[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

[Stephen Bain]

On 12/17/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, so now I am itching to write in Wikipedia
> something like: "The consensus amongst legal
> scholars is that opinion A is correct"  (or similar),
> with a footnote stating the evidence.
>
> Can I do that?  My sources were the best that exist,
> and everything I did can be verified easily by anyone
> with a good library.  On the other hand, I have drawn
> my own conclusions from these observations so
> maybe I'm afoul of the No Original Research policy.

Of course that's ok. Original research in that scenario would be to
say "the consensus among legal scholars is A, but they haven't
considered C, and therefore D is the correct position."

Original research is about posing new theories, or making new
inferences, or drawing new conclusions that are your own opinions and
involve some element of analysis or synthesis. Fundamentally, original
research is introducing your own original thought into articles.

Here you're simply stating an obvious fact: all sources support A.
Drawing conclusions from this in a way that amounts to original
thought would be something like "all sources support A and as a result
E, F and G".

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com