[WikiEN-l] The vexed issue of sources

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>
>
> On Sat, 9 Dec 2006, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> The source being used in the article is not the writing on the wall.
>> The source is the few Wikipedians that have seen the writing. While
>> the writing is probably reliable, the few Wikipedians are not.
>
> By this reasoning, a source isn't a book, it's the few Wikipedians  
> who have
> read the book.
>
> How exactly is the writing on the wall different from a book?   
> (Sure, not
> every Wikipedian can go read the writing, but not every Wikipedian  
> has access
> to a particular book either.)

I have access to an _awful_ lot of books through my library's  
interlibrary loan network. Of books that I wanted to get because they  
were relevant to something in Wikipedia that I was working on, I've  
probably been able to get three out of four. Not fantastically  
obscure books, but not exactly Barnes and Noble fodder, either.  
Specific examples (all long out of print): Abram Sachar's "Brandeis  
University: A Host at Last" (his 1995 history of Brandeis); Elsie de  
Wolfe's autobiography, _After All_; de Seversky's "Victory Through  
Air Power" (the 1942 book, not the Disney version!); B. Traven's  
novel, "The Death Ship."

Actually if my library can't get it through the Minuteman network,  
they can get it from the Boston Public Library, the Commonwealth's  
"library of last resort." The Boston Public Library has fourteen  
million volumes which makes it bigger than Yale's and only a tad  
smaller than Harvard's. They've done this for me twice.

I don't know exactly what resources other Wikipedians have, but  
interlibrary loan networks are not unique to my region of the U. S.

I'm not sure how I could get the wall of College Hall, University of  
Pennsylvania sent to me by interlibrary loan.

Reference librarians are very accommodating, but I don't think I  
could ask the Penn reference librarian to go there and take a  
snapshot of it for me. (Although you never know, and I admit that I  
haven't actually tried).