[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[JAY JG]

>From: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>
?
>On 6/6/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Sean Barrett wrote:
> > > Why are old Soviet records "original research" while old US records
> > > (NVR, DANFS, &c.) are okay?
> >
> > I'm not saying that they are, just that somebody is bound to try to make
> > that point.
>
>It disturbs me that "No original research", originally intended to
>prevent crackpot theories with no following being pushed on Wikipedia,
>is starting to mutate into something quite different.

It hasn't started to mutate into anything different, though some people 
pretend it has.  What typically happens is this: An editor sees a cited POV 
they strongly disagree with in some article, so they construct a novel 
argument to counter that POV, often even citing sources for the various 
facts used to construct the argument.  When challenged on the grounds that 
they are doing Original Research, they either counter by saying each of the 
facts used to create the argument is properly cited, or (if they've been 
around Wikipedia for a while) they grumble on Wikien-l that the arguments is 
obvious, and that the NOR policy is being stretched to cover areas for which 
it was never intended. When it is pointed out that obvious arguments will be 
cited *somewhere*, the response is that some things are so obvious (e.g. 
"like the fact that the sun rises in the east") that it would actually be 
hard to find someone specifically stating them!  Then e-mails fly back and 
forth on the list, eventually everything dies down for two months, rinse and 
repeat.

Jay.