"David Gerard" wrote
Date: 2006/09/21 Thu AM 10:40:52 BST To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?
Peter Jacobi wrote
If a Wikipedia article is "the best source available", it has become original research.
Or just the best-researched. Your assertion appears trivially false.
No, you are both right, with slightly different senses of the word 'research'. This is where it gets to be an interesting discussion. Wikipedians are para-academic para-journalists with the completely wild idea that 'policy' can adequately constrain and define a 'generic' research method, to the point that it produces material of actual value. Our idea of 'value' is not however a _market_ value or a _career_ value or a personal _prestige_ value (well, qualify that perhaps). It is not perhaps surprising that the outside world has fairly systematically misunderstood all this.
Charles
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charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Wikipedians are para-academic para-journalists with the completely wild idea that 'policy' can adequately constrain and define a 'generic' research method, to the point that it produces material of actual value.
Perhaps we are in agreement in this point. I'd consider the idea, that giving sources for every single sentence fragment is a cure-all, to be overly optimistic. It can result in featured articles and it can result in something like [[List of groups referred to as cults]].
But maybe my idea of an encyclopedia is rather restricted -- at least it is on the safe side: our articles should be concise versions of results found elsewhere (and by "found" I don't mean "scraped together"). Does there really exist a scholarly treatment of "Mormonism and Judaism", or is our article the only one?
Regards, Peter [[User:Pjacobi]]