On 12/18/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/18/06, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Sarah wrote:
The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to the general public,...
Which I understand to include such things as legal databases. In theory at least, anyone in the general public can do what is necessary to acquire access to such a database. We certainly don't require that sources are immediately available to anyone.
Any member of the public must be able to access the source and also see what the source says. So Zero's search would have to be very straightforward, one that no one could argue with or interpret differently, and it would have to be a search of a database that a member of the public could reasonably be expected to gain access to. And arguably his conclusion, that no legal scholar holds a different opinion (or whatever words he used), would have to be notable and relevant in a way that didn't invoke OR, otherwise it would be like saying no mathematician believes 2 plus 2 equals 5.
The NOR policy is clear that "anyone—without specialist knowledge—who reads the primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia passage agrees with the primary source. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a secondary source."
Sarah
To reiterate, there are two entirely separate issues in this thread: 1) whether you can draw a fair conclusion from the results presented by a database search, for the purposes of encyclopedic referencing and verification. 2) whether members of the general public (whoever they might be) should be able to easily (whatever that means) access any source cited in the encyclopedia for verification purposes.
My take on these questions: 1) No. Databases, in general, change and update their contents regularly; do not necessarily cover everything published in a given field (especially not a field as enormous as law); and cannot be trusted to properly index their holdings (and if something isn't indexed, you aren't finding it). On top of that, as has been pointed out the original poster's search may be incomplete or otherwise faulty. I wouldn't trust myself to do an absolutely comprehensive database search for these purposes, and I'm what passes for a trained professional these days; unless Zero's a fabulous legal researcher of some sort I'm not inclined to take his word for it. It's more than a barrier of having access to the database -- to recreate the search you also have to know *how* to search, which is not simple or easy in most legal databases. For all of these reasons, I wouldn't cite a database search in any context, except perhaps in a very specific type of academic writing that was focussed on research technique -- otherwise, it's like saying "because google said so" (which granted we use to determine lots of things around here, but hopefully not as an actual fact in an article). The search results would be a fine note to put on the talk page and should be taken as such.
2) As others have pointed out, expecting the public at large around the world to have access to all of our sources is pretty silly. There's the language barrier, for one thing; I am sure there are great sources in most all of the world's languages that I'll never be able to read, which shouldn't stop people from citing them in the relevant articles and relevant Wikipedias. There's also the expense of most major reference works and journals, the rarity of certain older and academic materials, the incomprehensiblity of certain academic topics to those who don't know the field (like Charles' math example, where I'm just going to have to take his word for it), etc. This is why libraries exist in the first place: to collect together things that may be hard to come by otherwise.
Now, if you have a CHOICE between an obscure work and a better known and better accessible one, and otherwise they're the same, then by all means cite the better accessible one. Better yet, cite both. Cite the ISO Standard and the easily-available IEEE paper that summarizes it. In other words: sure, I've personally handled a 1728 [[Cyclopaedia]] and can happily tell you that the long subtitle is correct, but it's only because the work is digitized and discussed in other sources like Britannica that I expect most people in the world to ever be able to verify that.
-- phoebe (brassratgirl)