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

[jayjg]

On 12/22/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > From: Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> > Message-ID:
> >       <4cc603b0612212250s7013522en8eb03e740941dcee at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> >
> > On 12/21/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > No, you absolutely cannot do that, for reasons eloquently stated
> > > > elsewhere. The claim that it is not in the Cornell University
> > Library
> > > > is a novel conclusion based on your own original research; this
> > seems
> > > > so trivially obvious to me that it astonishes me that others
> > would
> > > > claim otherwise. You might as well promote a novel claim in
> > physics,
> > > > and point people to the calculations you have made to prove your
> > > > theory. If a reliable source says "the book is not found in the
> > > > Cornell University Library", then quote them. Otherwise, move on.
> > >
> > > What's novel about "It doesn't appear on the such results,
> > therefore
> > > it isn't in the library"? Seems like an obvious conclusion to me...
> > > (might not be 100% reliable, depending on search terms, accuracy of
> > > the library's index, etc, but that doesn't make it novel).
> >
> > You may have made a mistake. Or it may be in the library but not in
> > the catalogue, or vice versa. That you conducted the search yourself
> > makes publication of your results OR. We publish the mistakes of
> > reliable sources, not of Wikipedians. :-)
>
> The fact that mistakes might happen doesn't make it OR.  You have
> to show how looking up a library catalogue is fundamentally
> different from looking up something in a book.  I don't think you
> have done that.  I think that an error in a library catalogue is not
> really a different problem from an error in a book, and an error in
> consulting the library catalogue is no different from an error in
> consulting the book.

Anyone can find the book you have quoted, and look on the page, and
see if it says what you claim it says.  The best footnotes actually
quote the section in question, so the confirmation is easy, and the
book is published, we know the edition and publication date, and the
contents of that specific publication are not going to change.
However, we can't easily reproduce the search you Zero0000 has done on
the library catalogue, and even if we could, there's no guarantee that
the catalogue will have the same contents when *we* search it. On the
contrary, one can guarantee that the contents *will* have changed.

Databases, library catalogues, and similar ephemera are complex beasts
that have little in common with printed works.

Jay.