" 
 ::::Well how about we just write ""more than a thousand..."" or ""over one thousand...""? This gets the general magnitude of the death count on the table, which is sufficient for a general-purpose encyclopedia IMO, while not pretending a confidence we don't have in a precise count. Anybody who needs to dive deeper into the material to retrieve the precise number for some reason has the refs. Better to be a little vague then take the chance of getting it wrong.   "