On 4/30/07, Sam Blacketer <sam.blacketer(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On 4/30/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
2) 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