Forum:Guidelines for original research

Unlike places like Wikipedia, The Sims Wiki relies on original research to fill in information about The Sims series. While fansites like SimsVIP, BeyondSims, Carl's Sims Guide, and others can provide information about content and serve as good references (especially for unreleased games where such reference citations are required) they cannot be relied upon to give extensive information about every facet of the games, especially older titles. As well, using information from those sources is tricky, as it is important that we do not plagiarize original works written on those sites. Therefore, The Sims Wiki does tend to rely on original research to fill in the gaps and to build complete and comprehensive articles.

While OR does have its place on The Sims Wiki, I feel that it may be time to write down some guidelines for how it is obtained, and how it is recorded here. Specifically, we should have some guiding principles regarding how this information is obtained, how it is recorded on the wiki, how it can be verified by other users if needed, how we can correct information that may be incorrect, and how we can resolve disagreements over information added to the wiki that is subjective (e.g. disagreements over a particular Sim's hairstyle, hair color, skin tone, or other physical attributes that cannot be objectively measured).

I can write up a guideline that we can then work to implement, but I'd like to get input first and foremost regarding how we should handle the issues I've mentioned, whether there are other issues that need to be addressed, and how we can make any agreed-upon process as user-friendly as possible.

--  LiR talk • blog  •  contribs 19:56, November 4, 2015 (UTC)


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