figures") found overall figures which are statistically consistent with those of the 2006 Lancet study, and Hagopian et al. discuss biases that could cause the estimated rate of casualties to decrease over time (e.g., recall bias and family disruption, both of which can lead to larger and larger undercounting as time goes on). You've found one criticism of the 2006 Lancet methodology (its choice of clusters near main roads), and then personally decided that that criticism completely refutes the study, and means it must be "rubbish." You're not accurately representing the state of the field. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:30, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

The gall of saying I've only cited one researcher when you earlier today literally deleted the Journal of Peace Research's jury (comprised of heavyweights in quantitative research on political violence) statement that Spagat's study "convincingly" showed that the Lancet study "significantly overestimated" the casualties. And those are not the only critics of the study. I don't have time for this. It's a complete waste of time.

talk

) 18:49, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

In your preferred version, Spagat's criticisms make up about half of the section on the 2006 Lancet study. That's undue weight for one critic. His article won a prize - that's great for Spagat. The Lancet study got about 300 citations and is cited in almost every study on the subject. The fact that someone gave a prize to a particular critic isn't due in a short description of the Lancet study. Spagat's criticism should be mentioned, but it shouldn't be half the section on the 2006 Lancet study. The 2006 Lancet study is not described as "junk" in the scientific literature. As Hagopian et al. (2013) points out, all studies on Iraqi mortality have received significant criticism. Spagat criticizes the sampling technique in the 2006 Lancet survey. Hagopian criticizes the Iraq Family Health Survey for not sampling the highest-violence areas in Iraq. Nearly everyone considers Iraq Body Count to be a gross undercount (counting techniques are generally considered inferior to survey techniques). The way you're presenting it, however, the 2006 Lancet study - one of the few quality studies on the subject - is complete "junk" and not "credible." That's your personal conclusion, based on the work of one critic, ignoring works like Hagopian et al. (2013) and Tapp et al. (2008) ("Iraq War mortality estimates: a systematic review"). -Thucydides411 (talk) 19:18, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

(1) "His article won a prize - that's great for Spagat." Three of the foremost scholars of quant research on political violence say that the Lancet study significantly overestimates Iraq War casualties and praise Spagat's article, and the foremost journal on political violence (Journal of Peace Research) awards the Spagat critique as "article of the year". It's just embarrassing to say that it's

talk

) 19:50, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

1) The Lancet has a much higher impact factor than the Journal of Peace Research. In fact, the Lancet has the third highest impact factor of any medical journal in the world. You're arbitrarily deciding who the "foremost scholars" are, and then saying that their opinions should overrule the rest of the field. It is undue to spend half the section on one particular criticism, and then to note that some prize was given to that criticism.

2) It's absurd to compare the 2006 Lancet study to Wakefield's autism study. The 2006 Lancet study is still cited in almost every paper on Iraqi mortality, and not as an object of criticism, but as an example of an important study on the subject.

3) All the studies on Iraqi mortality are "highly disputed." Iraq Body Count is almost universally considered a gross undercount in the literature. Nobody takes the AP figure you're giving as the lower end of the "credible" range, 110,000, seriously. The Iraq Family Health Survey completely skipped 10% of the clusters in its survey, precisely because they were to dangerous to access. All the studies have methodological flaws that have been criticized. Nevertheless, the 2006 Lancet survey is one of the few large-scale surveys on the subject, and followed a methodology that was considered the gold standard at the time.

4) You keep saying that Hagopian et al. (2013) (the "new assessment" you mention) somehow discredits the 2006 Lancet study. Have you even read the Hagopian et al. (2013) paper? It doesn't discredit the 2006 Lancet survey. It actually criticizes the Iraq Family Health Survey most heavily, and the number it finds is much higher than IFHS or Iraq Body Count. Studies aren't simply trash or gold. They all have weaknesses and strengths, and later studies try to improve on them. Hagopian et al. (2013) follows an updated methodology and finds a somewhat smaller, but not wildly different, number.

5) The 2006 Lancet survey is no more outdated than the AP figure of 110,000 that you want to call "credible," which is actually widely viewed as non-credible by researchers. There have not been many surveys of Iraqi mortality during the conflict. I think the criticism from Spagat should be mentioned, but that it shouldn't take up half the section on the 2006 Lancet survey. I also don't think you should insert your own personal judgment on what's credible and not credible into the lede. Your personal judgment is that the 110,000 figure is "credible," but that's not the judgment of the papers I've read on the subject, which draw a distinction between body counts and scientific surveys of mortality. What most of the literature emphasizes is that there's significant uncertainty in the number of civilian casualties. You're just arbitrarily lopping off the higher end of estimates, and keeping in estimates on the lower end that are demonstrably false (e.g., 110,000). -Thucydides411 (talk) 20:19, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

I changed the language in the lede to say "credible" rather than "official", and "highly disputed" in front of the 2006 Lancet Study. A red account managed to sneak in a bad edit a few months back.

talk

) 18:13, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Okay, now you've made yourself the arbiter of what's "credible," and what's not. Tell me then, how is 110,000 credible? -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Snooganssnoogans's latest revert calls the 2006 Lancet study "debunked non-credible rubbish." That's absurd. You can't do your own research, read one paper that criticizes the Lancet study, and the proceed to call it "debunked non-credible rubbish." The 2006 Lancet study is widely cited in the field, and is considered one of the best studies of mortality in post-invasion Iraq. -Thucydides411 (talk

) 18:06, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

You have no idea what you're talking about.

talk

) 18:13, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

That's not a valid response to my comment. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:24, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

It's not helpful to ignore the stable version that was reached after a lot of nasty nonsense was resolved here last fall. And I'd also ask everyone to review our edit warring and civility policies and also to steer clear of anything that might foster the appearance of

Maybe we can figure out a way of addressing each issue one by one, and pull in outside support to help mediate if that's necessary. I don't agree that the versions Snoogans is advocating for is the "stable" or WP:RIGHTVERSION however, and am not going to agree that it should be implemented as any status quo. -Darouet (talk) 21:10, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree that we should address each issue one-by-one. Dispute resolution might be helpful. Looking at the above talk, I don't see where these issues were "resolved" last fall. I see the conversation abruptly ending, with no agreement between the various conflicting editors. Editor exhaustion, perhaps, but not resolution. It should also be noted that so far, three editors have objected to

Snooganssnoogans' reverts. I seriously suggest dispute resolution as a mechanism to resolve these arguments, and avoid edit warring. -Thucydides411 (talk

) 21:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Darouet, this is not about proving "your" version is better. The previous version was not "Snoogan's" -- it was the result of discussion and compromises and it stood more or less intact for many months. The first thing we know about edit wars is not to be concerned with whether you like the current version. The reason to restore the old version is that it was stable, not that it belonged to anybody. It's an arbitrary way to return the article to stability that represents the last known consensus, even if that should ultimately change. Maybe you could restore it to show we're all on board here. SPECIFICO talk 22:53, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Actually the article was stable before Snoogans' edits last Autumn: there was edit warring then, and edit warring now. I'm interested in an editorial process that results in article improvement, which will involve a review of sources, a discussion of information to be placed in the article, and presumably some compromise. I'm not interested in some effort to get your WP:RIGHTVERSION put back in place without any thought towards a real engagement with the substance of this dispute. -Darouet (talk) 22:59, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Keep your aspersions in the closet. I am not the one disrupting the current article. I haven't edited it since the consensus version was reached months ago. SPECIFICO talk 23:34, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

You state that consensus was reached months ago. How do you demonstrate that consensus was achieved? How many editors were involved in that dispute, and who agreed with Snoogan's version, and who with mine? How many are involved now, and how many agree with Snoogan's version, and with many with mine? -Darouet (talk) 23:37, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

There is an actual content dispute here, related to an actual, physical phenomenon on earth: casualties of the Iraq War. That might include the millions of people who were displaced, and the hundreds of thousands to millions who were injured (physically or psychologically), or who died as a result of the conflict. There are a whole number of epidemiological studies that were done attempting to assess mortality and casualty rates. There are organizations that try to tally reports of deaths in the news. There are countless articles and books written on other forms of trauma.

If you want to engage in article improvement by engaging with those sources and trying to write a strong article, I will support that 100%. I will invest the time to collaboratively develop a strong article that we all agree well represents the material available on this subject. But repeatedly asking for the WP:RIGHTVERSION to be restored — a version that made a train-wreck of scholarship on this topic and was and remains contested — does not amount to article improvement or dispute resolution. -Darouet (talk) 23:44, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

@SPECIFICO: I don't see any aspersions above. Let's stay on topic. I think dispute resolution would be helpful for working through the content dispute here. There has been no obvious consensus since last fall, as the talk page above makes clear. I think if we went through the sources in some structured matter, with mediation, we could come to a consensus. -Thucydides411 (talk) 23:49, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Is something stopping you from filing Dispute Resolution? It beats a 2 vs. 1 edit war that wastes Snoog's time when he's been so productive on other articles. SPECIFICO talk 00:30, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I think an edit war wastes everyone's time - Snoogans and the three editors (not two) whom they've reverted. Dispute Resolution is a voluntary process, so I'd like to know if everyone here would be willing to participate. If so, then great. -Thucydides411 (talk) 01:06, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Spare us the drama! You put in a DR request and the process determines everything including participation. No more BS on the talk page. SPECIFICO talk 01:27, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Please remember

WP:CIVIL. Thanks, -Thucydides411 (talk

) 03:45, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for this. This is indisputable and per WP policy establishes what our article text must reflect. This should allow us to move on to other article improvements. SPECIFICO talk 13:17, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

The accusations of edit warring are misplaced, as a look at the number of reverts made by each user makes clear. But that's not the important point here. As I've said, I'm willing to have a mediated discussion about the lede and the Lancet sections.

I looked over the citations you added, and some are indeed criticisms of the 2006 Lancet survey, while characterizing others as criticisms would be inaccurate. I kept those which I thought were clearly critical in the article. It is, however, important not to give undue weight to any one particular critic. The previous version did, I feel, do this with Michael Spagat. That version also raised issues that do not have to do with the reliability of the 2006 Lancet survey (like the investigation centering on the of endangering the pollsters by sending them into a dangerous war zone). Those issues are discussed in the main page on the survey.

If you look through the papers citing Burnham et al. (2006), including review papers on the subject, it is not true that they generally view it as discredited. There is severe criticism from some researchers, who are noted in this Wiki article, but there are also many papers that discuss the work much more positively. -Thucydides411 (talk) 01:11, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

(i) If you have academic publications to share, add them. So far, your entire body of work on this article has been to remove academic publications and bizarrely also disturb the strenuous work to fix the uncontroversial garble that characterizes every section of the article (by indiscriminately reverting uncontroversial edits). For someone who has been involved in this article for years without doing anything to fix the severe problems in the article, to disturb the hard work of others is stunning. (ii) If one critic publishes across a large number of high-quality outlets on a given topic, we add the relevant publications. You fundamentally misunderstand how science works if it's about the author, rather than the publications. On Wikipedia, academic publications are the most reliable sources. (iii) You removed more than a dozen academic publications which were not authored by Michael Spagat. Complete and utter bad faith. This is not the first time that you have falsely suggested that the criticism is all Spagat. (iv) The cited ethical breaches concern jeopardizing the respondents of the survey. You can't even be bothered to read the text that you indiscriminately revert?

talk

) 01:45, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

I've had the time now to go more carefully through Marker et al. (2008), which is one of the ones you seem to be saying discredits Burnham et al. (2006). That's an extremely inaccurate characterization of the paper, to say the least. The paper discusses difficulties in conducting a survey of mortality in Iraq, and makes some recommendations for future surveys, but it explicitly says that

"We do not attempt to produce an alternative estimate; rather the goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their approach so that potential users are able to judge its accuracy."

Marker also writes that

"Burnham et al. attempt to estimate the number of excess Iraqi war dead throughout the country using fairly standard survey methodology, for which they are to be commended."

There isn't a claim in Marker et al. (2008) that Burnham et al. (2006) is discredited. In fact, Marker et al. criticize the IFHS and IBC methodologies more heavily. Previously, I left Marker et al. in as one of the studies that "disputed" the numbers given by Burnham et al., but I now see that that was wrong. Marker et al. would still be valuable to cite, but not as a paper that "disputes" Burnham et al.

Have you checked to make sure that all the other papers you're saying "discredit" Burnham et al. actually do so? In the case of Marker et al., that was clearly incorrect. -Thucydides411 (talk) 02:04, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

This is not the first bold-faced lie you've made in this talk. I did not say that this study or all studies that were cited "discredited" Burnham et al. The study that you bring up is a correct source for the text that it's sourced for: "A number of peer-reviewed studies criticized the Lancet study on the basis of its methodology and exaggerated casualty numbers." The study provides critiques of the Burnham study.

talk

) 02:13, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Please abide by

WP:NPA. Above

, you said that you added sources to substantiate your claims about the Burnham et al. (2006) study, and that, "A number of authorities substantiate language that the Lancet study is disputed and even discredited." I'm asking you to strike your accusations of bad faith.

"The study provides critiques of the Burnham study." The Marker et al. (2008) paper discusses both weaknesses and strengths of the Burnham et al. (2006) study. It both praises the study, and says that it followed standard survey methodology, and discusses shortcomings, which it notes are difficult to avoid when operating in a war zone. One of the strengths that it discusses, relative to the Iraq Family Health Survey and Iraq Body Count, is that the Burnham et al. study has more representative sampling. IBC is reliant on media reports (which do not document all deaths in Iraq and which are skewed towards the places where international media is more active, like Baghdad), and IFHS did not survey the most violent areas of the country. Marker et al. (2008) can be used as a source for the fact that there was criticism of Burnham et al. (2006), since it mentions that criticism, but not for the idea that it's discredited, because Marker et al. actually compares Burnham et al. favorably to other studies in many respects.

Another example of a study you've included in the list that "criticized the Lancet study on the basis of its methodology and exaggerated casualty numbers" is Rosenblum et al. (2009). Yet that paper does not criticize the Lancet study. It is, in fact, a rather theoretical paper laying out an improved method for estimating confidence intervals for surveys that use cluster sampling. Here's a typical passage, from the abstract:

"We present a simple approach for constructing confidence intervals for the population mean based on tail bounds for the sample mean that are correct for all sample sizes. Bernstein's inequality provides one such tail bound. The resulting confidence intervals have guaranteed coverage probability under much weaker assumptions than are required for standard methods."

Here's how the paper has to do with Burnham et al. (2006):

"As a concrete example, we construct confidence intervals using our methods for the number of violent deaths between March 2003 and July 2006 in Iraq, based on data from the study “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: A cross sectional cluster sample survey,” by Burnham et al. (2006)."

I agree that you've found a number of interesting papers that discuss the Burnham et al. (2006) study, but I don't think they support the language you use or conclusion you draw: that Burnham et al. (2006) is discredited or not "credible."

I agree with you that there are many problems with this Wiki page, as written right now. It needs substantial reorganization, because it's clearly accreted material over the years in a semi-random fashion. A lot of information is doubled, or spread across several sections, or not directly relevant. I would be willing to work with you on those issues. However, I don't agree with the thrust of what you're arguing here: that Burnham et al. (2006) is not credible and must be labeled as non-credible by Wikipedia. I don't think that's an accurate summary of the literature, or even of the sources you've provided. They discuss strengths and weaknesses of all the major studies, and describe the significant difficulties in coming up with any reliable estimates. They don't generally describe IBC as more credible than the Burnham et al. (2006) study, and in fact, the Marker et al. (2008) paper you linked does just the opposite. -Thucydides411 (talk) 03:44, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

"A number of authorities substantiate language that the Lancet study is disputed and even discredited" =/= The Marker et al study substantiated language the Lancet study was discredited. Is your reading comprehension seriously this deficient?

talk

) 23:13, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

The Lancet "study" has been deprecated and does not represent any part of mainstream best belief on the subject. It's fringe POV to insert this in a manner that grossly skews the reader's impression of the range of plausible estimates. SPECIFICO talk 22:36, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

That's not what I get from reading the literature. For example, Marker et al. (2008), which I discussed above, does not describe Burnham et al. (2006) as deprecated or fringe. Neither does Hagopian et al. (2013). Care to elaborate on why you consider the 2006 Lancet study deprecated or fringe? There are criticisms of Burnham et al. (2006), and they are discussed in this Wiki article. There are also severe criticisms of Iraq Body Count (for being an undercount) and the Iraq Family Health Survey (for not being a representative survey, having left out high-violence regions), which get far less emphasis in this Wiki article. I tend towards thinking that the article at present gives undue space to criticisms of the 2006 Lancet survey. -Thucydides411 (talk) 22:58, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Nobody said that Marker et al. (2008) showed that the Lancet study was depreciated or fringe. That's not what it was cited for. That's not what anyone on the talk page said. Are you seriously expecting me to come back again and again to the talk page when you lie repeatedly and play obtuse? You started this talk with lies. I then added more than a dozen high-quality RS that should have put your glaring bad faith concerns to rest. Instead of dealing with that, you go on to misrepresent the RS that were added and lie about the discussions that have taken place on the talk page.

talk

) 23:06, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Thuc, my advice is for you to go ahead and file the ballyhooed DR and take this to a resolution there. Fingerpointing and equivocation about the mainstream rejection of the Lancet is not going to result in stable text for the article. SPECIFICO talk 23:13, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

I find it very hard to engage here productively when all I get in return are accusations of bad faith, accusations of dishonesty, insinuations that I can't read, etc. I've gone through two of the sources above, and shown how they were inaccurately characterized. I've shown how Marker et al. (2008) actually compares the 2006 Lancet study favorably to IBC and IFHS. I've pointed out that the 2006 Lancet survey is still regularly cited, and not to attack it, but as a valuable contribution to the state of knowledge about wartime mortality in Iraq (e.g., by Hagopian et al. 2013).

@SPECIFICO: I'm a bit at a loss to understand why you're accusing me of "fingerpointing." I've been engaging with the sources here. If anything, I would hope you'd take issue with the accusations of bad faith made directly above your post. -Thucydides411 (talk) 23:26, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Just file a DR and let the chips fall where they may. You're edit-warring and Snoog doesn't like it. So? File your DR. SPECIFICO talk 23:47, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Again, I don't understand why you keep pointing the finger at me. Snooganssnoogans has single-handedly reverted four different editors now. DR is not about letting chips fall where they may. It's about mediated discussion to go through the issues one-by-one, and arrive at some sort of consensus. -Thucydides411 (talk) 19:29, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Snooggie is a gentleman and a scholar. As the Americans say "put up or shut up" (no offense) with the DR thing. Let the mediation fall where it may. SPECIFICO talk 19:45, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Looking carefully through the references that are currently used to justify the statement, "A number of peer-reviewed studies criticized the Lancet study on the basis of its methodology and exaggerated casualty numbers", and which are, presumably, also the basis for Snoogans deciding that the 2006 Lancet study is not "credible," it looks like only papers by two authors could be said to characterize the 2006 Lancet study in this way. Those two authors are Michael Spagat and Beth Osborne Daponte. Of the 11 articles Snoogans cited, 5 are by Spagat, another is a prize Spagat won, and one is by Daponte. That leaves four articles, one of which is a different survey (IFHS), rather than a review of the 2006 Lancet survey, one is a theoretical article on estimating confidence intervals in clustered surveys, one is a review of various surveys (Marker et al. 2008, which I discussed above, and which discusses both strengths and weaknesses of the 2006 Lancet survey, and comes off as more critical of IBC and IFHS than of the 2006 Lancet survey), and one is an in-depth review of the 2006 Lancet survey (Laaksonen (2008), "Retrospective two-stage cluster sampling for mortality in Iraq") that presents a mixed view, both praising the survey in some ways and pointing out some weaknesses.

