[WikiEN-l] Are phone books reliable sources?

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

On 5/30/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> Because you have no way of knowing whether the phone book is up-to-date.
> Even if the celebrity in question doesn't have a secret phone number, the
> encyclopedic merit of including phone book information is pretty much
> non-existent.