John Lee wrote:
On 4/3/07, David Gerard wrote:
On 02/04/07, Seraphim Blade wrote:
In reply to Phil, as to how that guts NOR: The entire point of NOR is that you do -not- use your own "editorial judgment" when writing an article, you use information in reliable secondary sources. It also helps to ensure that information is relevant-sometimes, something can be technically true, but also irrelevant. I'd ask the same question-why should we adopt the role of "first reporter"? If someone wants to do that, isn't that what Wikinews is for?
This appears to be the sort of obsession with replacing editorial judgement with rules that makes Wikipedia into a red tape obstacle course.
Unfortunately, good sense and quality cannot in fact be Taylorised.
It's an unfortunate truth that many of our editors aren't exactly capable of exercising good editorial judgment. Also, while I disagree that we should replace editorial discretion with rules, it's certainly non-contestable that WP is never the right place for the role of "first reporter".
The solution, I think, is to stay true to NOR as it has always been: don't use primary sources unless you are using them to present a non-novel interpretation.
At least this is an improvement over those who seem intent Nobody is arguing in favour of being "first reporter", which would be about creating primary sources. The discussion is about using primary sources. The likely result of a fixation on secondary sources is that those sources would be preferred even when they contradict the primary source.
Ec