Good example actually. From the "by the book" perspective, the zoo picture is better because it has a label beside the cage that can be cited. perspective, the in-the-wild picture is better because it shows the species in their natural habitat.

On 02/05/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: Can someone summarise the case for considering photos of Wikipedian-identified animals as OR, though? I sort of feel that, for a start, images are just decoration in any case. If an editor wanted to say "According to official sources, Green-horned Bats are only found in Transylvania, whereas this example was photographed in Gippsland" that might be one thing. But since we can't use copyrighted images, it seems absolutely necessary that we allow images taken by amateur photographers. We, or the reader, can then compare the photo to photos in published sources to confirm that they are close enough to be considered an accurate representation of the subject. Which leads me to think: It actually doesn't matter if our photo is genuinely of a Green-horned Bat, or whether it's actually a Yellow-horned Bat with a bit of photoshop work. It is simply a representation after all. Steve

On 02/05/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote: Well, I'd sort of say it doesn't matter. Take the simple case of an animal whose sex can't be distinguished without close inspection. There's no point captioning an image "Male ..." if you can't tell in the photo. Perhaps we should just use captions like "A member of the Red-horned Bat family, possible the Lesser" or something. Steve

On 02/05/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote: I agree, but are you actually proposing that all those "relevant facts" appear in the body of the article? I think every possible known factoid about the image should be kept on its image page, and only the most relevant should be brought into the article body. Steve

Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: Essentially, I have always seen it as a useful supplement to [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]]. When the policy is used to remove legitimate information that is clearly correct, or to impede the daily work of contributors against all common sense, it is used against its original purpose and should be interpreted in that light. Policy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. I agree about the OR-verifiability relationship. What confuses me in your statement is what you mean by "clearly correct" and "common sense". Both of these are subject to POV (and OR) if left to judgement calls. Are you restating what meets the verifiability policy with different words to help clarify or do you mean something else?~~~~Pro-Lick --------------------------------- How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger’s low PC-to-Phone call rates.

Perhaps it is better to think of OR less as a "thing" out there to be defined but as an "ideal" which will inevitably and forever present tough distinctions about what is or is not OR but in the end will hopefully develop a productive tension. The goal of the OR policy is not to necessarily shoot everything which could potentially be OR on the spot. As has been noted many times OR can be applied to all sorts of instances -- ever act of synthesis has a little bit of OR in it. However it is only in contentious cases that the OR rule needs to be pulled out -- places where there actually are people arguing against it. If the identification of a picture of an animal is controversial, then surely the question of OR could surface on some level. I think that would be quite healthy on the whole. OR should not, and is not (as far as I know), used to pre-emptively shoot things down which are uncontroversial. I don't think it is necessarily useful or necessary to worry about every eventuality of what is or is not OR. There is no such thing as "Original Research" which sits out there in the world in some sort of Aristotlean ideal form, and there is no simple criteria for telling what is or is not going to be OR. This should not dismay us, nor does it invalidate it as a useful heuristic or as a regulation. 150 years of philosophers arguing on the subject have produced no definition of "science" that covers all things that people generally consider to be "science" and excludes things which people generally consider to be "non-science" (see [[problem of demarcation]] if curious), but that has not stopped it from being a productive and useful category, if an essentially contested one. FF On 5/2/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: