Comments:Evidence of natural gas deposit found off Gaza Coast

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Every now and then there are ridiculous news concerning this particular geographical area. News like "Sharks in the Sinai water were sent by Israel", and "Fisherman from Gaza found a gas field". This does not deserve mention until any further reports are made from more credible news agencies. There is in fact a gas field offshore Gaza that was discovered in 1999 ("Gaza Marine Field") and was given to the control of the Palestinian Authority as part of the peace talks between Israel (under Ehud Barak) and the PLO that year. After the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2005 (and the inner-Palestinian civil conflict that followed) any plans to further develop that field have ceased. In any case, the amount of gas that was found in the field will be enough for local use only (not for exports).

Is it your contention, then, that Salem Salama didn not say the things that the lede says he said? Do you believe that the source articles are not credible sources of information about what he said?

If Mr. Salama did actually say that, than he should be embarrassed. Offshore natural gas fields cannot be discovered by fisherman, they are discovered by multi-million-dollar exploration companies that survey fields for years and conduct test-drilling and even then there is a 50-50 chance they are wrong. If this wiki-page is meant just to inform that this article had appeared somewhere, than it should stay. But if this is presented as actual facts, than there is still much left to be desired.

This wiki page is a published news article, reporting that Salem Salama said these things to the press on Monday and Tuesday, and that Ziad Al-Zaza said something to the press downplaying it. A key element of English Wikinews policy is that we try very hard to report only objective fact. Claims and opinions can be reported, while only stating objective facts, by attributing the claims and opinions to who said them. As the reviewer of this article, I was satisfied that Salama and Al-Zaza did say these things. A news article is a snapshot in time; per our policy, it can only be substantively changed for the first 24 hours after publication (which in this case had already passed before you posted your first comment). If we discover we got something wrong, which occasionally happens, and it's past the 24-hour mark (or is so severe that the article can't reasonably be "fixed"), we attach a {{correction}} notice to it. (It would be somewhat tedious to work out how often such errors are known to have occurred in a given year, because they're primarily sorted by when they were corrected rather than when they were published. An easily observed overall statistic, fwiw: out of about 20 thousand articles, we have correction notices on 79 of them.)