On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: > 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 sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on). One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way. > 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. This is exactly the situation. Being "encyclopedic" means that our articles will often include slightly obscure (but still relevant) results and facts, the type of results that will not appear in an introductory textbook. These can sometimes be cited to gradtuate textbooks, but other times the primary literature is the best source. This is especially true if we're looking for a source that comes out and says something directly, to make it easier for a half-trained reader to verify the citation. The situation with medical research is entirely different, unless there are some medical journals publishing papers that employ the axiomatic method. > 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. Mathematical Reviews should be cited extremely rarely on wikipedia (I could go on about this issue, since I'm a mathematician, but I won't). If other papers are classified as "primary sources" then we run into the problems Phil has been complaining about. Also, it's possible for several articles to talk about the same "idea" without explicitly mentioning each other, depending on how meticulous the authors' citation practices are. - Carl _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
