On 6/6/05, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Aside from the question of whether you are doing original research (which, by the way, I heartily approve of and support a change in policy to accept) , a good effort to identify your source is still necessary. This is a grey area. If I go to the Saguache County Courthouse and look up documents on say the [[Baca Grant No. 4]] that would seem to be both a well documented source (book and page) and publicly available but also difficult and expensive to access and original research to boot. So pretty ambiguous in terms of our policies.
A open invitation to original research would be a bad thing... but at the same time the prohibition against it denies the ability to print common sense to those in a field... Despite the handwaving claims to the contrary, it can be quite difficult (measured against the value of including the text) to find a citation for something that is common sense in a given field but not necessarily outside it. Fortunately, at least on en, we look the other way on original research unless there is a dispute.
We need to start thinking about ways to include original research in a way which maximises the gains and minimizes the harms, and what sorts of research could be most easily included.
I've been thinking about one such way which might be useful: Form a new project called Wikiviews. Wikiviews is a collaborative framework for conducting and collecting interviews with notable people. The wikiviews community would establish notability criteria to decide who is eligible for an interview for example, having an article on wikipedia about them would be a great start, but it would also be useful to interview notable professionals and hobbyists in their areas of interest. Collaborative consensus building can be used to create proposed questions. The interview is then performed and stored, and can then be used for citations in Wikipedia articles. This would give us greater ability to insert informed opinion into an article without running into many of the problems with original research since we could attach a source to those views.