[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[Rob]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

>
> Searching far and wide to find a secondary source that quoted the primary
> source gains you *nothing* except compliance with Wikipedia rules.  The
> secondary source isn't going to do any better fact-checking than you did when
> you just looked at the primary source directly--it just fills a rules
> requirement.

The secondary sources (presumably, ideally) will discuss why there is
a discrepancy between the birth records and the obituaries and
encyclopedias and dig into the issue a lot further than just merely
announcing "the obituaries are wrong".  Searching far and wide may be
too much to ask, and I realize that not every editor has the research
mojo of a librarian, but all I did was track down a newspaper article
and a biography.  Perhaps digging up the former is too much, but is it
really too much to ask that editors working on a biographical article
crack open a biography of the subject?