[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[Matt Brown]

On 6/7/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> IMO, those would only be legitimate sources to cite if the subject
> itself is obscure and known only to specialists.  If it's a well-known
> subject, it would make more sense to use mainstream sources on the
> subject.  If the obscure source is indeed important, it will at least
> have been cited by someone else.  

Agreed.  It's simply that some subjects are obscure enough (or at
least, the scholarly analysis of them is obscure enough) that the
sources would not necessarily be available through most libraries, for
instance.

To pick an example of personal interest, the publications of most
railroad historical societies will not be in many libraries'
collections.  The research and scholarship involved can be first-rate,
however, and quite appropriate to cite in a Wikipedia article. 
Furthermore, any other specialist in the field should be able to check
those references without too much difficulty, even if the material is
not that easily available to the general public.

However, the true point of contention in this, I think, will be how
citable primary sources should be, and to what degree going to primary
sources is original research.  Published primary sources are probably
fairly uncontroversial, but what about unpublished primary sources? 
E.g., to pick a topic of personal interest again, is citing documents
that can be found in the California Railroad Museum's collection of
Southern Pacific Railroad original documents acceptable, or is going
through such a collection original research?  The references are
available to anyone who cares to go there, but they are not published.

-Matt (User:Morven)