Hie DVdm. I was writing what follows while you made your edit. I can't right now, but I will coming to review in detail your example.
Thanks Johnuniq for your advice and input. Concerning the actual statement, I had already thought that after clearing things up with DVdm, I would rephrase it into something in the lines of "He is an iconic and inspirational reference for the generation growing up in the late 1970s, early 1980s." Adding "to some of the generation" should clear your objection about the absence of stats. But that's not the really important issue here. The fact is that it is ethically improper from me and from Wikipedia to declare that the (you call it blog) site is not a reliable source here, but then find that the links and statements in "Inertia Coupling" or "Alexander Abian" are significant enriching contributions to the users of Wikipedia, and the sourced site is reliable there. BTW, in these two and the few other topics the source is mentioned, the statements leading to the source links would qualify as synthesis. It would be highly objectionable from Wikipedia to keep those links unchallenged for the time being, and when someone gets around to rewriting the original material in the specific blog posts, the links will be trashed out. At this point 1) The sentence being vague and inaccurate can be corrected. 2) It seems that if you articulate a sentence validated by some sort of source that is not a direct quote, in most cases some synthesis is involved. 3) There is still the issue of the site being a reliable source. It seems to me that the Wikipedia efforts to keep the wackos with weird theories at bay, is leading editors to substitute verifiability, intelligibility and common sense by arguments of authority. This would set me going into a long winded argument about what is happening to Wikipedia, once lauded as the place "to come as you are," becoming stiff, purely factual and tight in such a way that it carries a lot of knowledge but no understanding. This in turn carries into a discussion about public education, and the work that Carl Sagan is known to the general public for. Cosmos was not about this marble statue said so but instead these are the reasons why we think so. To me the posts in the disputed site I linked to are interesting (but that maybe just my own personal opinion) and Wikipedia users having them available is positive, constructive and enriching for Wikipedia, and that's the reason I linked to them in the first place. Throwing them out, all of them, seems like excluding a whole plethora of good things, the baby with the bath water, because a Wikipedia directive says so, just because it does, not noticing the directives were written to prevent bad things from happening, it would seem to me, not to exclude good things by statute. So the reliable source rules are something I would like to discuss a bit more at length.