On 4/30/07, Sam Blacketer sam.blacketer@googlemail.com wrote:
On 4/30/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
- Are such lookups in SSDI legitimate sourcing for articles, or are
they original research? I incline towards the latter, since there is a leap between getting a name and making the decision that it is the same person that feels like more of one than we should be making without support from a source.
I would have thought that it is original research. The SSDI is by definition a primary source; the fact that it happens to be fairly easily available does not make it a 'published' source.
FWIW, and as much as I disagree with it, [[WP:OR]] specifically states that using primary sources is perfectly fine. It is the creation of primary sources that is barred. As for what "published" means, I think it means put into a fixed form and distributed to the public. The SSDI qualifies, though I suppose you could argue it's not fixed unless you're using the version distributed by CD.
Put it like this - if someone in there is notable, then their death would have been noticed (from the SSDI at the very least) by some proper secondary source.
The question of whether or not the SSDI creates notability where it otherwise doesn't exist is a completely different one.
But I'd also like to point out that the SSDI is useless without some other published information on the person. A name alone is probably not enough to be confident that we have correctly identified the person in the SSDI.
Anthony