On 4/14/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/14/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote: Honestly, I think that is taking WP:NOR way too far. A book summary is one of the easiest things to verify, just pick up the book and see for yourselves. It is easy to spot where there is strict outlining of the facts, and it is just as easy to see where the author inserts his own opinion or analysis. For instance, take [[Pride and Prejudice]]. It contains a long detailed summary of what's in the book. What if we were to ask for a source that Mr Collins first proposed to Elizabeth Bennet and, when turned down, asked Charlotte Lucas. The contributor would probably say "Just read the damn thing and see for yourselves!" And he'd be right, that is by far the best way, instead of relying on a third party, which may or may not be entirely trustworthy (and migth be hard to find).
As he said, in most cases summaries are not an issue. But "see for yourselves" does not work for any claims which are not strictly about who did what at what time. For example, I could write something in the [[Origin of Species]] article which claims that this book actually is an explicit call to overthrow the British upper-classes. Someone else would no doubt object. I am sure I could cite pages and lines from the book which support such a goofy interpretation (but one not uncommon in the late 19th century). But in this case, it would be clear that my "summary" was considerably different than practically every secondary interpretation of the book. This is where the NOR rule is handy -- it helps you clean out people's idiosyncratic interpretations of primary sources, of which the internet abounds (if you believed what you read online, Albert Einstein was a card-carrying believer in every religion and philosophy on the planet -- everybody likes to find some way to relate Einstein's vague metaphysical writes to their own personal outlook). When something is in real doubt (not a matter of uncontested facts), we should go with the secondary literature.
One can also get all philosophical and say that when you something
from a secondary source, you do the same thing, you analyze and parse the information and put it in your own words. Infact, besides making straight-copyvio copies of text, arn't we all breaking WP:NOR by simply contributing? However, that argument is just plain silly :P
I run into issues like this pretty regularly. The older a source is, and the more people can relate it to something contemporary, the more you get this. If you do anything at all on major intellectual figures then I imagine it comes up pretty often. Again, in many situations summaries and quotations are unproblematic and, as such, generally unchallenged. When people raise an eyebrow, though, that's when the NOR really kicks in with a fury. And lo, it is good.
FF