Hello Alexandre,
I believe we would easily agree that an ID card presented by someone is by default and in general immensely more reliable than any newspaper or random biographer or historian stating whatever without mentioning what their source is. That's why I don't see the point of asking for secondary sources when the ID is available (either publicly or by OTRS).
As for public vs. private, easy example: Our local archives provide access to all existing/known birth certificates in my region (or christening certificates, when those are not available) from 1538 till 1940s: https://abm.madeira.gov.pt/pt/inicio/ . Why would anyone prefer some so called "secondary source" over them? Unless some very good case is made that the official document is falsified, which would rather be the very odd exception.
OTRS can be used to verify and certify any kind of private information, not only identity of people. In Wikipedia we generally and usually send people to OTRS when they want to prove such kind of thing as their birthdate, without having to expose publicly their IDs. As far as I know, that's how it works.
My understanding is that the question with primary sources in Wikipedia emanates from the confusion with primary "autobiographic" sources, which are often considered the ones with worst quality, and the historical primary sources (meaning the first original document that everybody quotes afterwards), which are generally the best and more reliable (except in the cases where some debate has been made about the reliability of some specific primary source, in which cases one can simply add the debate to the primary source information). My understanding and experience is that in historical terms, the quality of a source generally degrades with the number of times it is quoted and recycled, so that secondary sources would be generally worst, and tertiary sources, as paper encyclopedias and newspapers, would generally be the worst possible ones.
I know this "primary source" stuff still is an ongoing debate in some corners of the Wikipedias, but, frankly, I've never seen anything that would question the point that an historical primary source is in general, and in the absence of any reliable study countering it, the best possible one we can quote.
Best, Paulo
Alexandre Hocquet alexandre.hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr escreveu no dia sábado, 16/02/2019 à(s) 14:32:
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,
Alexandre Hocquet
Université de Lorraine & Archives Henri Poincaré Alexandre.Hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet