Sean Barrett wrote:
Guettarda stated for the record:
In the case of a discrepancy between what you can find for yourself and what the article says - I suppose the place to start is with {{fact}} or something stronger. Obviously, if you have found the marriage certificate, why haven't other people? Or is it that they just aren't famous enough to have a real biographer? I'd say it is problematic. Personally I wouldn't think twice about trusting Sean's veracity - but the truth is, we don't have "trusted editors" and in theory, what stands for Sean should stand for any anon.
Thank you for the complement, but I would never expect anyone to simply take anyone else's word for any source. In this situation, I would post a scanned copy of the certificate and detailed information about where to see the original.
I maintain that mere difficulty of access should not be a criterion in evaluating sources. If a source /can/ be obtained by any editor, be it by Google, by using the public library, by snail-mail, or by traveling by camel to Samarkand, then it is a valid source, IMAO. In contrast, many of us have access to material that cannot be verified by those outside our professions. There is, for example, quite a lot of perfectly innocuous, unclassified, public domain data that only people with .mil e-mail addresses would be able to verify.
By making restricting access in this way the material if effectively classified. It is clearly a low level classification, but classified nevertheless. The key question should be, "Is the material available to anyone?" Can a stranger off the street have anonymous access somewhere? Is a website valid if it is the only source of the material but requires membership for passive access to the material.
Ec