User:Mesocarp/The Sources-Conclusion Noticeboard

The idea here is for a noticeboard I'm calling "The Sources-Conclusion Noticeboard" :P. The idea is that you ask questions of the form, "Do sources X, Y, and Z support the conclusion A?" I think this could take the place of both NPOV/N and NOR/N.

We know that RS/N works fairly well, or at least it seems to me that that's so. People regularly cite conversations there in distant disputes to support a use case for a source, and it does have a fairly impressive rhetorical effect at least to many editors. A temptation exists to "overplay" the results of discussions there, but to some extent that's just a downside of having a noticeboard, since they sort of exist to be authoritative.

That perspective on noticeboards invites a comparison to RfCs, which are also a sort of "all-purpose authoritative conversation generator."

Although, I guess, in a way, questions like that would also be fair game for RfCs. The thing about RfCs, though, is that they're always positioned within a larger venue, such as a talk page, village pump, noticeboard, etc. A noticeboard is itself a venue, which gives the debate a different character—a more general character, one where you imagine a question would be posed quite tersely and could plausibly impact a variety of articles at once. An RfC can plausibly affect only one article (sometimes fiercely-contested articles accumulate their own interesting history of RfCs and so on), and noticeboards can have their own RfCs. RfCs draw users who sign up for the RfC category, whereas noticeboards draw users who are interested in answering the class of questions posed on the given noticeboard. 🍉◜⠢◞ↂ🄜𝚎sₒᶜa𝚛🅟ම𛱘‎🥑《 𔑪‎talk〗⇤ 21:55, 29 October 2023 (UTC)