Carl Beckhorn wrote: > On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > >> Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary >> sources where there is no secondary source mention. >> That was deliberate. >> > > We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published > in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they > contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is > that these sources have to be considered "secondary sources" in order to > mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people > like to consider them "primary sources". > > The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be > silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more > applicable when "primary source" means "blog post". >
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That's what survey articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other papers, works like Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much better to cite those. To take an even more direct example, in the medical field, summarizing the results of all the studies that have been done on a particular subject is a "meta-analysis", and a publishable, first-class research project in itself. If no prominent meta-analysis in an area exists, it would be original research for Wikipedia to attempt to directly crawl through the primary literature and write our own, beyond something simple and non-committal like "studies have found both positive [1,2] and negative [3,4] results". An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing the paper that proves it. But if, say, an antidepressant was "shown to be no better than placebo"---now we're in a controversial, murky area, where anyone can cherry-pick primary sources to make an argument for all possible conclusions. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
