[WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

[Carl Beckhorn]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
> I'm not comfortable with the idea that Wikipedia is going to be the  *source* 
> for a new summary and synthesize of primary source material.
> That is the very position that we strove to exclude in the policy  language.

An issue here is that there is a continuum between "list of" articles 
and "prose" articles, not a discrete spectrum.  On one hand, we 
probably all agree that [[List of cathedrals]] is permitted to draw from 
as many primary sources as desired provided that there are clear and 
appropriate criteria for inclusion. That is, nobody would say we have to 
directly copy our list of cathedrals from a list someone else has 
compiled, or that it even has to cite secondaryu sources at all. 

One step removed from this are articles like 
[[List of cohomology theories]]. These, again, are permitted to draw 
from primary sources at will, provided the standards for inclusion are 
valid. 

One step further are articles that consist of a series of summary-style 
paragraphs on several related topics. These are essentially glorified 
disambiguation pages. One example is [[Reduction (recursion theory)]]. 
In this particular case there are plenty of secondary sources, but
if we were to really tighten up the referencing some things would need 
to be cited to journals. And none of the sources presently included 
would be readily understandable by an untrained reader, apart from 
the verification of direct quotes. 

 - Carl