On 16/02/2019 12:18, Paulo Santos Perneta wrote:
"/what Wikipedia actually requires: not primary sources like birth certificates, but secondary ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NVH21MEe0 – publicly available sources in which her birthdate is mentioned./" -> This is not exactly true. That would be the kind of document that could be required by someone in OTRS in order to certify her birth date. And birth certificates are issued by official third party, reliable sources, so I don't see how can they be considered a "primary source". Unless you are talking about primary sources in History, but in that case those would often be the best possible sources one can use in a Wikipedia article.
Dear Paulo,
What constitutes a reliable source is a never-ending debate for wikipedians and historians alike. I tried to make that point in the Philip Roth anecdote
(you can find it here, it's in French, but I have added approximate English subtitles : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NVH21MEe0 )
Is the open letter by Roth in the New Yorker a secondary source ? a reliable one ? And is the facebook post of Bliss Broyard a reliable source ? Is it becoming one when it is transcripted in the Salon magazine ? This is a very tricky point and the raging debates about it at the time show just that.
You can consider an "oficial" birthdate certificate a reliable source. I find it questionnable though, as many football players have several birthdates for example. (And to assure this point is not a post-colonialist one, It has been recently revealed that French police were deliberately falsificating immigrants papers to expel them).
But it is certainly not a secondary one. It is not published, so it's useless to being cited in Wikipedia, and even if some sort of public archive of birth certificates would exist, they would still be primary. The process of their production would have not be analysed by a "third party" as you name it.
Finaly, when OTRS require such papers, is not it to prove the identity of someone complaining in order to receive their claim, more than a piece of evidence to be inserted in an article ? If you have a counter-example, I'd be interested to check.
Yours,