On 12/21/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
From: jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com
On 12/21/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
On 12/21/06, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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...
Indeed, that would end up being OR - quite simple OR, but OR all
the
same. It's annoying when you know something that apparently
no-one
has published, but there isn't much we can do about it. (Unless you happen to be an expert on the subject and can publish it yourself)
If that is OR then WP:NOR is a broken rule.
A citation is essentially a very simple piece of research that can easily be reproduced by anyone without specialist knowledge.
I don't see what that can't be broadened just a bit. For example, let's suppose a library has an online catalog... let's say an
online
catalog that's accessible to anyone. (Two that come to mind are the Cornell University Library, and the 16,000-volume public library of Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands... well actually it seems to be offline but it was available a few years ago).
You can't prove a negative, but you can certainly say "his book is not in the Cornell University Library" or whatever, and cite a link to the search or a description of how to do the search. This
doesn't
seem very different to me from a citation.
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.
Jay.
Jay, I don't agree with everything Daniel and Steve have written about this, but I also find your reply quite problematic. Surely the library catalogue is the most reliable and verifiable source for what is in the library.
It's the most reliable source we have for what is in the library at that time. However, we, as searchers of that catalog, are neither a reliable or verifiable source for what is in the catalog.
Concerning negative information, consider "John Smith's latest murder novel Killers of Wiki did not reveal the identity of the murderer." Can't I cite the novel for that? Anyone can get the book and verify the information, so it is reliable and verifiable. I don't think it is necessary to wait until some third party makes this observation about the book. (Obviously it would be a different matter if the claim needed some actual thinking or analysis beyond mere looking.)
Well, to begin with, that claim is not trivial; one would actually need to read the entire book to be sure that the murderer's identity is not revealed, and be sure one had read it correctly, and not drifted off one night while reading page 344, and missed the critical paragraph. Moreover, if that particular fact is notable or interesting, it is most likely to have already been stated in a book review of some sort. And, of course, John Smith's rabid fan X is likely to show up and say "Are you kidding? The identity is of course indirectly yet deliberately revealed via these means". I suppose you could get away with it if the claim is entirely non-controversial (if there actually is such a thing as a non-controversial claim on Wikipedia), but it would be better practice not to.
It seems to me that citing a library catalogue as a source for saying that a book is not there is fine. I can't think of why one would want to do that in a Wikipedia article but I don't think it is illegal.
As I've stated elsewhere, books are published, the contents of a specific edition don't change once published, and quoting from a page is a simple task that any non-expert can verify. Catalogs are ephemeral, their contents change all the time, they inevitably contian bad records and are missing records, searching them is non-trivial, and the best we can do is verify that Zero0000's specific search on a specific date did not return any results.
Jay.