[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

Thu May 19 01:24:43 UTC 2005

On 5/18/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>>  This is amusing because the direction to avoid original
> > research is often taken merely as advice and only used as a rule when
> > there is conflict
> 
> That is not my understanding.  "No original research" is official policy.

Sure enough, but it's routinely ignored. I cited example of places
where you'll not only find it ignored but we'd have lesser articles as
a result.

'No original research' is a useful idea but it's not a crowing
achievement like NPOV, we'd be fools to follow it blindly, and I'm
glad to see that we do not. Often the cost of finding a citation (if
indeed one is available) for a particular point which is obvious to
anyone who has studied the references, is just too great.  As time
goes on we will find more and more things where the material in the
various wikiprojects is some of the highest quality material
available, and we would have to ask ourselves, must we cite inferior
inferior information because of a silly policy when no one disputes
what we would like to provide?

(not that no-orignal-research is silly, but rather almost any policy
applied blindly can be silly)