[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's destiny

[Steve Bennett]

On 2/27/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> >If the history of webcomics has not yet been written, that would be a
> >good reason to write it on Wikipedia.
> >
> That seems directly contrary to the long-established "no original
> research" policy.  When it comes to history articles, Wikipedia is not
> the place to publish novel historical narratives of any sort, whether
> they be on the Cold War or on webcomics, but a place to document
> *existing* historical narratives.

Isn't "novel" the key word here? There is nothing particularly novel
about compiling a list of brief, sourced,  synopses of every work by a
major author, for example. Stating that increasingly frequent
references to the devil were caused by the author's impotence might
well be "novel".

A measure of "novelness" might be how likely another editor is to
dispute the accuracy of your compilation. It seems quite likely to me
that one can compile an undisputed history of webcomics. And should.

> "If you have an idea that you think should become part of the corpus of
> knowledge that is Wikipedia, the best approach is to arrange to have
> your results published in a peer-reviewed journal or reputable news
> outlet, and then document your work in an appropriately non-partisan
> manner."

That's consistent with my view. If you wish to contribute unpublished
information about the history of any webcomic, Wikipedia is not the
place. But if you just want to compile published information from
various places into one complete record, then within various
constraints, Wikipedia is a great place for that.

IMHO.

Steve