On the other hand, Beastie, Hamblin absolutely *was* deviating from scholarly standards of citation. I noted in an earlier post that, depending on the documentation style, the type of correspondence needs to be listed. In other words, saying "correspondence" doesn't cut it. The reader needs to be told that the source was a letter. DCP has said elsewhere that they rely on the Chicago Manuel of Style for their citations, which means that Hamblin blew it. Here's a site (from CUNY) which gives an example of the proper means of citation:
Oh, I don’t disagree that his sourcing is problematic and even incompetent, and I do agree that there has been something of a trend in Mormon apologia to use problematic sourcing.
If Sorenson's sloppy footnote is rendered a "problem," in your view, then how can we excuse Hamblin's blunder here? Is it simply a matter of content? And if so, don't we also have to fault Hamblin for failing to acknowledge what appear to be changes to the text?
in my opinion, the difference is that the source Hamblin was likely looking at – the fax – actually did say what he attributed to it. Yes, he omitted some words at the end which could be misleading, but Sorenson’s source didn’t say anything at all close to what Sorenson claimed it said. When confronted, he admitted it was the wrong source, that his real source was a lost personal correspondence from someone now dead. So if Sorenson had not made a completely erroneous citation but instead made a sloppy attribution to a letter that has never been found, then what he did would be very much like what Hamblin did – incompetent. But, in my view, the line of honesty instead of simple competence was crossed when Sorenson actually claimed a different source said something when it did not say it at all.
That’s why I think Sorenson’s footnoting could be used as an example of likely dishonesty and not just incompetence, whereas Hamblin’s seems more incompetence. The fact is that the found fax says pretty much what he claimed his source said.
Such as calling a personal letter a "correspondence"? I think that this vagueness is a really big problem in this case. Hamblin is trained as a historian, and in that discipline, sources are *extremely* important. It is practically a breach of the tenets of the profession to list sources in so vague a manner. I think it is very much like the case with Sorenson: we can credit this vagueness either to Hamblin's utter incompetence, or to the fact that he was deliberately trying to deceive.
As I said, I’m not arguing against the case that it shows incompetence and sloppiness. But it’s difficult to explain Sorenson’s mistake as nothing but incompetence when he had to LOOK at the source he cited to get a page number, and he HAD to see it didn’t say what he was claiming it said. OTOH, Hamblin was looking at a document that did pretty much say what he claimed it said. I think that is a crucial difference.