[WikiEN-l] Notability on the skfields

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 10:08:26AM -0700, Todd Allen wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Todd Allen wrote:
> >
> >   

[stuff snipped]]
   
> Very well. Change it to "Provide anything but the most trivial factual
> information about oneself", and it stands. (And by the way, while I've
> never heard of anyone lying about their children's names, there are
> plenty of people that have gotten in trouble for lying about where they
> went to school, and a -ton- of people that lie about their age.)

This is true and I think it is a bigger problem than you think. Your
answer is to go to secondary sources. However, it is more than likely
that the secondary sources get the information about age, children,
school, etc. from the primary source. To get the information from
anywhere else would take much more time. It is also possible, and if they
are a cub reporter in a newspaper very possible, that they will add
errors in so doing. The more they rewrite the source so it does not look
like a direct copy, the more likely they are to make errors. It is
impossible to know whether a secondary source has taken the information
from the primary source we want to avoid.

We are often better getting simple facts from the primary sources, in
spite of possible errors, but of course we do need some secondary
sources.

Brian.
-- 
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au  
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity