Resolution will be based on the Wikipedia articles for the hospital and the explosion.
Resolves "Yes" if Wikipedia clearly states that the explosion was caused by Israel, "No" if it clearly states that it was not caused by Israel, and "Wikipedia will be Ambiguous" if it does not clearly present one claim or the other as true.
Will resolve early if Wikipedia consistently takes a yes or no stance before market close. Resolution ignores Wikipedia vandalism, as defined by my judgement.
I will not trade in this market.
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Thanks for participating, everyone! I considered making a sequel market with a later end-date, but decided I'd rather not run it myself.
I hope other people do make more markets on this subject though! Right now the biggest markets on the site just resolve to the creator's determination, and I feel like having more markets about external neutral sources is good for controversial questions like this.
Do you guys think Wikipedia will stay ambiguous in perpetuity, if they haven't taken a stance after this long? I feel like it's unlikely too much new evidence comes to light, at this point.
@Joshua I'd bet it will remain ambiguous. Hard to imagine we get dramatically better information about the event than we have now.
Plus, most positions the article can take fall under "ambiguous":
Presents Israel causing it as unlikely
Presents Israel causing it as equally likely as other explanations
Presents Israel causing it as more likely than other explanations
The unambiguous options are actually only the extreme ends of a larger continuum.
It'd be more interesting to include more in-between options in the market. Unfortunately that may be impossible to resolve in a fair way if the final text ends up in a gray area between two options.
Still interesting as it was, though! At one point I thought there was a large chance this market would resolve "no". Thanks for the good question!
@chrisjbillington and since reverted! Though the text is now emphasising the growing consensus a bit more.
@BenjaminShindel all of these questions that say things like "definitively" and "unambiguously" need to be resolved reasonably if their creators value their reputation as good resolvers, which will mean tolerating some nonzero amount of hedging or qualification. I don't think @Joshua will throw this market over a technicality, and have been betting accordingly.
Yeah not you, but I figure no matter how this resolves someone wil be upset hahaha. Hopefully more consensus is reached over the next month!
In the meantime I recommend savvy bettors keep an eye on the talk page, they've got some relevant discussion ongoing there.
@Joshua That discussion led me to check out the article on the Arabic Wikipedia, which, well, compare and contrast (Google chrome translation):
The opening summary on the Explosion Wikipedia page is now much closer to a "No" statement, imo:
"There is strong evidence that the explosion was caused by the failed launch of a Palestinian rocket laden with fuel, with the majority[13][14][15] of independent experts and analysts stating that the damage is more consistent with a fireball from a rocket than an Israeli bomb.[16][17][18][19]"
edit: which has since been removed. The edits continue.
@day2f This is really now a market on whether Wikipedia has a strong leftist/anti-Israel bias. We are much more sure about what happened than about what Wikipedia will say.