User talk:Lord Voldemort~enwikibooks/Quicksand

No original research
I think that the entire concept of a wiki requires a common truth for the content to converge. Without a common truth, I can say one thing, you can claim the opposite, and we can keep overwriting the other indefinitely. This makes it an obvious choice to require NPOV content. Some level of verifiability is implicit in NPOV -- if you cannot verify content, how can you demonstrate that it is indeed neutral. That being said, I think that original research can be both NPOV and verifiable, in which case there is no reason to exclude it from Wikibooks. Encyclopedias are seldom the receptacle of novel information, so it makes sense to me that Wikipedia would exclude original research. What is required is a guideline/policy that permits the community to prevent content from cycling indefinitely, such as can happen with any content that is not verifiable. Incidentally, this is what permits science to progress: verifiability (or rather the inability to disprove things leads people to postulate commonly recognized theories). --Rs2 03:54, 22 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comments... I didn't quite know what should be done with a No Original Research policy, and that is why I didn't just put it into the Wikibooks namespace and start a poll. And although verifiability and NPOV are related, they are vastly different. Thanks again. -- LV (Dark Mark) 15:36, 22 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the biggest reason to have the no original research (NOR) policy is because we want wikibooks to be a repository for information, not theory. Also, we don't want wikibooks to become the poor man's substitute for a scholarly journal: scientific study and research needs to go through the proper, time-tested channels of peer reveiw and critique before they can be accepted as being "fact" and put into a public place where people can read and learn. If somebody conducts original research, and that research is then proven to be false, what becomes of the book here? does it suddenly qualify for deletion on the grounds of non-verifiability? We run the risk of simply collecting lots of junk that can't be verified, but also can't be debunked, because it is completely original. I think this policy is starting to look pretty good, and I would probably cast a vote for it once we get the text up to 100%. -- 01:57, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I (Kernigh) noticed the "no original research" policy in this sandbox. The current version discourages any kind of original research, and encourages all information in Wikibooks to be based on primary and secondary sources outside oof Wikibooks.

In fact, for books like Modern History, this seems reasonable. Actually, Wikipedia and Wikisource can be sources for that book. In contrast, I would get rid of Wikimania05, see Talk:Wikimania05.

However, I wonder how Wikibooks should handle the cases of Genetic transformator for block-based loss-less compression (GT) and Triangular Earth Calendar (TEC); both propose new concepts. Both are modified versions of primary source web pages, so it seems that the policy currently in this quicksand might accept them. (GT might be identical to the source document; I am not sure.) One potential problem is that the source documents might have been copied in by the authors of the source documents. This appears true, at least for TEC. (I am not sure, but Wikisource might have a rule against that.) I suppose that it is debatable whether to have modules like these two.

For Bourne Shell Scripting/Cookbook, that is original work. I wrote one of the three recipes. However, they are all short examples intended to demonstrate existing features of the Unix Bourne shell program, which is not our original work. I would support a policy that kept pages like this (maybe unless they were too large?). --Kernigh 04:11, 7 December 2005 (UTC)


 * You make some good points. But overall, I think that this policy could be effective in it's current state. We should probably allow some original research, such as the Bourne Cookbook page, but those could be determined on a case-by-case basis. But Wikibooks is not a place for actual original research that is intended to turned into a thesis or research paper. -- LV (Dark Mark) 15:25, 7 December 2005 (UTC)