T P wrote:
On 2/27/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't see why we would look foolish for having good historical coverage. If a field was *ever* of enough note to have multiple reliable sources we can cite, then we ought to cover it, and that will still be true 15 and 150 years from now. The solution to imbalanced coverage between present-day and older stuff is not to reduce our generally thorough coverage of present-day stuff, but to greatly improve our much sparser coverage of anything older than 50 years. Was there some field of study that was briefly popular in 1830 but faded to insignificance by 1845? If anyone's written anything reliable about it that we can cite, then I'd like to be able to read an article on the subject.
That's a valid point. I am concerned, however, that people will write stuff in the heat of the moment and not go back and revise with the benefit of hindsight.
Yeah, I think that's worth watching out for. This is an issue even on topics that are *definitely* notable. For recent events, we use a lot of news articles as sources, since they're the only thing available. As an event gets less recent, we should start rewriting the articles to use reliable secondary sources written by historians and analysts, who are better equipped to filter and contextualize the news articles for us. Our article on World War II, for example, is based on books by historians, not on the original newspaper accounts. Our article on the recent war in Somalia, meanwhile, necessarily relies exclusively on original newspaper accounts. I would hope that in 5 or 10 years' time, when secondary sources on it become available, it will have been rewritten so it no longer does.
IMO, this is part of the gray area of "original research". Is writing an article on the war in Somalia directly from news reports original historical research? It depends partly on how the article is written---the more synthesis of narratives and analysis of the overall situation, the more it's treading into research territory. Once secondary sources do appear, it's important to try to get away from that gray area as much as possible and reduce our use of the contemporary news sources. So I can see your view that it would be better to just wait until the sources exist before writing an article at all. That would certainly be sounder, but I think our articles on recent topics provide an important enough service that it's worth muddling through the gray areas anyway, so long as they do eventually get returned to.
-Mark