Sarah wrote:
I don't mean that we should only use sources that
are *easily*
available, because that would be very limiting, but they must be
reasonably available in the English-speaking world. I can't be precise
about what I mean by "reasonable," but broadly speaking the man in the
street should not have to move mountains, or pay a great deal of
money, to obtain the material if he's determined to find it, and the
source must be a published, citable one, not something circulated
within a limited group of people.
Even there one must be flexible. If one of our objectives is to free
this kind of information we are being pro-active in using it as
references. If it is not reasonably available to the man on the street
we should be looking for ways to make it available rather than
suppressing references to it.
Even when we refer to "something circulated within a limited group of
people" we can't be too rigid. I have, for example, a large bound
typescript record of the papers presented at an international conference
held in Utrecht in 1950. I suspect that its circulation was limited to
conference attendees. I don't know if any of the papers were published
elsewhere, or how many other copies survive. It's still recent enough
for most of the papers to be protected by copyright, but old enough for
some of them to be orphans. Does it advance human knowledge to suppress
the material? Isn't it better to find ways to make it available?
The other issue
is that of Original Research, and where "collation and
organization" becomes OR.
The issues of availability of sources and OR merge when a Wikipedian
explores a database that isn't widely available, as Zero was
suggesting, adds his own interpretation of his research on that
database to an article, and then calls the database his "source," even
though there isn't a single document in that database that actually
supports what he's saying. In other words, he has no citable,
published source. That's a violation of NOR and V; it's a misuse of
the primary source (the database); and it's arguably not reasonable to
expect the man in the street to find a way to duplicate the research.
But otherwise, yes, I agree it's best to keep the two issues -- OR and
availability of source material -- separate.
If you really believe they are separate issues then don't try to run
them beck together. I like to look at databases as some kind of
metastructure of sources. There is nothing "primary" to such databases
at all. Whether Zero is correct to call them his source depends on how
strictly you want to define that word.
Ec