On 31/07/2011 15:26, Chris Keating wrote:
On 30/07/2011 16:18, Chris Keating wrote: > I'm very pleased to say that our long-planned collaboration with the > National Maritime Museum is now happening. > > They have released a lot of info from their internal research on Royal > Navy warships on their website: > http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/research-areas-and-projects/warship-histories/ > (it says CC-BY-NC but the NC bit is a typo and will soon be corrected) I know that "released" is now apparently synonymous with "published" (in American English at least). RS needs published secondary sources, as we understand. Just to be clear, we expect this data to be acceptable as a source directly citable in articles?Yes. "Released" refers to the NMM's intellectual property. "Published" refers to the act of making it available to the public, as they have done on their website.
It is also a secondary source, in the sense that it's information gathered by NMM staff (i.e. people who know what they are doing) from the original source documentation.
It is clearly an _unusual_ secondary source in that we're much more used to working with books, website articles, etc than we are with 2,500-page PDF documents in this format, but previous discussions (on this list and on-wiki) have indicated that people think it is a good source for the purposes of WP:RS
Obviously the community as a whole could in theory decide that it is not a reliable source, which would scupper the whole project and leave me looking very silly - but given the reaction so far from the community has been very positive.
I didn't think the reliability was a worry. There are nuances in "published": I recall a Wikisource discussion on hosting this material, which on the issue of publication seemed to go against doing that. Thanks for the clarification.
Charles