For commercial software with natural language functions, a high coverage is required. This implies that only extensive lexica and complete morphologies are of interest to the language industry. For many languages, lexical and morphological information has to be collected from traditional lexicographic files and printed dictionaries. However, such material may not provide adequate information - even if trivial defects such as misprintings and editorial inconsequences are not taken into account. The present paper is an attempt to point out how basic information on any language drawn from traditional sources has to be controlled for normative correctness and descriptive adequacy, and how normalization can only be defined relative to a given application.