Sarah wrote:
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Sarah wrote
The problem is that material we use as sources must be available to the general public, and it's not clear that we can expect the public to have access to a legal database.
This is rather objectionable, as a type of argument. 'Available' to the 'general public' contains two very negotiable ideas. Few academic sources (in proportion to the total) are easily available to many (in proportion to the 6 billion total) of the world's inhabitants. Making a fuss about this is a sure route to a worse encyclopedia.
Any public library can order material that's in a regular academic library. Similarly, they can order any material that's in a legal database. But they can't "order" the database itself, and it's the database as a whole that Zero wanted to call his "source," or rather his own interpretation of its contents. That's not reasonably checkable by Wikipedia readers, which is why we don't allow OR.
The database or library is an intermediate to the sources. If 20 items in the database are said to support a point it is still the 20 items that provide the verification, and not the database itself.
Ec