[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

Tue Dec 19 15:28:03 UTC 2006

Thanks for everyone's replies.  I'll make a few comments.

1. The legal database (more properly, collection of legal journals)
   I was using when the question came up was HeinOnLine.  In my
   small city, it is available in one public library and two university
   libraries.  I'm sure the access is similar in other cities.  Similar
   resources like Lexis are also widely available in public libraries.
   So I don't think availability is an issue.

2. Jay is quite correct to discourage weasel words like "probably".
  For one thing, it prevents objective verification. 

3. Sarah points out the following text from WP:NOR :
      "anyone--without specialist knowledge--who reads the
      primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia
      passage agrees with the primary source. Any interpretation
      of primary source material requires a secondary source."
  That seems to be broken.  Examples of specialist knowledge
  which might be required are the ability to read a foreign 
  language and the ability to understand mathematical notation.

  Someone who can read music should be able to report from
  a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
  specialist knowledge.  What the policy *should* require
  (somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
  the score is in E-flat.  The fundamental skills of the field
  should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.

4. Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not databases and
  libraries."  Nobody suggested libraries.  I don't see that
  databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that
  the process of extraction of the information from the database
  is verifiable.

  Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the
  victims one by one.  I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the
  victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.
  It comes under "research that consists of collecting and
  organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary
  sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR)  I can't
  see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all
  the articles on a particular subject in a particular database
  give the same story about something, provided that that
  observation is one that anyone can verify.  Of course this
  criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't
  eliminate the cases where it is.

Zero.

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