Daniel Mayer declared that:
...Wikipedia is not a primary source. Once and /if/ that person is able to get a real publisher to publish their autobiography, then and /only/ then do we use their autobiography as a source. We need some sort of filter.
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?
I thought our original aim was to have articles written by contributors who actually know something about what they're writing. People are always encouraging me to spend less time editing other contributors' work or rewriting factoids I discover on-line on in books -- and more time contributing my unique knowledge of my two areas of expertise: the Unification Church and software development.
Last year and the year before that, a lot of the talk on this mailing list was about how to attract experts in their fields; how to avoid driving them away once we hooked them. Have we given up on that goal?
Is Wikipedia destined to be little more than an annotated collection of web links and bibliographical references? If so, I'm going to continue to lose interest in the project.
I want Wikipedia to become MORE authoritative, not less.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed