Talk:William G. Farrow

Is there a sound basis for adopting the highly melodramatic depiction of the three being tied to crosses for execution? Other sources, e.g. findagrave.com (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=9529372), describe a much more probable scene "executed in Shanghai’s Public Cemetery No. 1, in accordance with Japanese military tradition: they were forced to their knees, blindfolded with their arms tied behind them, then shot simultaneously by three soldiers armed with rifles in the center of their foreheads." Sirlanz 14:53, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Apparently, findagrave.com is not a reliable source. I believed it was, but then sometime later I discovered that it could be freely edited just like Wikipedia. Since the only requirement for including a statement in an article is the presence of a reliable source to support it, the statement that the three were tied to crosses could legitimately be included in this article. The statement is supported by the following source: http://www.scnow.com/news/local/article_5271a8d1-7d34-5677-aa52-1a4f54bdc05d.html.

You might want to take on board the following: (1) the statement is highly melodramatic, has a strong Christian racist undercurrent and very improbable; (2) who are the putative eye-witnesses propounded by the claim?; (3) the late Dwight Dana (by snow's own account "heavily involved at St. Matthews Episcopal") of Snow.com provided no source information; (4) the same account cannot be found on any other web source; (5) snow.com is a very small local regional publication serving a region of South Carolina, with low readership (217 thousandth global ranking, over 48 thousandth in the States) which leads today's edition, for example, adoringly, and with no alternative voices, with a staunch religious right talk at Florence Baptist Church, falsely characterising an unabashed evangelical Christian call to arms as a talk on "religious freedom" (the report fails to mention anything at all in the speech about, for example, tolerance of people of other or no faiths); and in another article features a nativity scene exhibition at a local Catholic church. Wikepedians ought to be cautious and circumspect before placing material on its pages. Including this exotic statement is throwing caution to the wind. sirlanz 03:03, 6 December 2015 (UTC) [reply ]