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Re: https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/citizendium-l/2006-October/000565.html
ZP = Zachary Pruckowski
ZP: Because of the "No Original Research" rule, no CZ article can ever be a
primary source.
In a lot of settings, people writing research papers should be referring to
only primary
and secondary sources, since they are essentially creating a secondary
source (combining
accounts, comparing and contrasting to analyze events and uncovering
trends). Therefore
a tertiary source isn't the best way to go. In a lot of circumstances,
that doesn't matter,
and CZ would then make a great resource. There is a proposal (on the
forums) to host primary
and secondary source papers in much the same way that Wikimedia Commons
hosts free images.
There is no way to keep the "No Original Research" rule and have
Citizendium (CZ) be
a primary or secondary source.
Zach & All --
For the sake of people who may not be familiar with the Wikipedia Patois,
let me just mention that the Big Three "Content Determining" Policies of
Wikipedia are the following:
1. No Original Research (NOR)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
2. Neutral Point Of View (NPOV)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
3. Verifiability (V) or (VER)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
These policies are intended to define what is meant by "sourced research",
which is the only sort of information content that Wikipedia is supposed
to contain.
When I first glanced at these policy pages back in December of 2005,
they seemed to say about the same thing that my junior high teachers
told us about the difference between Book Reports and Creative Writing,
and that my high school teachers taught us about writing research papers.
So far so good.
About the only practical problem that I noticed at that time, besides the
artificial acronyms, was the fact that the basic Rx was parcelled out over
three separate sites and that its precise wording tended to be changing all
the time, in a 3 ring circus, dog and pony and juggling act sort of fashion.
But the current state of these three policy pages is a total mess at the
present time
and no longer reflects standard scholarly understanding of things like sourced
research,
primary sources, secondary sources, the relative value of primary and secondary
sources
in research, and so on down the line.
By August of 2006, the situation got so bad that I had to begin a study
of how the Wikipedia policies had been mutated over time. For example,
here is the longitudinal dataset that I collected for Wikipedia's NOR:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:No_original_research/Historical_datapoints
The above dataset breaks off in August 2006,
but the deteriortaion in quality standards
became even more extreme after that time.
The best recommendation that I can make from this experience and study is
that Citizendium should not base its content quality standards on those
of Wikipedia, but should return to the standards and practices of
the already established research and scholarship communities.
Aside from this, I do not know yet if author-editor teams will be "signing"
articles, but depending on whether and how that is done it can chaange the
primary-secondary status of articles to some degree.
Jon Awbrey
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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
citizendium development forums: http://smf.citizendium.org
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=User:Jon_Awbrey
wikinfo: http://wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=User:Jon_Awbrey
wp review: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showuser=398
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