Ray Saintonge wrote:
Now you open up the question, "What is
novel?" I absolutely agree
that we are ill-equipped to judge novel thinking, Too many look at
this from the distorted extremist lenses. If the dozens of sources
that I use for a historical argument are all "peer reviewed" sources
my argument is no longer novel. If we follow the severely
restrictive approach to "original research" that some people are
proposing our encyclopedia would be full of nothing but dumbed-down pap.
I suppose I'd define "novel" as "making a substantial claim that
hasn't been made before", which is obviously subjective, but I don't
think it's possible to make a clear-cut definition.
For example, one of the culinary articles (which I forget at the
moment) had a section on the etymology of a word that was essentially
a reconstruction of the word's history personally done by a
Wikipedian, through a combination of primary and secondary sources.
That, to me, is original etymological research and not appropriate for
first publication in Wikipedia. We instead should cite only published
etymologies, such as "the OED claims this, but some other guy in his
book _Blah_ claims this other thing."
On Wiktionary if someone were to present such etymological research I
would be inclined to say, "Well done!" I would usually not consider it
as "original" but as a synthesis of existing sources. The OED is a
well-respected source, but it's not the only one that I use. More often
than not the difference between the OED and other etymologies is a
matter of detail and degree, and not of completely contradictory views.
I also regard the secondary sources as published etymologies. As yet, I
know of no rule that confines us to a set of select orthodox
etymologies. I read the term "published etymology" as any published
work that deals in whole or in part with etymology no matter when it was
published.
Ec