On 12/18/06, Sarah <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/18/06, Rich Holton <richholton(a)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)