On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)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?