"David Gerard" wrote
Date: 2006/09/21 Thu AM 10:40:52 BST
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?
Peter Jacobi wrote
> If a Wikipedia article is "the best source
available", it has
> become original research.
Or just the best-researched. Your assertion appears
trivially false.
No, you are both right, with slightly different senses of the word 'research'.
This is where it gets to be an interesting discussion. Wikipedians are para-academic
para-journalists with the completely wild idea that 'policy' can adequately
constrain and define a 'generic' research method, to the point that it produces
material of actual value. Our idea of 'value' is not however a _market_ value or a
_career_ value or a personal _prestige_ value (well, qualify that perhaps). It is not
perhaps surprising that the outside world has fairly systematically misunderstood all
this.
Charles
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