From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
On 12/21/06, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
A while back I wrote about a self-publicising vanity author. One of the details I'd liked to have note was the complete (or near- complete) absence of his books in public library catalogues, but it's almost impossible to actually find a way to cite a "negative search" much less a positive result...
Indeed, that would end up being OR - quite simple OR, but OR all the same. It's annoying when you know something that apparently no-one has published, but there isn't much we can do about it. (Unless you happen to be an expert on the subject and can publish it yourself)
If that is OR then WP:NOR is a broken rule.
A citation is essentially a very simple piece of research that can easily be reproduced by anyone without specialist knowledge.
I don't see what that can't be broadened just a bit. For example, let's suppose a library has an online catalog... let's say an online catalog that's accessible to anyone. (Two that come to mind are the Cornell University Library, and the 16,000-volume public library of Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands... well actually it seems to be offline but it was available a few years ago).
You can't prove a negative, but you can certainly say "his book is not in the Cornell University Library" or whatever, and cite a link to the search or a description of how to do the search. This doesn't seem very different to me from a citation.