[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Arie van Buuren]

Jimbo, could you please comment on the following attempt to understand your 
point?

We often need to know the relative importance of  information in the context 
of an article. An important use is to e.g. establish attribution (who hold 
this POV; are they the majority, a minority, a tiny minority), or relevance 
(is it relevant to many people; is this between the subject and a limited 
number of others; how widely has it been reported/interpreted/analyzed?) To 
discover this, we will virtually always need reliable, secondary sources: 
the mere *existence* of a primary source whose actual number of visitors is 
unknown (such as court records) does not tell us anything about its 
importance, while both the existence of e.g. books or mainstream media 
reports on the information and the interpretations/analysis/etc they 
provide, may tell us what we need to know.

Information without sources that provide a context, constitutes original 
research - not to the degree that it is untrue, but to the degree that we do 
not *know* how (un)important it is and are relying on our personal insights 
instead. We should err on the side of caution by not including it in the 
encyclopedia.

Thanks,

AvB