David Gerard wrote:
On 29/12/06, Steve Block
<steve.block(a)myrealbox.com> wrote:
zero 0000 wrote:
Someone who can read music should be able to
report from
a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
specialist knowledge.
Agree with you. But Wikipedia isn't the place for them to report that.
We aren't a place for original research. The place for them to report
that is in their criticism of the score published in some other source.
We summarise it. That's how it works.
That *is* summarising it. Summarising the obvious should not require
teaching J. Random Querulous the basics of your field because they
want a source for your observation that "the sky is blue" based on the
wavelength of the light from it tending to be more like 400nm than
700nm.
An NOR extremist could likely ask for a citation that would convince
those who believe that light is in particles rather than waves. :-)
Saying that a musical work is in E-flat is not criticism; it's meta-data
where there is a high degree of probability that subject-educated
readers will draw the same conclusion from identical data contained in
the musical score. Other information that could constitute original
research in a musical context when it is not put there by the composer
would be terms like "andante" or "allegro" to indicate the speed of
the work
What the policy *should* require
(somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
the score is in E-flat. The fundamental skills of the field
should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.
No, again that isn't right. We don't record the truth, we summarise
sources. What we do is allow the reader to check we have summarised the
source accurately.
This may be the case in some extreme interpretation, but I really
don't see that it is in this one.
Yes. The fact is that most situations are not extreme. We put in a lot
of effort arguing about the extremes when the reality is that most of
the extremes are of limited consequence. The entire anal process of
building a unified field theory of epistemology results in a
considerable waste of time.
Ec