Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Delirium wrote:
That is no more useful or desirable than going to [[Neutrino]] and seeing original physical research that some physics crank has decided to publish on Wikipedia. If you've made novel historical discoveries by digging through primary sources, then great, but Wikipedia is not the place to publish them any more than it's the place to publish your novel physics discoveries.
The difference is the one betwen invention and discovery, and the physics example is one of invention, not discovery. In discovery we find what was already there, and invention only becomes a factor in historical research when the authenticity of the documents is disputed.
This seems like a strange distinction to me. I have never heard of physics discoveries being referred to as "inventions"; one might invent a machine that helps in making those discoveries, but the discoveries are simply finding what is already there.
I wouldn't consider the crackpot ideas in physices to be discovering what was already there
What makes it original research is that you're the first to have claimed to find it. In such cases (whether in physics or history), the proper place to put forth your claimed discoveries is in a journal or some other such place where they can be evaluated (and possibly refuted) by others.
If I read that strictly not even Hansard or The Congressional Record are acceptable sources. In fact there are many old collections of documents that have been published without being vetted by the history establishment.
As for whether the authenticity of documents is disputed, that's exactly the sort of thing we should be relying on secondary sources to determine. If I find some random archival document that *appears* to say something about World War II, it would be inappropriate for me to start relying on it in the article by citing it; I should instead see what historians have said about it, how it's been interpreted before, if there is consensus or disagreement on its authenticity or implications, etc. If it's never been mentioned before, I would have to conclude that its authenticity and implications are unknown. There are many journals devoted to hashing out that sort of thing, and we shouldn't be replicating their work on talk pages, imo.
My reference to invented or forged documents was as an exception. Otherwise respectable professionals are frequently bambozled as was the case with Die Stern a few years ago over certain WWII era diaries. For the sake of clarity let's confine the discussion to documents about which authenticity is not a factor.
There are more documents (good documents) languishing in archives than can ever be processed by an army of historians. Part of our mission is to make knowledge freely available to all. This may or may not be in anencyclopedic format; if not then it belongs in some other wikiproject. There is also much more to history than the broad brush strokes of global events The histories of all those Rambot included towns are also worth including, and the corpus of that material is growing faster than the number of historians available for writing it up.
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