Draft talk:Farmingdale Statue

I've looked through one section, "Discovery". This appears to be based on three sources:

• Gramly, Richard Michael. "How a Long Island Relic Becomes a Zulu Artefact." Black Art: An International Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1980, pp. 33–48.
• Nesbitt, Pat (Secretary to Director). Letter to Mrs. John W. Genega. Suffolk Museum and Carriage House at Stony Brook. June 20, 1968. Genega family archive.
• Pike, Martha V. (Assistant Curator, History Collection). Letter to Mrs. Edna Genega. The Museums at Stony Brook. June 16, 1976. Genega family archive.

A paper published in Black Art can be assumed to be a "reliable source". (It's an academic paper. Academic papers often disagree with each other. Many turn out to be wrongheaded. However, this is tolerable.) However, consider the other two, while bearing in mind that Wikipedia:Reliable sources tells us:

Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. ... Published means, for Wikipedia's purposes, any source that was made available to the public in some form.

There's no indication that either is published. Similarly, many of sources cited elsewhere in the draft do not appear to be published.

It's not normal to consider citing unpublished archival material. But if this were possible in some circumstances ... the situation turns out to be still worse. The draft includes a list of "Primary documents (Genega family archive)". Many of the cited sources, the draft tells us, "are held in the Genega family archive. The collection is in private ownership." (At some unspecified place.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:51, 18 April 2026 (UTC)