The following argument is not valid. I can think of several titles relevant to the the history of technology which are not in the BL catalogue, and not listed on the C19 Short Title Catalogue which covers a range of copyright libraries. This is particularly true for trade catalogues which are outside outside UK copyright deposit rules and so never recorded.
On 3 Oct 2005 at 21:33, wikien-l-request@Wikipedia.org wrote:
An even easier solution: the holdings of the Library of Congress is accessible from the Internet. I would expect that the same could be said for the British Library, the Biblioteque Nationale (sp?) in Paris, & the equivalents in Germany, Italy, Japan, & Australia. (However, funding for such useful projects always seem to be
lacking.)
Any citation from a source that cannot be found at one of those
sites
is considered invalid; & considering that, by law, a copy of every book printed in the US or the UK ends up at the respective national library, one would have to work hard to find a reliable source not
in
one of those catalogs.[*]
Tony Woolrich Canal Side, Huntworth, Bridgwater, Somerset UK Phone (44) 01278 663020 Email apw@ap-woolrich.co.uk
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005 apw@ap-woolrich.co.uk wrote:
The following argument is not valid. I can think of several titles relevant to the the history of technology which are not in the BL catalogue, and not listed on the C19 Short Title Catalogue which covers a range of copyright libraries. This is particularly true for trade catalogues which are outside outside UK copyright deposit rules and so never recorded.
Then where should one turn to verify that these books exist? Is there the information in an online database? Or even a printed reference work that would be available at a large public or college library?
The whole point of proving a citation is to allow others to either confirm or extend our research. If they can't find a copy of the material cited, then the citation isn't very useful. That's the reason unpublished materials or private conversations aren't permitted sources in Wikipedia.
Unless we can verify that the source exists, then we might as well allow every kook in who cites this certain book that was printed a few years ago, but almost every copy has been destroyed, & the publisher was forced out of business. (Or claims that it was given to him by an angel, a crewman of a UFO, or a talking salamander.)
Geoff
On 10/4/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
Unless we can verify that the source exists, then we might as well allow every kook in who cites this certain book that was printed a few years ago, but almost every copy has been destroyed, & the publisher was forced out of business.
Quite. We should deprecate, or perhaps even eliminate, all reports that depend on obscure primary sources. We're an encyclopedia and if we cannot find a reliable secondary source that we can cite then we may have to accept that we've ventured too far away from the realm of verifiability.