[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

Mon Dec 18 14:46:20 UTC 2006

On 18/12/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 12/17/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> OR is when you go out and test the evidence yourself. Finding sources to
> >> corroborate a point is called research, not original research.
> >
> > No. In Wikipedia, OR is when you do the interpretation of evidence
> > yourself. We should simplify the OR rule to make this clearer:
> > "Wikipedians are dumb. We cannot interpret, only repeat."
> >
>
> So, in theory every entry could be written by a bot, eh?
>
> /me imagines RamBot adding articles on every court decision and piece of
> legislation...

I'm manually writing articles on pieces of legislation - sadly the
data isn't available to make it bot-generable, otherwise I'd set that
going and tidy the results up.

Which neatly brings out another aspect of pushing-OR. I open my copy
of "Tudor Constituional Documents", and proceed to write something
like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridges_Act_1530
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_Act_1555

The problem is, all that the source contains is (a translation of?)
the original text; I've recast it in a more modern style and converted
from long and tedious legalese to a fairly comprehensible precis, but
I've done it solely working from the original and not from any
secondary synopsis of the Act.

Is this original research? If not, why not - where does "rewriting"
end and "interpreting" begin? Does it depend on the complexity of the
source document?

I think I'm in the clear - but I'm curious to know where we would draw
a line on this sort of thing.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk