Delirium wrote:
Michael Snow 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.
Broadly speaking, there are two possible kinds of historical narratives. One is to bring together various facts about a subject in reasonably coherent fashion, without imposing any interpretation on it. Done Wikipedia-style and well-referenced, I don't see the problem with this. I think as far as the "no original research" policy is concerned, this kind of historical narrative "exists", to use your phrasing, no matter that perhaps nobody has actually written it yet. I'm not sure how else you can justify having argued so strongly for including the history of the Brian Peppers phenomenon in Wikipedia. In fact, this is a great deal of what some of our better articles on obscure topics do. A thorough history of webcomics may not be possible until the secondary sources are better developed, but certainly enough primary sources are available to make a start at it.
The second kind of narrative is one structured to draw some particular conclusion or advance a theory. In this scenario the history is written with a specific thesis and attempts to show its validity. That approach isn't really necessary to writing a history of webcomics, though it's certainly a pitfall to watch out for.
--Michael Snow