On 12/22/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, jayjg wrote:
Read your own words; "Seems like an obvious conclusion to me..." You are drawing your own conclusions, rather than quoting others who have drawn those conclusions. In addition, by definition it is a *novel* conclusion; if it weren't novel, then you'd be able to quote someone who had come to the same conclusion.
That only applies if *any conclusion whatsoever* is original research. But that's not true. Otherwise it would be original research to say that someone is more than 5 feet tall if the source just said they are 6 feet tall.
So you can't just say "that's a conclusion, so it's original research". You need to figure out exactly what types of conclusions are and aren't allowed, and then show that this particular conclusion falls into the prohibited category.
I would argue that an *obvious* conclusion falls into the permitted category. The whole reason we accept conclusions like "he is 6 feet tall, therefore he is more than 5 feet tall" is that they don't require specialist training to make, and that nobody could seriously deny they are true--in other words, we accept such conclusions because they are obvious.
But we're not talking about trivially obvious conclusions; rather, we're talking about conclusions based on complex actions that require expert knowledge to conduct correctly, and even then don't always produce accurate results. The only *obvious* conclusion we can draw in this case is "Daniel Smith ran this specific search on the catalog, and it didn't return any results", which is hardly encyclopedic information.
Jay.