[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Guettarda]

On 3/22/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/22/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> > > >I do not agree that stating that A sued B, when you have a court
> > document
> > > >stating that A sued B, is a "matter of interpretation involving
> > original
> > > >research."  In fact, I find this to be quite strange.
> > >
> > > Probably because you are thinking about it the "wrong" way.  Wrong in
> > > the context of a project which is explicitly conceived as a tertiary
> > > source verifiable from reliable secondary sources, that is.  How hard
> > > will it be to find a newspaper report and cite that?  If you can't,
> > > then it probably *is* trivial.
> >
> > Fine, it's trivial.  Trivial isn't the same thing as original research.
> >
> > If the source makes a statement, repeating the same claim made in the
> > statement is *not* a matter of interpretation.  Stretching the
> definition
> > of
> > original research and "interpretation" to claim that repeating something
> > verbatim or near verbatim is "interpretation" makes about as much sense
> as
> > saying that growing wheat for your own use is interstate commerce.  You
> > end
> > up with a policy that has no relation to what the words actually mean,
> and
> > which can be used to cover anything and everything without limit.
>
>
> Basically, as I understand it, the reason we ought not to have included
> the
> lawsuit is not because it's a novel interpretation of the facts, but
> because
> the facts have not been published by a secondary source. In theory, we
> could
> have articles about every lawsuit ever filed, but I think many people,
> even
> inclusionists, would balk at that - and for good reason. Like it or not,
> "notability" still plays a role (albeit a rather undefined one) in how we
> think about the encyclopaedia. And although we may not say it outright, it
> seems the present established status quo is that we establish sufficient
> notability by the existence of secondary sources. If it hasn't been
> covered
> by a secondary source, it probably isn't worth writing about.
> Encyclopaedias
> are tertiary sources.


The point isn't writing an article about a lawsuit, it's a matter of
including an explanation for the distinction between the Mega Society, the
Mega Society East and the Mega Foundation, especially since the article has
ample links to the Mega Foundation website.  Since the subject of the
article was once actively involved with the Mega Society, and after
splitting with them founded the Mega Society East, it all gets very
misleading.  Since the subject of the article was successfully sued over the
Mega Society East name, but it continues to show up in various bios (e.g.,
http://www.iscid.org/christopherlangan.php ), it's in Wikipedia's interest
to make the distinction clear.  We don't include disclaimers, and shouldn't
- but we should make sure that we are not misleading people.  Until the
section about the law suit was introduced, I couldn't figure out the
difference between the groups (both the [[Mega Society]] and the [[Mega
Foundation]] had Wikipedia articles at some point in the not too distant
past).