Steve Bennett wrote:

One question I have had: what if the author gives you permission to copy an entire email somewhere, including email address? That seems to me to be pretty verifiable, unless someone accuses you of fabricating the entire thing. The only question is where to put the email - WikiSource?

That would seem to fall vaguely in the same category as a blog entry by the same author; better than having no documentation, but not nearly as good as something peer-reviewed.

-Mark

On 3/27/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:

To meet verifiability requirements the email would probably have to be signed with a verified S/MIME certificate issued by a well-known certification authority such as VeriSign (NOT Verisign's 'community certificates' program or whatever the hell its called, that is not even verified) otherwise it would be laughably easy to fake

I agree here, but I think you're getting application of the requirement of verifiability mixed up. Verifiability in the context of Wikipedia applies to facts in the article. It means that a given fact must be independently verifiable. Verifiability of references is another matter. We can include references that are not particularly verifiable (for instance, the accounts of Alexander's exploits, portrayed by the sympathetic tame historians of his entourage and others, are discussed at length in the article on Alexander the Great. They're certainly not particularly reliable, and not remotely verifiable, so we depend very much on the consensus of modern historians who have studied the material in depth.

The trouble with a personal communication is that it's personal. If you phone someone at a college and he tells you something about the college history, ask him if the college records verify the fact, and if so, have they been archived at the Bodleian or the British Library or somewhere. At least then you can cite the college records and someone can pop down to the library and have a look. Even centuries after the original records go out of print, get lost, are destroyed by fire or whatever. If someone hasn't taken the trouble to write a history of the institution in question, then this would be one way to use word-of-mouth to provide a concrete, though still not reliable, reference. By which I mean that you could pop up to the British Library and ask to see the work, but it might still not be a reliable source.

Enough for you to say something like "the school's history (citation) claims that Guido Fawkes later executed for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, attended the school for two terms but was expelled for playing with matches."

So if possible, use a personal communication not as a reference, but a source of information to produce something that may be of use.

You'd then cite the original reference, and tag it something like "reference in need of verification." The reference, or the tag, can be removed when the necessary check is performed. Hopefully before some latterday Guido gets twitchy with the matches in the library.