On 3/17/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
Perhaps I sound a little territorial, here (of course the historian claims that being a historian is not easy), but I suspect that other people with other backgrounds will agree a bit on this. I'd rather have people write an encyclopedia based on secondary accounts than primary accounts -- the former will prove to be a collection of the current state of the knowledge (an encyclopedia), the latter will prove to be a collection of off-beat, missing-the-point, and thoroughly unaware and uninformed amateurisms.
I suspect you're wrong about this being universal. It may well be true for history, but in mathematics, for example, citing primary sources is perfectly reasonable and even desirable. The difference, of course, is that history, unlike mathematics, requires context and interpretation.
From what I have read, I think this would apply to mathematics as well. I
can't remeber the exact examples, but I recall reading that several key proofs of theorems recently have not been accepted, but rather, reviewers could find no errors. To do something comparable to what FF was talking about would be to quote directly from one of these proofs to support some argument - if the experts have a hard time interpreting these proofs, we can't take the word of any old editor that they have understood the proof.
Ian