Talk:Iraq Body Count

I think the article should mention the criticism from Media Lens and the response from the IBC team, but I dont't know enough about the subject to add this myself. As far as I understand, the essence of the ML criticism is that the IBC data is being used in the media and by politicians to provide an upper bound on the number of deaths of Iraqis in Iraq and that IBC aren't doing enough to discredit this use of the data. The main points from ML is that these are civillian deaths only, while presented as total deaths and that there is an inherit bias in the media sources (English speaking only, reports from journalists confined to the "green zone", etc.). Is this about right? 129.241.11.201 06:25, 16 Mar 2006 (EST)

Parking Material with Inadequate Referencing
The following material has been relocated from the article page to the discussion page pending documentation; several of the links are broken or do not support the quoted material and thus are not in accordance with SourceWatch's strict referencing standard. Here is the material that is parked for now, as of January 27, 2010:

However, as Medialens notes: “In reality, IBC is not primarily an Iraq Body Count, it is not even an Iraq Media Body Count, it is an Iraq Western Media Body Count.” - This link does not go to a source that substantiates the quoted statement.

One of the world’s leading professional epidemiologists, anonymously noted in an email to medialens that:“It is easy to calculate the sensitivity of their surveillance system. They would take another list or independent sample, and see the fraction of that sample that appeared in their data base. I have asked them to do this over a year ago, they have not."


 * "There are other databases out there (NCCI being the most complete), they could do a capture-recapture analysis (as lots of experts have been calling for) and see how many people have died but they have not."

- This link needs to be fixed.

This came on the same day when it was announced that the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq has reached 2,500 with the death of a marine. - This source does not substantiate the statistic used.

Parking Material that Is Not Credible
Another organization, "Iraq Coalition Casualty Count," places U.S. deaths at 4,374 and foreign deaths at 218 in Iraq since 2010. Is this figure just for the month of January? It seems unintentionally misleading to compare total US military deaths in the entirety of the war to one month for civilians. But, if the civilian figure is intended to cover the entire war, it's too small to be credible. Lisa Graves 17:56, 28 January 2010 (UTC)