Talk:Rainbow Bridge (pets)

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[edit] Authorship and origins

user:ChavaGirl - With regard to the Rainbow Bridge article, the thing is, that yes, we know who the copyright holder of the book rainbow bridge is. What we don't know is if that is the original source for the text, or if it draws upon something earlier.

The uncertainty is this:

A lot of texts end up in books. It is self-evident that a person who writes a book is a copyright holder of his own book. That doesn't need saying. Copyright is automatic to the author, and to add "copyrighted in 1994 with the US Copyright office" has two negative impacts on the article: it's adding information that's implied within authorship already, and it makes the article look like it is trying to emphasize or show bias. This is an encyclopedia, so we are very careful to ensure everything in it is written in the style of a neutral source of information. copyright is automatic to the author of any text, so if we add that it looks like we're trying to push one "side" in the debate.

In fact, all we know about britton is that his book contains the writing. We don't know if this was the original source for the notion, or the original place it was published, and we have to be careful because we are a source of reference information and we can't put our own assumptions down as facts.

If you look on google, you'll see what the problem is. Look at this link:

http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=%22cross+the+rainbow+bridge%22&start=0&scoring=d&hl=en&lr=&num=100&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=9&as_maxm=12&as_maxy=1993&

What this says is that the idea of rainbow bridge can be traced on the net to before 1994. We can see several posts of the notion of "crossing the Rainbow Bridge together", and at least three quotes that suggest the poem was already in circulation and known at that point.

The first archived post mentioning the poem, here, states on January 7 1993 that "The following was taken from Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League Newsletter which reprinted it from the Akita Rescue Society of America". So given that newsletters take at least a week to print, the poem was already being circulated in printed form by December 1992, and being quoted and circulated. (Of course the archive itself may be lacking earlier mentions.) This post adds the further information that the "Rainbow Bridge" poem was well enough known by 1993 that people would quote just one line of it and expect others to understand. Britton published his version of it in print in 1994, and could have written it earlier; the problem is we don't know if he did, or if he got the idea from someone else's prior work, and lacking sources that confirm this, we can't assume it.

In other words we have no way to know who the original author of the notion was. We know that Britton published it in a book, but we don't know if the original poem was his, or whose idea the poem was, who inspired it, or who wrote the first draft that was circulated before them. We know he wrote it in a book that was published in 1994, but we also know it was widely in circulation at least as early as 1992. Wikipedia's "job" is to state what can be cited and verified from credible sources, and try to avoid making undue assumptions. That is what we know, and what is worth saying. So that is why the article states what it does.

[We can continue to discuss this here if you like, and that way others can read it in time to come and see what was covered. Its usual to "sign" your post by putting "~~~~" at the end of it; this automatically adds a signature. Note that you don't "sign" edits to articles, only to talk pages and other discussions.]

FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 13:12, 9 December 2006 (UTC)