This tells that the item does not belong to the person who added it and that it was gathered from a publicly available source (such as ebay).
Since the purpose of the register is to gather as much information as possible for statistical purposes - Peter and I decided that as long as these items are specially marked - these is no harm in adding them.
A wrong "collected item" would be going to your friend's house, peeking at his serial and publishing it as a "collected item". This is wrong as this information is NOT publicly available.
Additionally - asking a seller on ebay for the serial number for an item that does not include the serial number on the description and then publishing it is NOT okay (The seller confided you with the serial and did not make it publicly available).
Such entries will be removed.
A good "collected item" would be one that is publicly available for everyone to see, for example - ebay items, online articles, gbase items, etc... The idea is that if there is a Rickenbacker out there with all the relevant details (type, serial number, finish, etc...) there is no harm in having it added to the register as long as it is marked as "collected item". This way - no privacy is being violated as this information is public and we do make the information on the register more accurate.
When you add a new "collected item":
- Make sure to mark the "collected item" checkbox at the bottom of the page
- Make sure to add a note stating that this is a collected item, an example ebay item comment would look like this:
Collected from Ebay, item #123456789
Other items should contain a link to the source of your information (NOTE: items without reference will be removed). - Fill in the publicly available details, most ebay listings contain the city, state and country in which the item is located, please use them and NOT your details.
A small tip: before adding your record run a small search on the serial to make sure it is not already there to avoid wasting time on trying to add existing records.
