[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[Ray Saintonge]

Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:58 PM, James Hare wrote
>> You could phrase it like this:
>>
>> "The SSDI says 1904[source] while all these other publications say
>> 1918[source]." Or you could discredit the reliability of the sources (which
>> would be the right thing to do, since the SSDI is not likely to get birth
>> dates wrong) and just say "Dixon was born in 1904.[source]"
>>     
> SSDI might very well be wrong.  It's worth mentioning, but shouldn't be
> taken as definitive.
>   

*Any* source may be wrong, including ones with a high reputation for 
accuracy.  Nevertheless, we have no measure of reliability for any 
source.  Has anyone ever taken a statistically significant random sample 
of SSDI records and tried to determine what percentage of those records 
are erroneous? If that study determines that no record in a sample 
(greater than 100) is in error I may be able to safely hypothesize that 
the error rate is less than 1%.  That is still not enough to say that 
the SSDI is error free.

> And it's not a primary source.  "In historiography, a primary source (also
> called original source) is a document, recording, artifact, or other source
> of information that was created at the time under study, usually by a source
> with direct personal knowledge of the events being described." Social
> security didn't even exist in 1904, so clearly this information was not
> created in 1904.
>   

The requirement that Social Security Numbers of newborn children appear 
on a tax return is relatively recent.  Before 1989 the person applied 
himself.

Ec