Geoff Burling wrote:
On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Sean Barrett wrote:
Ray Saintonge stated for the record:
Iif you use the old Soviet records somebody is bound to bring up the "No original research" rule.
Why are old Soviet records "original research" while old US records (NVR, DANFS, &c.) are okay?
Ease of verification?
In theory, many old US records are accessible by the Freedom of Information Act; I believe something similar exists for many national archives.
There's a gold mine of material available before even needing FOI. For example, all US patent applications made since their big fire are available on line. In about 1970 I remember wandering in a section of university stacks where they were storing booklets received at a rapid rate from various US government agencies. There was no way that any library could keep up with maintaining a subject catalogue of this stuff. My favourite was a pamphlet from the US Army, "The Toxic Effect of Burning Chicken Feathers."
Years ago, when this topic was raised on this list, I seem to remember that there was a consensus towards requiring all sources cited or used to be *published*. Not only did that mean that the material received some token degree of review, & did not depend on Wikipedia for dissemination into the larger public discussion (which was one reason for the No Original Research rule), but it also allowed a Wikipedia user to verify the citation for her/himself. Thus an unpublished memo from a national or corporate archive written in 1955 should not be cited; but a letter between two ancient rulers that has been translated & published as part of _The Armana Letters_ (published by John Hopkins Press, & for sale on Amazon) can be cited.
"Years ago" is wonderfully hyperbolic considering that in most jurisdictions the project is not old enough to attend kindergarten. "Published", in most cases, is a solid objective criterion to use as a starting point. There may still be arguments about whether something really was published. Is a doctoral thesis "published" when it is simply put on University library shelves and made available through interlibrary loan?
I am always happily surprised at what I can access through my local public library's Interlibrary Loan services -- often at no cost to me.
Half the problem faced by many of our contributors is in not knowing the extent of available resources, and how to get at them.
Of course, this requirement leads to other questions. What about rare books or ephemera? For example, if one wanted to write articles on Grunge rock in Seattle (home of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarten & other well-known bands), _The Rocket_ is an invaluable & authoritative source to cite. However, that newspaper went out of business years ago, & I wouldn't have a clue where I could find copies of specific -- or any -- issues. (It was a free weekly newspaper that could be found at all of the local record stores in Seattle & Portland.) If there is a library with a run of its issues, I doubt that they would share either the originals or a photocopy thru ILL; but then, coming thru old issues of _The Rocket_ or 16th century incunabula seems to me close to performing original research.
To the extent that it can be found, protecting this ephemeral material is a big problem. Copyright permissions would be a nightmare, but in 95 years the newsprint is likely to be so crumbly as to be unusable. Maybe there's a need to be more agressive about building on-line pdf files of this stuff. There is a strong argument for considering such actions to be fair use. The fourth of the factors to be considered is the effect on the copyright holder's market.
Another question is citing untranslated, non-English sources in a English-language Wikipedia. Obviously, many experts write in languages other than English, & some topics cannot be developed beyond a stub without use of non-English sources; however, when a contributor writes an article & only cites, say, Russian or Georgian-language sources for her/his article, I have to take it on faith that not only are the references reported correstly, but that the works even exist.
And I'm sure that there are other issues one could discuss. However, if we could agree that published sources -- either primary or secondary -- can be cited, but unpublished works can not be, this would solve most of the problem.
It's a good starting point, as long as we don't start imposing qualifications on the published material. "Peer reviewed" is a common one that is mentioned. The problem with that is that it's a subjective judgement; determining whether a publication is peer-reviewed requires a significant exercise of POV.
In theory we could go beyond the "published" criterion, but I would approach that with extreme caution. We've been known to have a few anal editors for whom ANY measure of flexibility sets us on the road to chaos and confusion.
Ec