On 18/12/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 12/17/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
OR is when you go out and test the evidence yourself. Finding sources to corroborate a point is called research, not original research.
No. In Wikipedia, OR is when you do the interpretation of evidence yourself. We should simplify the OR rule to make this clearer: "Wikipedians are dumb. We cannot interpret, only repeat."
So, in theory every entry could be written by a bot, eh?
/me imagines RamBot adding articles on every court decision and piece of legislation...
I'm manually writing articles on pieces of legislation - sadly the data isn't available to make it bot-generable, otherwise I'd set that going and tidy the results up.
Which neatly brings out another aspect of pushing-OR. I open my copy of "Tudor Constituional Documents", and proceed to write something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridges_Act_1530 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_Act_1555
The problem is, all that the source contains is (a translation of?) the original text; I've recast it in a more modern style and converted from long and tedious legalese to a fairly comprehensible precis, but I've done it solely working from the original and not from any secondary synopsis of the Act.
Is this original research? If not, why not - where does "rewriting" end and "interpreting" begin? Does it depend on the complexity of the source document?
I think I'm in the clear - but I'm curious to know where we would draw a line on this sort of thing.