Pin Eight:Original research

Unlike Wikipedia, this wiki accepts original research within the project's scope.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The whole goal of a general-interest encyclopedia is to summarize what reliable sources say about a given subject. To this end, encyclopedias implement verifiability policies. Specialized encyclopedias, such as scores of wikis on Wikia, may have similar policies with reliability defined relative to a specific field of interest.

This wiki, on the other hand, is not an encyclopedia as much as what Ward Cunningham's wiki calls a content creation wiki. (FSF might use a different term.) Many of the articles contain observations, conjecture, and synthesis about the real world, in other words, use of the scientific method.

Other articles focus on what TV Tropes calles wild mass guessing (WMG): educated guesses about things left unstated by the author of a work. Statements about a work's universe not supported by citations are not considered canon, and WMG pages are not endorsed by the author or publisher of the works in question.

In any case, if you think the arguments presented in an article are broken, or the sources used have been discredited, feel free to explain why on the article's talk page. You don't even need to register to leave a comment; just click "discussion" or "talk" at the top.

Templates
Visitors arriving through a link from another web site may initially see the Monobook skin of the MediaWiki user interface and assume that the article is intended as encyclopedic. You can clarify that an article is devoted to original research about the real world by adding or is good above the article's lead section. For original research about others' fictional universes, use WMG. (No such template is currently needed on pages about the "game world", the fictional universe created by contributors to this web site.) These templates drop pages into Category:Original research and its subcategory Category:Wild mass guessing respectively.