[WikiEN-l] The onward march of the meaning of "original research"

[Fastfission]

Perhaps it is better to think of OR less as a "thing" out there to be
defined but as an "ideal" which will inevitably and forever present
tough distinctions about what is or is not OR but in the end will
hopefully develop a productive tension.

The goal of the OR policy is not to necessarily shoot everything which
could potentially be OR on the spot. As has been noted many times OR
can be applied to all sorts of instances -- ever act of synthesis has
a little bit of OR in it. However it is only in contentious cases that
the OR rule needs to be pulled out -- places where there actually are
people arguing against it.

If the identification of a picture of an animal is controversial, then
surely the question of OR could surface on some level. I think that
would be quite healthy on the whole. OR should not, and is not (as far
as I know), used to pre-emptively shoot things down which are
uncontroversial.

I don't think it is necessarily useful or necessary to worry about
every eventuality of what is or is not OR. There is no such thing as
"Original Research" which sits out there in the world in some sort of
Aristotlean ideal form, and there is no simple criteria for telling
what is or is not going to be OR. This should not dismay us, nor does
it invalidate it as a useful heuristic or as a regulation. 150 years
of philosophers arguing on the subject have produced no definition of
"science" that covers all things that people generally consider to be
"science" and excludes things which people generally consider to be
"non-science" (see [[problem of demarcation]] if curious), but that
has not stopped it from being a productive and useful category, if an
essentially contested one.

FF

On 5/2/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/2/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't see what's original research about this.
>
> It's all a matter of definition. Under some definitions, Wikipedia
> thrives on original research and could not exist without it. We are
> all researchers the moment we decide to pick a topic, study the
> sources, evaluate them carefully, weigh expert against expert and make
> decisions about what to include and what to omit, how to arrange the
> text, which "NPOV" terms to use, and so on.
>
> Our original research policy does not exist without a reason, of
> course. It exists so we can prevent material from being added which is
> either obviously spurious, or which we have no means to verify.
> Essentially, I have always seen it as a useful supplement to
> [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]].
>
> When the policy is used to remove legitimate information that is
> clearly correct, or to impede the daily work of contributors against
> all common sense, it is used against its original purpose and should
> be interpreted in that light. Policy is a means to an end, not an end
> in itself.
>
> Erik
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