[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

[Andrew Gray]

On 20/12/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree, that needs to be changed, but I'm not sure what to. We need
> to define what kind of specialist knowledge is ok, and what isn't. For
> example, is being able to speak Latin acceptable specialist knowledge
> to use, basically meaning Latin speakers can translate the primary
> source in the article? (It's definately preferable to cite a
> translation, but if there isn't one, it may or may not be ok for a
> Wikipedian to translate it, we need to decide.)

Mmm. Let's say there is a significant Russian novel - significant but
obscure. No English translation has been made; English scholarship on
it is basically limited to recognising it exists.

But there are plenty of Russian sources. Should enwiki have an article
on this work?

(The answer, of course, is "yes" - for the benefit of English-speaking
students of Russian literature. Our policies should never prohibit us
doing transformative work like telling speakers of one language what a
source in another language says - because if we don't allow that,
we're going to have crazily crippled encyclopedias for smaller
third-world languages...)

> The key point here is that your source for the statement that all the
> papers say the same thing isn't just the papers, it's the database. If
> there is a way to reliable cite the database, rather than just the
> sources it contains (a link to the search results page, perhaps), then
> it might be ok, but just citing the papers definately isn't.

A while back I wrote about a self-publicising vanity author. One of
the details I'd liked to have note was the complete (or near-complete)
absence of his books in public library catalogues, but it's almost
impossible to actually find a way to cite a "negative search" much
less a positive result...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk