On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Wjhonson wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly. Then you will never be using original research.
You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting. Don't do that.
But selecting what quotations to use, what parts of them to use, and in what context one uses them, and the language one uses to present them, is a not a mechanical or necessarily neutral endeavor. It cannot be done without summarizing and interpreting.
Certainly in Wikipedia and everywhere else the world also, unrepresentative of partial quotations are used to propagandistic or controversial effect--sometimes even deliberately, but more often because the particular quotation and manner fits what the editor desires to express. A person in the course of a long career will say many things on their main interests, and some will be at least partially contradictory. Selecting what represents the person's true views, what represents a true change of opinion, what represent erratic misstatements --all of this require decisions which amount to what we call original research and synthesis. It is not possible to write any but the most trivial article without research and synthesis. Preparing a summary of the state of a question intrinsically requires it. Deciding of the balance of an article necessarily involves having a POV--if one approaches a subject where one has none initially, by the time the article has been finished, one or the other position is sure to have been found more appealing, and a non-neural POV is sure to have developed.
The writing of secondary and tertiary works are inevitably associated with bias. The way by which we avoid its worst manifestations in Wikipedia is not by being free from bias, but by having articles written collectively by a diverse group of people. What we lose in elegant prose we gain in objectivity. This is why it is important to continually increase the number of active editors--not just to increase the scope, but to ensure adequate eyes on the articles.
But even so, the different Wikipedias will be inevitably different. (Attention has recently been called on the list to http://manypedia.com/.) We need in particular more people with multiple language ability to incorporate the diversity in the individual encyclopedias. This is one reason why it is critically important to develop Wikipedias in the non-Western languages, so their views too can be represented not just in their own language, but throughout the project.
-- David Goodman
DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG