Judging a Source's Proximity to the Event
Launch library · evergreen read
Proximity is not only a matter of time, though a document written the same week as an event usually carries more weight than one written decades afterward. It is also a matter of position: was the source's creator actually present at the time, or merely reporting what someone else told them later?
A source close in time but distant in position can still be weaker than one further removed in time but written by a direct participant in the events described. Both dimensions deserve separate consideration rather than being collapsed together into a single vague sense of reliability.
Naming both factors explicitly, even just within your own working notes, sharpens judgement considerably about which sources deserve the most weight when accounts of the same event start to diverge from one another. Writers who track both dimensions consistently tend to develop a more reliable instinct for which competing account deserves the benefit of the doubt.