[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

[Steve Bennett]

On 12/20/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Someone who can read music should be able to report from
>  a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
>  specialist knowledge.  What the policy *should* require
>  (somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
>  the score is in E-flat.  The fundamental skills of the field
>  should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.

Not for all music. There are scores for which it requires more than
trivial music knowledge to know whether it's C major, A minor or
atonal. But I'm quibbling :)

> 4. Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not databases and
>  libraries."  Nobody suggested libraries.  I don't see that
>  databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that
>  the process of extraction of the information from the database
>  is verifiable.

More generally: We can use *anything* as a source. We just have to use
each source for the *right purpose*. You wouldn't use even the most
detailed academic research paper by the most respected researcher on
molecular biology to back up a statement about Pokemon. And it's
perfectly acceptable to use a cheap trashy blog as a source to back up
the statement "as Smith himself wrote...".

So there are no good sources and bad sources - just misuses of sources.

>  Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the
>  victims one by one.  I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the
>  victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.

You can cite the book, and even page numbers, so yeah.

>  It comes under "research that consists of collecting and
>  organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary
>  sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR)  I can't
>  see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all
>  the articles on a particular subject in a particular database
>  give the same story about something, provided that that
>  observation is one that anyone can verify.  Of course this
>  criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't
>  eliminate the cases where it is.

All these things are sliding scales. It's easy to objectively say "all
the victims were women". It's just *harder* to objectively say "all
the papers supported notion X". Maybe it's ok. Maybe it isn't.

Steve