[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[James Hare]

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]"

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This may have come up before so if there's a previous discussion on en
> or here, please direct me to it.
>
> Do we have an official stance on using primary sources like the US
> census and the Social Security Death Index to prove a case of [[age
> fabrication]]?  My take on it is that it is prohibited original
> research, using primary sources to disprove secondary ones, compounded
> by the fact that we could easily confuse the subject of the article
> with another person of the same or similar name.
>
> If you want to be specific, here it is:  Every published source has a
> birthdate of 1918 for the late psychic Jeane Dixon.  However the SSDI
> has her birthdate as 1904 and the brother-in-law of her nephew swears
> on the talk page that the 1904 date is the correct one.  I think the
> 1904 is correct, and it's frustrating because likely no journalist or
> historian is going to bother publishing something about such a minor
> matter, but my opinion is irrelevant and we should defer to published
> sources.  Verifiability not truth and all that.  Or should we IAR in
> cases like this and go with the "correct" date?
>
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