Talk:Jan Jacobsen (English service)

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Untitled[edit]

The Dab page that gave rise to this article stub said in relevant part (footnoting markup caused to be rendered as text, rather than be effective, by me):

*Jan Jacobsen (Flemish privateer), mid-17th century Flemish corsair and privateer who operated out of France, as did others such as Karel Verburg and Jan Jansen, on behalf of Great Britain during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. <ref> Rommelse, Gijs. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667): Raison D'état, Mercantilism and Maritime Strife. Hilversum: Gijs Rommelse & Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006. (pg. 115) ISBN 90-6550-907-0 </ref>
==References==
{{Reflist}}

(For the record:

The passage cited (see below) supports "England" but not "Great Britain" (which was a royal slogan by the 1660s but not the name of a state until 1701
The name "Jan Jansen" (lk'd to Jan Janszoon) does not appear per se in the source; "Jan Jansen Gouverneur" is the name that apparently suggested the 2-word name to the editor.
The word "corsair" is ambiguous, but the above phrase "corsair and privateer" suggests "sometimes pirate and sometimes privateer", while the source instead refers to the same people sometimes as corsairs and sometimes as privateers, and fails to imply that "corsair" in its sense entails piracy: it is more reasonable int its context to construe it as used either merely for variation, or to emphasize that these privateers had no motivation of benefiting England, and wanted letters of marque in order to gain most the benefits of piracy without the risk of hanging that commiting piracy would have carried.

)
In citing a reference in a WP article, an editor in effect certifies that they have personally consulted the referenced work and carefully extracted and/or paraphrased what it asserts as facts. In this case, the original text was apparently submitted to Wikipedia:Articles for creation by an IP (who could not create an article themself), and created by a registered user who summarized "New from WP:AFC by User:72.74.220.10".
The publication cited is not listed by Amazon, but searching on Google for

Dunkirkers Karel Verburg Jansen Gouverneur shipping

should produce (for you as it did for me), in the abstract of its only hit, the sentence that was presumably used as source; the hit is within Google Books (but it goes to p. 117 instead of 115 where that sent appears) is labeled as the cited work. It is far-fetched to believe the apparently obscure physical book is the direct source, and IMO there is a strong presumption that Google Books was the direct source.
I know that Google Books is not a permissible citation; i'm not clear whether the prohibition against seeing a secondary source but citing the primary one that it quotes applies to cases like this; acceptability of the ref i've removed to this talk page depends on the answer. Since the facts presumably are to found elsewhere, i've preferred to err on the side of caution, and IMO if there really is only one source (which may be the dissertation for the author's PhD of the same year and thus "an original contribution to the field"), i argue it is not established knowledge per WP:OR.
--Jerzy•t 05:35, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]