Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Ray - Jay is correct in his description of original research. His point is simply that deduction (that is, drawing a conclusion from a set of premises) should not be used by editors to make a point not already made in a credible publication.
This sounds like an argument for the commandment, "Thou shalt not think."
When it comes to Wikipedia, that's a pretty good commandment. Original thinking on matters of content is beyond the scope of the encyclopedia---we're here just to summarize the thinking that's already been done. We're also particularly ill-equipped to judge novel thinking. If you make a novel historical argument, citing dozens of sources in the process, you should submit it to a history journal to be peer-reviewed, not to us.
Now you open up the question, "What is novel?" I absolutely agree that we are ill-equipped to judge novel thinking, Too many look at this from the distorted extremist lenses. If the dozens of sources that I use for a historical argument are all "peer reviewed" sources my argument is no longer novel. If we follow the severely restrictive approach to "original research" that some people are proposing our encyclopedia would be full of nothing but dumbed-down pap.
Ec