Jussi, private archives are not "published" and so they fail WP:RS on that specific note.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 12/25/2008 3:34:13 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, cimonavaro@gmail.com writes:
Andrew Gray wrote:
2008/12/23 Wilhelm Schnotz wilhelm@nixeagle.org:
I hate to pop into this, but have we thought about the question of reader access. By this I mean as it currently is with most of our sources, our readers are able to verify the articles themselves if they wish to. If we start to use sources that only certain people can access, that closes off the ability of the average reader to verify what we write.
We've discussed this before, in a general case, and pretty much dismissed
it.
Limiting ourselves to easily-accessible sources sounds good in practice, but immediately runs into trouble. We simply can't write articles on most of our subjects to a good and reliable standard without relying heavily on access to print books (which people object to because they're offline) or subscription databases (which people object to because they're not accessible to casual users).
(This should be distinguished from, eg, people sourcing things to private archives; in the former case they're accessible by anyone who goes through the right channels, but in the latter they may be literally inaccessible to anyone else...)
This brings to mind an interesting case...
About how to source an un-prejudiced article about the former Finnish president [[Urho Kaleva Kekkonen]]. A vastly controversial figure in Finnish politicians.
The problem of sourcing stands thus:
While there have been researchers of varying credibility writing about Kekkonen (some clearly conspiracy nuts, others with a clear wish to create a national mythos around his persona, with no problems about letting the mythopoiesis be transparent, and some serious seeming researchers), the big festering problem with "Kekkolology" has been the asymmetry of access to primary sources that researchers have had.
The researcher Juhani Suomi long held a near solitary access to Kekkonens private archives, as he was chosen by Kekkonens estate holders to create a "definitive" biography the statesman. This was vociferously criticized by the conspiracy nuts on the other hand, and at least on the surface serious people such as his successor Mauno Koivisto, who wanted in his own retirement years write a wider historiography of the era, in which both of them operated (him still as a Prime Minister in the critical years). The accusations were both about the inequality of access to the primary sources, but also about the fact that Suomi might have been a partisan for the cause of the agrarian centrist party Kekkonen and Suomi were both aligned with, thus creating a "official" party historiography of the man.
This inspires me to check out the talk page of that article, to study how wikipedias editors have solved that knotty problem.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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