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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
