"Thomas Dalton" wrote
I think it's best to stop talking in terms of
original research and
talk about reliability of sources (which is the main reason the OR
rule exists, it's a special case of WP:RS).
Historically that's quite wrong. 'Original research' came into policyland as a
Jimbo intervention against cranks on the science pages. 'Citing sources' was one
of things that floats up from the frontline areas of highly contentious pages.
'Verifiability' was an attempt to amalgamate NOR and 'cite sources'; and
RS is a needed guideline to support our notion of verifiability.
It is not exactly satisfactory that our policies have this kind of path-dependence (in
some sense one has to understand why they got there). But the history does have a role to
play in explaining things. Especially because consensus on policies is hardly perfect.
Charles
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