[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/6/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Aside from the question of whether you are doing original research
> (which, by the way, I heartily approve of and support a change in
> policy to accept) , a good effort to identify your source is still
> necessary. This is a grey area. If I go to the Saguache County
> Courthouse and look up documents on say the [[Baca Grant No. 4]] that
> would seem to be both a well documented source (book and page) and
> publicly available but also difficult and expensive to access and
> original research to boot. So pretty ambiguous in terms of our policies.

A open invitation to original research would be a bad thing... but at
the same time the prohibition against it denies the ability to print
common sense to those in a field... Despite the handwaving claims to
the contrary, it can be quite difficult (measured against the value of
including the text) to find a citation for something that is common
sense in a given field but not necessarily outside it.  Fortunately,
at least on en, we look the other way on original research unless
there is a dispute.

We need to start thinking about ways to include original research in a
way which maximises the gains and minimizes the harms, and what sorts
of research could be most easily included.

I've been thinking about one such way which might be useful: Form a
new project called Wikiviews.  Wikiviews is a collaborative framework
for conducting and collecting interviews with notable people.  The
wikiviews community would establish notability criteria to decide who
is eligible for an interview for example, having an article on
wikipedia about them would be a great start, but it would also be
useful to interview notable professionals and hobbyists in their areas
of interest.  Collaborative consensus building can be used to create
proposed questions. The interview is then performed and stored, and
can then be used for citations in Wikipedia articles. This would give
us greater ability to insert informed opinion into an article without
running into many of the problems with original research since we
could attach a source to those views.