Michael Snow wrote:
Broadly speaking, there are two possible kinds of historical narratives. One is to bring together various facts about a subject in reasonably coherent fashion, without imposing any interpretation on it. Done Wikipedia-style and well-referenced, I don't see the problem with this. I think as far as the "no original research" policy is concerned, this kind of historical narrative "exists", to use your phrasing, no matter that perhaps nobody has actually written it yet. I'm not sure how else you can justify having argued so strongly for including the history of the Brian Peppers phenomenon in Wikipedia. In fact, this is a great deal of what some of our better articles on obscure topics do. A thorough history of webcomics may not be possible until the secondary sources are better developed, but certainly enough primary sources are available to make a start at it.
That sounds somewhat reasonable to me, but without any authoritative (or even semi-authoritative) sources to fall back on, we do have to be very careful that we're only documenting non-controversial things with a minimum of interpretation. Some of my wariness of novel historical narratives stems from some argument on [[en:neofolk]], which has become an idiosyncratic history of the music genre completely out of keeping with its actual history, but one that's hard to refute conclusively because there are no good widely-available and widely-accepted histories of the genre. In those cases, POV-pushers are left free to make up a history that fits their particular sensibilities and promotes their favorite artists.
I could see webcomics turning into that, as fans try to jockey to place their favorite comic into a more prominent role in the history of webcomics than it really deserves, and that's something we should watch out for. I do agree that simply listing whatever facts can be conclusively established is fine though.
-Mark