On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Ken Arromdee <arrom...@rahul.net> wrote: > On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Rob wrote: >> The fact that original secondary sources were wrong in this case is >> immaterial. Errors in secondary sources should be a reason to dig up >> more secondary sources, not to make a point using primary ones. > > Wikipedia is already full of places where people are required to jump through > hoops merely because that's what the rules require, even if it doesn't > actually > help. This is another one.
No it's not. If the you've understood a rule as some formality that you must comply with when it clearly does not help you've misunderstood something. (Either the rule, the applicability of the rule, or that it helps; Even a poorly drafted rule can't bind you to pointless mechanisations: thats part of the core purpose of WP:IAR) > Searching far and wide to find a secondary source that quoted the primary > source gains you *nothing* except compliance with Wikipedia rules. The > secondary source isn't going to do any better fact-checking than you did when > you just looked at the primary source directly--it just fills a rules > requirement. If a secondary source isn't a synthesis and analysis of primary source material, then it's not really a secondary source. There is a lot of primary source material which is simply data: Stuff that has almost no sanity checking. "Number of votes cast. District 413: -32768". A decent secondary source, written by people familiar with the limitations of the primary material and with consideration of the available data and scholarship, is that sanity checking. Part of your confusion probably stems from that fact that wikipedians often treat news reports like secondary sources. Good reporting is a kind of scolarship, but good reporting is rare. More often news reporting is just a lossy regurgitation of primary source material (or wikipedia!) or even just barely informed speculation. But thats a problem with Wikipedia's misunderstanding the general worthlessness of news-media, not a problem with preferring secondary sources over primary sources. The whole notion of distinct classes of "primary source" and "secondary source" doesn't map especially well. To the extent that something is raw or unreviewed and otherwise single sourced it should be less preferred to references which are a synthesis from multiple sources, reviewed, and generally consisting of digested knowledge rather than raw facts. It's great to provide people with maximal access to primary source material, but the obvious conclusions drawn from it can be wrong this is why we need to reference scholarship rather than just tables of facts. An example I like of an uninformed analysis of the primary source material being misleading is http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/187/4175/398 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
