[WikiEN-l] Looking up death dates in government death records: original research?

[Ken Arromdee]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Matthew Brown wrote:
> 2) Are such lookups in SSDI legitimate sourcing for articles, or are
> they original research?  I incline towards the latter, since there is
> a leap between getting a name and making the decision that it is the
> same person that feels like more of one than we should be making
> without support from a source.

Are such lookups sourcing for articles at all?

If the research that shows that someone is dead is used to determine whether
they are subject to BLP, rather than being used to put a statement in the
article claiming that the person is dead, it's no different from a Google
test or any other sort of meta-test that is used to decide what goes in an
article.

The Google test is original research if you put in the article a line "this
person is well-known, because I checked Google", but it's not original
research if you use the Google test to help determine the notability of the
subject when creating an article.

On the other hand, the concept of original research is so stretched that I'm
sure someone could find an excuse somewhere for calling this original
research anyway.