On 3/21/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/21/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
If Darwin was responding to the work of others than his book can no longer be considered a primary source.
"Primary" and "secondary" refer to how information is used. And most secondary sources become primary sources over time, anyway (Darwin's _Origin_ is now taken less as a scientific work than as an artifact of the 19th century evolutionary thought).
I think you have it all backwards. I do agree that reading the original is often much more difficult, and that secondary works fulfill a simplifying function. But any secondary interpretation imposes additional views, or creates distortions of the original material, or begins the cherry-picking process.
Of course it does. The goal is that the *experts* should be the ones doing the distortion and cherry-picking of the source material, not the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. That's the point of WP:NOR.
That might be a side effect on the ban on original research, but it's not the point. The point of banning original research is to ensure verifiability.
Having "experts" cherry-pick and distort (and I know you're being facetious here) may be your goal, but it's certainly not a consensus view.
I don't agree with the concept that Wikipedia's quality is dependent on there being experts to filter the content, whether as part of the editing process or through a ban on primary sources. I've found that consensus editing does an equivalently good job of filtering, especially when the line between expert and non-expert is deliberately left vague. For example, in articles about musical technique, scholars, practicing musicians, and music teachers all may be considered experts or non-experts considering what metric to apply, but all have important views and information to impart. Similarly with politics and yes, even history to some degree (depends especially how recent. I'd trust the analysis of medieval European history more from someone who can read medieval Latin.)
Now, string theory or elliptical curves or anaplerotic reactions are another matter.