World records in Pokemon speedrunning

I am going to make an effort to discourage the term "world record" in the context of Pokemon speedrunning. This is because most people see the term as synonymous with "best time," yet this is not the case in our community.

The leaders of Pokemon speedrunning decided in September 2014 that runs done on emulator are ineligible for world record. However, these runs are still submitted and approved at speedrun.com. When someone in a Pokemon chat asks "What's WR?" and another person links them to the leaderboards, they might see an emulated run at #1 and think it is the record. Or someone might say, "So-and-so has the record, but the best time is actually X," leading to even more confusion. The logical follow-up question to that response is, "Why is the best time not the record?" The answer is that emulated runs can be cheated more easily than console runs, and people are more likely to cheat when going for a world record.

So why is emulation allowed at all? Because some emulators play 100% accurately for certain categories, and the community didn't want to completely discourage emulator runners who lacked the resources to stream from console. So you can run on emulator, submit your time to speedrun.com and blend in with all the console runners, as long as your time isn't #1.

Unfortunately, I see far too many negative effects of this WR/best time split in our community today. Console runners settle for bad times because they no longer need to beat better runs to call themselves WR holders (examples: Red, Yellow, Gold, Sapphire). Emulator runners grind for top times and see their efforts questioned, laughed at or ignored (example: Gold). People in Twitch chats wonder whether top emulated runs were cheated, even though anyone with common sense can see that they weren't (example: Yellow). The community loses focus on what's important -- optimizing our speedgames -- in favor of an unhealthy obsession with world records. Yet the soft emulator ban remains in place of a better system, such as a hard ban or a commitment to thoroughly review suspicious runs.

I'm not writing this in an attempt to change the rules, but please understand that there is a difference between "world record" and "best time," and that I will no longer be using the former to reference Pokemon speedruns. And if nothing else, maybe having a different term will help us realize that being #1, legitimately or not, isn't that important after all.