From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com
--- slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/26/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Personal communications are valid to cite. All one needs to do to check is call the guy and
ask the same question.
All our sources have to be published, Daniel, i.e. in the public domain, so a personal communication can't be cited.
That is absurd since not all knowledge has been written. What matters is if you can trust the source and if it is verifiable. The method of communication is not that important.
-- mav
Citing a personal communication is much better than citing nothing at all. I have used an email from a representative of Babson College, for example, on the Babson College Talk page, as a reference for whether or not their giant world globe rotates. (It was built to rotated and once rotated but it doesn't now).
But these aren't _good_ references and do _not_ meet Wikipedia's guidelines, which I believe are longstanding.
The reason why publication is important is that by definition a published source is widely available and easily checked. As I have personally found, it is not always easy to "call the guy and ask the same question."
Among other things, you may not have his contact information. (It would be a serious breach of etiquette and privacy to include that in the reference). And you are basically requiring every reader who wants to verify the information to establish a personal contact with the source. That's just not reasonable.
Finally, the requirement of publication puts a very rough-and-ready filter in place. In order to publish something, the author _usually_ has to convince at least _one_ other person that it is worth publishing... and spending money on. That's not an absolute test of truth, but it is at least a filter. Over the phone, someone can say anything to me that they like. Thus, a personal communication is a poor reference for the same reason that a personal website is a poor reference: anyone can say anything they like, without even the slightest necessity of passing any kind of vetting process. Actually, a phone call is worse: a personal website is, at least, out in the open and subject to inspection.