[WikiEN-l] Rules, expertise, and encyclopedic standards

Wed Mar 9 19:54:37 UTC 2005

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."

-Mark