On 4/14/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
Honestly, the verifiability argument doesn't fly at all with me. If you pick information out of an archive, it's most certainly verifiable, someone else can check it out as well. I realise that that is a hassle, but that doesn't change the fact that it is verfiable.
"Verfiable" of course does not mean "absolutely verfiable" (in which all facts would at some level be), but clearly something on a spectrum from "anyone can see it by clicking a link" to "it's an old book but there are copies of it in at least a few major repositories where a large number of Wikipedians are located." In the last category, it is worth noting that a significant number of Wikipedians are students at universities with extensive library services, including interlibrary loan, and it would not be very hard to verify 90% of all very-old book references. It would be a rare source indeed that somebody in the University of California system or in the Ivy Leagues would not be able to verify within a few days, to speak nothing of all of the other universities in the world with fine and extensive library services.
If something is archival and unpublished though, it generally means that it is in one single archive. That archive may have no interarchival lending options. There may be no interested Wikipedians with access to that archive. There are no doubt a few exceptions, but so rare would they be, and certainly not worth changing a very good policy, one which sits as a chief cornerstone to our epistemological approach, in order to satisfy. All of the proposed benefits (a few birth/death dates? information about obscure and probably non-notable institutions?) seem a paltry thing in comparison with the fact that removing "verfiabiilty" would create an endless mess of difficulty with POV-pushers.
How about, as a compromise, if someone would like to include a source
from an archive, they are required to submit a copy of the document, so everyone can see it for themselves.
If they can host it semi-permanently somewhere (a scan at Commons, for example), then it is, so far as I can reason, "published" and verfiability is no longer an issue (NOR might still be, but that's a different can of worms). If they cannot put it somewhere where editors of the future can see it then no, it is still unpublished and unverifiable except to the small group of editors who happened to see it at one point in time.
The fact is, it's really hard to define research in this context. How
is looking up someones birth certificate in an archive worse than looking it up on the internet?Technically, they're both research. Honestly, I'd prefer it if the info got directly from the source. Same thing with things such as trial transcripts, if we quote someone from a trial, I'd prefer it if we knew excactly, word by word, what they were saying instead of trusting a third party.
NOR would not prohibit people quoting from trial transcripts or other primary source material, so long as it was not being used in a way which is "unique." I could quote all I wanted from the Oppenheimer trial but if I quoted out of context in order to prove he was a space alien, that would be NOR. If I did it to substantiate and add color to the standard interpretation (or any of the possible notable POVs included in the article), that would be just fine, of course.
The above only holds true if the primary source is accessible and verifiable though. If I say that a quote in a secondary source is wrong but can't provide any proof of it, then other editors are going to have to take me at my word. That's a bad policy -- there are far too many people who either purposefully or unintentionally mis-read or mis-quote to support their arguments to allow this. Even I sometimes make transcription mistakes, and I do archival research for a living. Perhaps it is not assuming "good faith", but I don't want a policy which lets people assert things that I cannot check. The entire system of Wikipedia relies upon multiple eyes being able to see something, and what you're suggesting is that we just jetison that in the case of primary sources (which are already difficulty enough for people to interpret).
As long as you don't do analysis, and pick your information straight
from the source, document it and be sure other people can see it too, what's the big deal? How is that any different from looking up information on the internet or in a magazine from half a century ago? Especially so if we make them provide a copy of the document.
If other people "can see it too" and we can "provide a (long term) copy of the document" then verifiability is not a problem at all. There is no such thing as using a primary source without "doing analysis", as any historian will tell you. All reading involves interpretation. All quoting (and all narrative) involves being selective. The current policies allow for plenty of flexibility in regards to editing and researching; they require that at the end, all interpretations are anchored in a secondary source, and that all sources used should be verifiable.
I've yet to see a compelling reason why that shouldn't remain the case; it has worked pretty well so far, and yet even now we have constant problems of people inserting dubious and incorrect information into articles. At least at the moment we have a strong argument for consistently removing information which cannot be verified -- you would remove this check? What benefit could possibly outweigh such a deficit?
FF