On 3/13/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I really don't see anything wrong with me
footnoting a) as "was born
in Such-and-Such<ref>Personal correspondence with the Wikimedia
Foundation, June 17th, reference ABC1234567</ref>.
I disagree. There are lots of problems with this. 1) You're not the
Wikimedia Foundation; 2) It's not a published source which can be
easily accessed; and 3) it's not a reliable source even if it's true,
as the person no doubt does not remember his own birth.
Yes, we could ask
them to issue a rather dull press release, or write a blog post, or
(in one case I recall) update the details on their myspace page. But
no reasonable academic or reporter objects to incorporating
corrections of trivial, non-contentious details from those who know
about the article; why should we?
Because we want to be better? If the detail is so trivial as to not
matter if it's correct or not, why include it in the first place?
Alternatively, if the truth might actually matter, then we should make
sure to get it right.