Seraphim Blade wrote:
NOR helps to preserve relevance and importance of information as well as correctness of it. If no one else has seen fit to investigate this matter or publish that conclusion, why should we be the first?
Giving the original research rule a double role in this way is bad for two reasons:
- it is hard enough to work out where we want the boundary of this rule to be considering either one of the jobs separately;
- using the existence of published sources as a central way to judge relevance and importance is a recipe for systematic bias.
That isn't to say that the existence of published sources isn't a sensible way to help make decisions about relevance and importance. But there's no good reason to suppose that we should be using the same criteria for the decision about when a statement is sufficiently obvious that we can make it without giving a reference and the decision about when a statement is significant enough to mention.
-M-