At 09:24 AM 11/19/2009, Mauro Lacy wrote:
In my opninion, if this reference is not presented, an skeptic can still argument, with a reasonable level of doubt, that the document is a fake/it's not official.
It's certainly desirable to have a direct reference, but, in fact, anyone who trusts the document sufficiently could just cite it. Personally, I'd probably want to verify in some way that the document has actually been published. That could have been a leaked draft, for example. Krivit didn't state the provenance, and it's quite possible he's not at liberty to do so, in which case we'd have to consider that it hasn't been published yet.
Notice that the thread was started by an editor who just wanted to drop it in the pond and see if there was a splash. She's pretty busy, I understand, not likely to pursue this immediately. So it was indeed pretty funny. Obviously, the paper is of interest and could rather significantly shift the article, but it's really more like a breaker of a log jam. There is plenty of reliable source, of the highest quality, that's been excluded for a long time.
And there is plain horse-puckey from "reliable source" that is, of course, in the article. Old secondary source referring to the situation in the early 1990s, presented as if it were true about all the corpus of work that has taken place since then, when it wasn't really *ever* accurate.
