[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

Tue Jun 7 16:16:12 UTC 2005

Matt Brown wrote:

>"Cite your sources" is fine.  "Provide your sources," though, is not. 
>On many obscure topics, the sources WILL be difficult to locate.  Any
>attempt to turn this requirement into having to provide sources that
>can be requested from the average library or online will remove a
>large number of very credible but obscure sources - specialist
>publications, limited circulation journals, and many other documents.
>  
>
IMO, those would only be legitimate sources to cite if the subject 
itself is obscure and known only to specialists.  If it's a well-known 
subject, it would make more sense to use mainstream sources on the 
subject.  If the obscure source is indeed important, it will at least 
have been cited by someone else.  If, for example, you find an obscure 
source on the Holocaust that is not cited in any mainstream work on the 
Holocaust, it would be original research to begin to build an argument 
based on it.  (If you thought mainstream Holocaust historians were 
ignoring some obscure but credible and important source, that would be 
an issue to take up with them; we're just here to report the consensus 
in the field, not to create it.)

-Mark