On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 00:37:38 +0800, "John Lee" <johnleemk(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Wait a minute. As I understand it, the policy Phil is
defending in his
present post states that primary sources are acceptable where the
interpretation drawn is not novel (i.e. new). This is how I understand our
policy, although Phil in another post seems to have criticised this
interpretation (that primary sources should not be cited unless there are
secondary sources available).
If there are no extant secondary sources, any
interpretation whatsoever of
the primary source is novel. I suppose one could argue for the face-value,
literal meaning interpretation as non-novel, but it's suprising how often
people can disagree on a literal reading of a source.
That's pretty much how I see it, too. A subject which has *no*
reliable secondary sources is probably unencyclopaedic, a subject
which is primarily drawn from reputable secondary sources may
undoubtedly contain individual facts drawn directly from primary
sources, provided no novel conclusions are proposed as a result.
And I suspect Phil and I would agree on the majority of calls either
way, although we might well disagree as to what constitutes a reliable
secondary source for a given article.
In some cases we have articles where the level of quality of the
source is reduced and reduced until a non-trivial one can be found, on
the grounds that it is "obviously notable", like bands that have
appeared on Eurovision.
And in some cases people are still psychologically back in the "good
old days" of 2004 and earlier, when we actually needed lots more
content. By now a pretty high proportion of new articles are vanity,
spam or both. And the spammers are getting smarter - some companies
now employ SEOs directly. But I digress.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
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