Charles Matthews wrote:
Take [[apple pie]], which cites an original source. WP doesn't need to police whether the conclusions drawn are safely derivative or not. (That's apple sauce - sorry.) Any more than if I wander around Cambridge and see something encyclopedic, I need first to check that it's in a guidebook.
Yeah, this is somewhat of a tricky issue. My personal barometer is that if I'm documenting facts with a minimum of interpretation, then all I need is some reference for the facts. But if I'm making an interpretation, I try to confine it to interpretations that have been made before, rather than trying to synthesize primary sources myself.
In a few cases, like [[industrial music]], there's no authoritative scholarship in the field (indeed, very little scholarship at all), so some amount of original research contentiously creeps in, but there's still an attempt to document "prevailing opinion", as far as information on it can be found, and trying as much as possible to avoid making novel musicological arguments and categorizations.
-Mark