On 7/21/06, Bkonrad bkonrad123@sbcglobal.net wrote:
On 7/21/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
If you are writing about Shakespeare, the primary source is the text of Shakespeare's work. If you are writing about an episode of Friends, the primary source is the episode itself.
No, if you are writing about Shakespeare, the primary source is the text of Shakespeare's work. If you are writing about the author of Friends, the primary source is an episode of Friends. If you're writing about the play Hamlet, the play itself would not be a primary source. If you're writing about an episode of Friends, the episode itself would not be a primary source.
No, sorry. I used "writing about Shakespeare" as a shorthand for writing about Shakespeare's works. I'm not sure how it is these days, but it used to be a pretty common school exercise to write essays about one or another of the bards works. It was considerably less common to write essays about the bard himself. And it IMO is completely ass-backwards to say "If you're writing about the play Hamlet, the play itself would not be a primary source." The inverse of that is very nearly the definition of primary source, at least in the world beyond Wikipedia's somewhat idiosyncratic usage in discussions of OR.
Now all of this is really somewhat distinct from whether something is original research (at least in the context of what that means on Wikipedia).
In my opinion it confuses the point. Original research is much more simply stated as writing from direct observation, as opposed to writing from someone else's observations.
That is one type of OR, but it is not usage intended by the OR policy on Wikipedia (or at least as it was originally formulated).
If writing about an episode of Friends and using that episode isn't original research, I'd have to ask, what is? What is original research in the context of writing about a published work, or is there no such thing as original research in that case?
As I wrote earlier (now a bit further down), OR in that context would be putting forward ideas that were not explicitly in the episode itself, such as trying to explain a character's motivation or making comparisons with other works.
If you are writing a simply plot summary, there is not much OR involved--as others have pointed out, every article on Wikipedia involves selecting which details to include and which to omit. There may be disagreement about which details are significant, but to be a simple plot summary, the details must be explicitly present (verifiable) in the primary source.
I never said that the act of selecting which details to include and which to omit is original research. It was others who brought that up.
Yes, but presenting a simple plot summary is little more than selecting details from the primary source.
Where things cross the line into OR is when the summary starts to put forward some sort of analytical synthesis--such as attempting to explain WHY a character may have taken a certain action or comparing the plot to that of some other work. OR occurs when one starts to advance ideas that are not explicitly present in the source material, but are based on inference or synthesis or other techniques.
I agree with this to a large extent. But I think when you write about a work using only the work itself as a source you necessarily *do* put forward this sort of synthesis. Otherwise, what is the point of mentioning the fact?
Now, whether there is a point to mentioning any specific detail (or even an assembly of details) is a valid consideration, but that is separate from either OR or verifiability. As to whether you "necessarily" put forward an original synthesis when writing about a work using only the work itself -- I disagree. It is a fine line and one easily crossed, but so long as any such use of a primary source sticks to reporting only what is explicitly in the source and avoids making derivative observations, it is both verifiable and not OR. Whether it is worth including in an encyclopedia is another matter.
I guess the exception would be when you just list out facts in random order and don't make any attempt to make them relevant. And I suppose you could argue that's what the Trivia section of an article does. But otherwise, analytical synthesis is a necessary part of every article.
Frankly, I think such a limited exception is not enough to restrict what is OR, since listing out random facts is not a good thing either.
Why would they have to be in random order? We order things all the time in extracting details from other sources in writing articles. The details in a simple plot summary should reflect the order of presentation in the show. The trivia sections in articles have nothing to do with plot summaries. I'm not sure why you bring that up here.
Bkonrad