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

[jayjg]

On 12/22/06, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, jayjg wrote:
> > Read your own words; "Seems like an obvious conclusion to me..." You
> > are drawing your own conclusions, rather than quoting others who have
> > drawn those conclusions. In addition, by definition it is a *novel*
> > conclusion; if it weren't novel, then you'd be able to quote someone
> > who had come to the same conclusion.
>
> That only applies if *any conclusion whatsoever* is original research.  But
> that's not true.  Otherwise it would be original research to say that someone
> is more than 5 feet tall if the source just said they are 6 feet tall.
>
> So you can't just say "that's a conclusion, so it's original research".  You
> need to figure out exactly what types of conclusions are and aren't allowed,
> and then show that this particular conclusion falls into the prohibited
> category.
>
> I would argue that an *obvious* conclusion falls into the permitted category.
> The whole reason we accept conclusions like "he is 6 feet tall, therefore
> he is more than 5 feet tall" is that they don't require specialist training
> to make, and that nobody could seriously deny they are true--in other words,
> we accept such conclusions because they are obvious.

But we're not talking about trivially obvious conclusions; rather,
we're talking about conclusions based on complex actions that require
expert knowledge to conduct correctly, and even then don't always
produce accurate results.  The only *obvious* conclusion we can draw
in this case is "Daniel Smith ran this specific search on the catalog,
and it didn't return any results", which is hardly encyclopedic
information.

Jay.