JAY JG wrote:
From: Matt Brown morven@gmail.com
?
On 6/6/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Sean Barrett wrote:
Why are old Soviet records "original research" while old US records (NVR, DANFS, &c.) are okay?
I'm not saying that they are, just that somebody is bound to try to
make
that point.
It disturbs me that "No original research", originally intended to prevent crackpot theories with no following being pushed on Wikipedia, is starting to mutate into something quite different.
It hasn't started to mutate into anything different, though some people pretend it has. What typically happens is this: An editor sees a cited POV they strongly disagree with in some article, so they construct a novel argument to counter that POV, often even citing sources for the various facts used to construct the argument. When challenged on the grounds that they are doing Original Research, they either counter by saying each of the facts used to create the argument is properly cited, or (if they've been around Wikipedia for a while) they grumble on Wikien-l that the arguments is obvious, and that the NOR policy is being stretched to cover areas for which it was never intended. When it is pointed out that obvious arguments will be cited *somewhere*, the response is that some things are so obvious (e.g. "like the fact that the sun rises in the east") that it would actually be hard to find someone specifically stating them! Then e-mails fly back and forth on the list, eventually everything dies down for two months, rinse and repeat.
This argument sounds like its original research. :-)
Ec