"Stephen Bain" wrote
On 12/17/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
Ok, so now I am itching to write in Wikipedia something like: "The consensus amongst legal scholars is that opinion A is correct" (or similar), with a footnote stating the evidence.
Can I do that? My sources were the best that exist, and everything I did can be verified easily by anyone with a good library. On the other hand, I have drawn my own conclusions from these observations so maybe I'm afoul of the No Original Research policy.
Of course that's ok.
I think it's OK, too. We are suppoed to summarise existing knowledge: so NOR shouldn't take away the tool of giving an accurate precis. One can tweak the wording, so that 'most opinions follow that of X in [cite]' is perhaps better than 'consensus'. But I think many practical cases are like this, with a slight change of words helping out the look.
Charles
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On 12/17/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
"Stephen Bain" wrote
On 12/17/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
Ok, so now I am itching to write in Wikipedia something like: "The consensus amongst legal scholars is that opinion A is correct" (or similar), with a footnote stating the evidence.
Can I do that? My sources were the best that exist, and everything I did can be verified easily by anyone with a good library. On the other hand, I have drawn my own conclusions from these observations so maybe I'm afoul of the No Original Research policy.
Of course that's ok.
I think it's OK, too. We are suppoed to summarise existing knowledge: so NOR shouldn't take away the tool of giving an accurate precis. One can tweak the wording, so that 'most opinions follow that of X in [cite]' is perhaps better than 'consensus'. But I think many practical cases are like this, with a slight change of words helping out the look.
This might be ok if you were looking at an exhaustive list. If the collection was (supposed to be) exhaustive, and you looked at them all and summarised the information then you would still be doing OK, but since you would only be summarising existing knowledge it would be ok (IMO). Similarly, with your database, you could say that all the opinions in that database said A, but calling that "consensus" wouldn't be ok.
Ian