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

[Anthony]

On 4/30/07, Sam Blacketer <sam.blacketer at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 4/30/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> 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.
>
> I would have thought that it is original research. The SSDI is by
> definition a primary source; the fact that it happens to be fairly
> easily available does not make it a 'published' source.

FWIW, and as much as I disagree with it, [[WP:OR]] specifically states
that using primary sources is perfectly fine.  It is the creation of
primary sources that is barred.  As for what "published" means, I
think it means put into a fixed form and distributed to the public.
The SSDI qualifies, though I suppose you could argue it's not fixed
unless you're using the version distributed by CD.

> Put it like this - if someone in there is notable, then their death
> would have been noticed (from the SSDI at the very least) by some
> proper secondary source.
>
The question of whether or not the SSDI creates notability where it
otherwise doesn't exist is a completely different one.

But I'd also like to point out that the SSDI is useless without some
other published information on the person.  A name alone is probably
not enough to be confident that we have correctly identified the
person in the SSDI.

Anthony