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