The idea that the 2006 Lancet survey is not "credible" or is discredited then rests really on two sources - Spagat and Daponte - and is not shared by other sources, including Hagopian et al. (2013), Marker et al. (2008) and Laaksonen (2008). Saying that the 2006 Lancet study is not "credible" is a very strong claim, and the sources do not support it. It is correct to say that the 2006 Lancet study is controversial and has been both attacked and defended in the peer-reviewed literature, and it is correct to describe the criticisms (for example, Spagat's "main-street bias"). However, the text of this Wiki article, with the recent changes, goes far beyond that, and declares which studies are credible, and which are not. -Thucydides411 (talk) 06:33, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

The sources that you talk about literally criticize aspects of the Lancet study, and the language of "criticized" in the Wikipedia article is accurate. The sources used to substantiate the language of "disputed" are 164, 179-181, 191-192, 199, 201-203. Note that at no point is it said in Wiki voice that the Lancet study is "not credible", merely that it's "disputed". Sources 164, 191-192, 197, 199, and 201-202 go as far as to say the Lancet Study is just straight-up wrong or discredited, yet this is never said in Wiki-voice. Most of these sources are not authored by Spagat despite your obsession with this. Furthermore, it's bizarre to dismiss all research involving Spagat, given that these are individual academic publications (i.e. the language has undergone thorough peer-review). Not the authors matter (that's not how science works), but there are seven co-authors on these studies, and Spagat isn't lead author on the award-winning JPR study.

talk

) 09:52, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

If you look at the list of sources you're saying call the 2006 Lancet study "straight-up wrong or discredited," you'll see that they're by Spagat or Daponte, which is exactly what I said above. I don't see how you could claim I'm dismissing Spagat, given that the version of the article I support gives significant room to his critiques. But you've given undue weight to one critic, and you've decided, on the basis of that one critic, that the 2006 Lancet study is not credible. Note that at no point is it said in Wiki voice that the Lancet study is "not credible", merely that it's "disputed". Yet the cut-down lede you wrote defines "credible" estimates, and then refers to "other" estimates (the obvious implication being that they're not credible), among which it lists the 2006 Lancet survey. That is equivalent to a declaration, in Wikipedia's authoritative voice, that the 2006 Lancet survey is not credible. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:39, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

"If you look at the list of sources you're saying call the 2006 Lancet study "straight-up wrong or discredited," you'll see that they're by Spagat or Daponte" - OK, I'm done with this discussion. There's a limit to the amount of bold-faced lies and bad faith arguments I can take. There's no point trying to seriously discuss this with you.

talk

) 17:50, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

I've asked you before to

avoid personal attacks. If you have anything substantive to say about the sources, I'm willing to discuss them - just as I have above. The changes you've made to the article are very controversial, and it's incumbent upon you to explain them, without resorting to calling people who disagree with you liars or accusing them of not being able to read. -Thucydides411 (talk

) 18:20, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Thuc, you ask everybody who rejects your edits to AGF, etc. etc. You keep saying you're going to DR, which is the obvious way to resolve this disagreement. I can't imagine your POV would prevail there, but rather than keeping up the bludgeon here, the normal channel would be DR or an RfC. Given the low editor-count on this article, I suggest you carry through with your repeated calls for DR. It's a time-honored reality check. SPECIFICO talk 19:15, 15 February 2018 (UTC)