[WikiEN-l] original research

Mon Dec 6 09:17:01 UTC 2004

David Gerard wrote

> >Charles Matthews  wrote
> > I don't think 'original research' should cover original scholarship.
That's
> > a stretch.

> I don't think it is. Wikipedia is not somewhere people writing on a
subject
> should be coming to new conclusions.

Take [[apple pie]], which cites an original source.  WP doesn't need to
police whether the conclusions drawn are safely derivative or not.  (That's
apple sauce - sorry.)  Any  more than if I wander around Cambridge and see
something encyclopedic, I need first to check that it's in a guidebook.

That being said, 'secondary source' is a  good enough definition to go into
a WP mission statement, such as 'master secondary source on the Web'.

Charles