On 3/21/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's a big difference here. Court
proceedings are published, unlike
birth certificates, and are certainly not confidential, like medical
records. These are both published documents. How can the use of
published
documents, to verify that they said what they are
reported to have said,
be
said to be "original research" or, for
that matter, "investigative
journalism"?
Stating a simple fact from a simple primary source is not a problem.
Putting together an entire history of a case from multiple primary
sources is OR. A history is more than just the sum of the events -
which events you choose to include and which you don't, how much
emphasis you put on each one, etc, all change the way the reader will
interpret the facts, that's what makes it OR and an NPOV violation.
Yes, and there were three parts to the section. One said "the case
happened", and was supported by a primary source document. Not, in my
opinion, OR. The second part supplied some details, and was sourced to the
party that filed (and won) the case. AFAIK, the losing party has not
commented on the details of the case, but I may be wrong. There's the
possibility of POV/RS issues here, but not OR. The third part was the
outcome of the case, supported by the court ruling - based on a primary
source, but not, in my opinion, OR.