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

[Mark Williamson]

I was pretty sure the site definition of original research was "ideas
that are entirely your own, theories, or something new that people in
the field haven't seen really yet", not just "something that cannot
cite sources because it comes from a person's head". I've written
plenty of articles in many different Wikipedias that would be
considered original research under the second definition but not the
first.

Mark

On 06/06/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
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