That's a great example of a non sequitur. It's usefulness won't be established by choosing one of the most common names as a straw man. Once you've established that a person lived at a particular address his continuing appearance in the phone books for a 15 year period is evidence that he may have lived there for that 15 years. Whether any information source will be useful depends on what we are trying to do with it. Why dismiss it prematurely?
Ec
Steve Bennett wrote:
The surname "Ng" is one of the most common in Melbourne, spanning 47 pages of the 2006 phone book...
Steve
On 5/29/06, Joe Anderson computerjoe.mailinglist@googlemail.com wrote:
I would be interested to see how a phonebook would be used as a source.
On 5/29/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 5/26/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
When we choose to publish facts on private people versus public people, for example, is a judgment call about how "notable" they are---not anything to do with verifiability, as many private/non-notable people have information about them verifiable from e.g. phone books.
Actually, I'd dispute that a phone book is a reliable source. It's pretty easy to get fake information into a phone book. Also I'd say there usually isn't enough information in a phone book to uniquely identify a person anyway.
I'd go so far as to say phone books are completely excludable as Wikipedia sources, regardless of whether the information is on a public or private person, famous or average, "notable" or "non-notable".
While I acknowledge that most phone book information has very limited value, it is easy to imagine situations where that would not be the case.