[WikiEN-l] Original Research

[Tony Sidaway]

On 3/27/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> To meet verifiability requirements the email would probably have to be
> signed with a verified S/MIME certificate issued by a well-known
> certification authority such as VeriSign (NOT Verisign's 'community
> certificates' program or whatever the hell its called, that is not even
> verified) otherwise it would be laughably easy to fake

I agree here, but I think you're getting application of the
requirement of verifiability mixed up.  Verifiability in the context
of Wikipedia applies to facts in the article.  It means that a given
fact must be independently verifiable.  Verifiability of references is
another matter.  We can include references that are not particularly
verifiable (for instance, the accounts of Alexander's exploits,
portrayed by the sympathetic tame historians of his entourage and
others, are discussed at length in the article on Alexander the Great.
 They're certainly not particularly reliable, and not remotely
verifiable, so we depend very much on the consensus of modern
historians who have studied the material in depth.

The trouble with a personal communication is that it's personal.  If
you phone someone at a college and he tells you something about the
college history, ask him if the college records verify the fact, and
if so, have they been archived at the Bodleian or the British Library
or somewhere.  At least then you can cite the college records and
someone can pop down to the library and have a look.  Even centuries
after the original records go out of print, get lost, are destroyed by
fire or whatever.   If someone hasn't taken the trouble to write a
history of the institution in question, then this would be one way to
use word-of-mouth to provide a concrete, though still not reliable,
reference.  By which I mean that you could pop up to the British
Library and ask to see the work, but it might still not be a reliable
source.

Enough for you to say something like "the school's history (citation)
claims that Guido Fawkes later executed for his involvement in the
Gunpowder Plot,  attended the school for two terms but was expelled
for playing with matches."

So if possible, use a personal communication not as a reference, but a
source of information to produce something that may be of use.

You'd then cite the original reference, and tag it something like
"reference in need of verification."  The reference, or the tag, can
be removed when the necessary check is performed.  Hopefully before
some latterday Guido gets twitchy with the matches in the library.