From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com On 5/18/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
In my experience, it is far more often ignored because an editor wants
to
draw some original conclusions about something, and is unaware of the policy, unable to comprehend it, or simply doesn't care. Currently the
risk
that Wikipedia will be damaged by "blindly following" the NOR policy is
far
less than the risk that it will be damaged by *not* following it.
We have entire areas of study which would be exceptionally difficult to document if we were strictly adhering to a no original research policy. For example our articles on Free Software related subject often contain information sourced from mailing lists and form the editors experience, sources which would not normally be acceptable under the normal application of the original research standard.
Deciding what may be accepted as research is as difficult a problem as determine what is notable.
That may be true for certain cutting edge topics which are not well documented. But in other areas (e.g. religion, politics, current world conflicts, controversial people, etc.) the more typical problem is that people insist on inserting their own analysis.
Jay.