[WikiEN-l] Are phone books reliable sources?

[Ray Saintonge]

That's a great example of a non sequitur.  It's usefulness won't be 
established by choosing one of the most common names as a straw man.  
Once you've established that a person lived at a particular address his 
continuing appearance in the phone books for a 15 year period is 
evidence that he may have lived there for that 15 years.  Whether any 
information source will be useful depends on what we are trying to do 
with it.  Why dismiss it prematurely?

Ec

Steve Bennett wrote:

>The surname "Ng" is one of the most common in Melbourne, spanning 47
>pages of the 2006 phone book...
>
>Steve
>
>On 5/29/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>I would be interested to see how a phonebook would be used as a source.
>>
>>On 5/29/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>On 5/26/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>When we choose to publish facts on private people
>>>>>versus public people, for example, is a judgment call about how
>>>>>"notable" they are---not anything to do with verifiability, as many
>>>>>private/non-notable people have information about them verifiable from
>>>>>e.g. phone books.
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>Actually, I'd dispute that a phone book is a reliable source.  It's
>>>>pretty easy to get fake information into a phone book.  Also I'd say
>>>>there usually isn't enough information in a phone book to uniquely
>>>>identify a person anyway.
>>>>
>>>>I'd go so far as to say phone books are completely excludable as
>>>>Wikipedia sources, regardless of whether the information is on a
>>>>public or private person, famous or average, "notable" or
>>>>"non-notable".
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>While I acknowledge that most phone book information has very limited
>>>value, it is easy to imagine situations where that would not be the
>>>case.
>>>