On 12/17/06, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com <
charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
"Stephen Bain" wrote
On 12/17/06, zero 0000
<nought_0000(a)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