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

[Ilmari Karonen]

jayjg wrote:
> 
> No, the accurate statement is "This specific online search by Daniel
> P.B. Smith on this specific date did not return any results".

I highly doubt the identity of the person who looked in the catalog is 
relevant.  I suppose it would be technically possible for an online 
catalog to deliberately return different results to different users, but 
  I would not really call any site that did that a "catalog", much less 
a reliable source.

So we're down to "as of this date, no books by this author were listed 
in the official online catalog of this library."  Doesn't sound all that 
ridiculous to me.

(Elsewhere you've complained about the supposed difficulty of repeating 
the search.  You do realize that most, if not all, library catalogues 
allow you to link directly to search results?)


> And, of
> course, there's no guarantee that 1 minute after Daniel P.B. Smith
> does his search, the book will not be acquired, or entered into the
> catalog, or re-indexed properly because it had been improperly entered
> before, or...

If it indeed happens one minute later, what will happen is that Daniel 
P.B. Smith will look foolish -- or would, if the catalog did not show 
when the record was added.

If it happens later, there are two possibilities.  One is that no-one 
will notice, in which case we will continue to cite an old version of 
the source until someone does.  Assuming the original citation included 
the date of access, as our guidelines recommend for all ephemeral 
sources, this is not a problem: we do not pretend out information is 
always up to date.

The other possibility, of course, is that someone (perhaps even Daniel 
P.B. Smith himself) does check the source and finds that it no longer 
matches the claim in the article.  The reasonable thing to do in that 
case is to change the article.  The only problem occurs if the person 
who notices the mismatch fails to assume good faith and, mistakenly, 
accuses Daniel of deliberately lying -- but hopefully, even if no 
objective record of the change remains, other neutral editors will have 
previously verified the source and can confirm that Daniel's claim in 
fact used to match the source.

If not, the outcome is the same as in the one-minute scenario: Daniel 
may suffer a blow to his credibility.  Note that, in any case, the risk 
is _only_ to Daniel's personal reputation, provided that the article is 
corrected as soon as the nmismatch is noticed; if Wikipedia's reputation 
were in any significant way harmed by mistakes that were corrected when 
found, we wouldn't have any reputation left to harm anyway.  (Some may, 
of course, argue that this is in fact the case.)

-- 
Ilmari Karonen