[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Arie van Buuren]

Wow, very fast response. Thanks.

Also a note that where I wrote "Information without sources that provide a 
context" I intended to write "Information without sources that provide such 
context" which is somewhat more specific.

AvB

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at wikia.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 4:22 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR


> This all sounds about right to me.  Context matters, of course, and so I
> think there is a huge red herring here if we too simplistically compare
> potentially libelous or simply hurtful information in a biography of a
> living person with arcane information from academic journals, etc.
>
>
>
> Arie van Buuren wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
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