charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
The second-order point on that is, well, WP shouldn't _anticipate_ the scientific revision, so the same should apply to history. But I think the policy on original research then enters: it can correctly be said of WP that its current affairs coverage should _not_ be doing the job of historical synthesis, ahead of the historians.
I agree with that, and I think that the fact that our articles do sometimes wander into that territory is the source of some of the sentiment that we shouldn't have them in the first place. The articles on the 2004 U.S. presidential election were the worst set of them, *just now* finally being cleaned up of literally dozens of articles filled with novel syntheses, Wikipedian-produced data analysis, and all manner of other original research. We do need to find some better way to keep that sort of thing out.
-Mark