On 30/07/2011 16:18, Chris Keating wrote:
> I'm very pleased to say that our long-planned
collaboration with the
> National Maritime Museum is now happening.
>
> They have released a lot of info from their internal
research on Royal
> Navy warships on their website:
>
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/research-areas-and-projects/warship-histories/
> (it says CC-BY-NC but the NC bit is a typo and will
soon be corrected)
I know that "released" is now apparently synonymous with
"published" (in
American English at least). RS needs published secondary
sources, as we
understand. Just to be clear, we expect this data to be
acceptable as a
source directly citable in articles?
Yes. "Released" refers to the NMM's intellectual property.
"Published" refers to the act of making it available to the
public, as they have done on their website.
It is also a secondary source, in the sense that it's
information gathered by NMM staff (i.e. people who know what
they are doing) from the original source documentation.
It is clearly an _unusual_ secondary source in that we're
much more used to working with books, website articles, etc
than we are with 2,500-page PDF documents in this format, but
previous discussions (on this list and on-wiki) have indicated
that people think it is a good source for the purposes of
WP:RS
Obviously the community as a whole could in theory decide
that it is not a reliable source, which would scupper the
whole project and leave me looking very silly - but given the
reaction so far from the community has been very positive.