Steve Bennett wrote:
On 02/05/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/2/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
I don't see what's original research about this.
It's all a matter of definition. Under some definitions, Wikipedia thrives on original research and could not exist without it. We are all researchers the moment we decide to pick a topic, study the sources, evaluate them carefully, weigh expert against expert and make decisions about what to include and what to omit, how to arrange the text, which "NPOV" terms to use, and so on.
Can someone summarise the case for considering photos of Wikipedian-identified animals as OR, though?
I don't know any serious editor that is suggesting that photos are somehow original research - I took the original message as a sarcastic comment on the many tortured misintepretations of NOR.
It is true that identifying plants and animals from photos is a bit of a minefield - very often the key characteristic(s) distinguishing a species from all others is not visible in the photo, so one might say that that makes it "unverifiable" without other info, such as a label on a cage. On the other hand, people who've worked with ToL images on WP/commons have run into a number of cases where professional photos collected from the net are misidentified too, so it's not a problem unique to us, and I think we just need to encourage people to be conservative about id'ing (if you're not certain, back off to genus or family id), and to regularly review images for accuracy, just we would for article text.
Stan