The thing about citations and against derivations from first principles is deliberate and (so long as participation is open to everybody) I think removing it could do more harm than keeping it: it’s hard to tell if a derivation from first principles in a field you’re not familiar with is valid, so short of somehow magically increasing the number of (say) editors with a PhD in physics by a factor of 10, allowing OR would essentially give free rein to crackpots, since there wouldn’t be that many people around who could find the flaws in their reasoning. Right now, they (at least in principle) would have to find peer-reviewed publications supporting their arguments, which is not as easy as posting some complicated derivation and hoping no-one finds the errors.
One big problem with Wikipedia (which I’m not sure could be fixed even in principle) is that sometimes you’re not allowed to taboo words, because you’re essentially doing lexicography. If the question is “Was Richard Feynman Jewish?”, “He had Jewish ancestry but he didn’t practise Judaism” is not a good-enough answer if what you’re deciding is whether or not the article about Feynman should be in the category for Jewish American physicists; if the question is “Was an infant who has since become a transsexual woman a boy?”, answering “it had masculine external genitalia but likely had feminine brain anatomy” is not good enough if what you’re deciding is whether the article should say “She was born as a boy”; and so on and so forth. (There once was an argument about whether accelerometers measure inertial acceleration even though both parties agreed about what an accelerometer would read in all of the situations they could come up with, because they meant different things by inertial acceleration. What happened is that someone come up with other situations such as magnetically levitating the accelerometer or placing it somewhere with non-negligible tidal forces, and the parties did disagree about what would happen. (My view is that then you’re just misusing the accelerometer, and drawing any conclusions from such circumstances is as silly as saying that resistance is not what ohmmeters measure because if you put a battery across an ohmmeter, what it reads is not the internal resistance of the battery. But IIRC, rather than pointing that out I just walked away and left Wikipedia, even though I later came back with a different user name.)
Agreed that removing the condition against first principles would perhaps screw stuff up more.
But the attitude against original research is uncalled for. When there’s someone who misunderstands the quoted articles, you can’t just go ahead and refer to first principles, noooo thats original research, and the attitude is: i’m not ashamed i’m instead proud i don’t understand topic we’re talking about, i’m proud i don’t (because can’t) do original research. Non experts come up with all sorts of weird nonsense interpretations of what experts say, that experts would never even feel need to publish anything to dispel. And then you can’t argue with them rationally, they proudly reject any argumentation from first principles.
Huh, yes. OR shouldn’t be allowed into articles but it should on talk pages. (Plus, some people use a ridiculously broad definition of OR. If I pointed out that the speed of light in m/s is exact and the number of metres in a yard is exact and proceeded to give the exact value of the speed of light in imperial units, and I called that original research of mine anywhere outside Wikipedia, I’d be (rightly) laughed away. Hell, even my pointing out that the word Jewish has several meanings was dismissed as OR, by someone who insisted that on Wikipedia the only possible meaning of Jewish is ‘someone who a reliable source refers to as Jewish’.
If I pointed out that the speed of light in m/s is exact and the number of metres in a yard is exact and proceeded to give the exact value of the speed of light in imperial units
someone who insisted that on Wikipedia the only possible meaning of Jewish is ‘someone who a reliable source refers to as Jewish’.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want to use a more nuanced concept to refer to someone, you could always find a reliable source who has used that nuanced concept to refer to the person. Or you could do the OR somewhere else and then someone else can use that to improve the article.
If I pointed out that the speed of light in m/s is exact and the number of metres in a yard is exact and proceeded to give the exact value of the speed of light in imperial units
For some time, they claimed that converting exact values as rational numbers (as opposed to conversions with a finite number of sigfigs) is not a routine calculation. (To be honest, I’m not sure I remember what eventually happened. [goes to check] Oh, yeah. The footnote stayed because we did find a citation. Not that I’d normally consider the personal website of a cryptographer as a reliable source, but still.)
The thing about citations and against derivations from first principles is deliberate and (so long as participation is open to everybody) I think removing it could do more harm than keeping it: it’s hard to tell if a derivation from first principles in a field you’re not familiar with is valid, so short of somehow magically increasing the number of (say) editors with a PhD in physics by a factor of 10, allowing OR would essentially give free rein to crackpots, since there wouldn’t be that many people around who could find the flaws in their reasoning. Right now, they (at least in principle) would have to find peer-reviewed publications supporting their arguments, which is not as easy as posting some complicated derivation and hoping no-one finds the errors.
One big problem with Wikipedia (which I’m not sure could be fixed even in principle) is that sometimes you’re not allowed to taboo words, because you’re essentially doing lexicography. If the question is “Was Richard Feynman Jewish?”, “He had Jewish ancestry but he didn’t practise Judaism” is not a good-enough answer if what you’re deciding is whether or not the article about Feynman should be in the category for Jewish American physicists; if the question is “Was an infant who has since become a transsexual woman a boy?”, answering “it had masculine external genitalia but likely had feminine brain anatomy” is not good enough if what you’re deciding is whether the article should say “She was born as a boy”; and so on and so forth. (There once was an argument about whether accelerometers measure inertial acceleration even though both parties agreed about what an accelerometer would read in all of the situations they could come up with, because they meant different things by inertial acceleration. What happened is that someone come up with other situations such as magnetically levitating the accelerometer or placing it somewhere with non-negligible tidal forces, and the parties did disagree about what would happen. (My view is that then you’re just misusing the accelerometer, and drawing any conclusions from such circumstances is as silly as saying that resistance is not what ohmmeters measure because if you put a battery across an ohmmeter, what it reads is not the internal resistance of the battery. But IIRC, rather than pointing that out I just walked away and left Wikipedia, even though I later came back with a different user name.)
Agreed that removing the condition against first principles would perhaps screw stuff up more.
But the attitude against original research is uncalled for. When there’s someone who misunderstands the quoted articles, you can’t just go ahead and refer to first principles, noooo thats original research, and the attitude is: i’m not ashamed i’m instead proud i don’t understand topic we’re talking about, i’m proud i don’t (because can’t) do original research. Non experts come up with all sorts of weird nonsense interpretations of what experts say, that experts would never even feel need to publish anything to dispel. And then you can’t argue with them rationally, they proudly reject any argumentation from first principles.
Huh, yes. OR shouldn’t be allowed into articles but it should on talk pages. (Plus, some people use a ridiculously broad definition of OR. If I pointed out that the speed of light in m/s is exact and the number of metres in a yard is exact and proceeded to give the exact value of the speed of light in imperial units, and I called that original research of mine anywhere outside Wikipedia, I’d be (rightly) laughed away. Hell, even my pointing out that the word Jewish has several meanings was dismissed as OR, by someone who insisted that on Wikipedia the only possible meaning of Jewish is ‘someone who a reliable source refers to as Jewish’.
That’s not reasonably called OR on Wikipedia either. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Routine_calculations
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want to use a more nuanced concept to refer to someone, you could always find a reliable source who has used that nuanced concept to refer to the person. Or you could do the OR somewhere else and then someone else can use that to improve the article.
For some time, they claimed that converting exact values as rational numbers (as opposed to conversions with a finite number of sigfigs) is not a routine calculation. (To be honest, I’m not sure I remember what eventually happened. [goes to check] Oh, yeah. The footnote stayed because we did find a citation. Not that I’d normally consider the personal website of a cryptographer as a reliable source, but still.)