3. Sarah points out the following text from WP:NOR :
"anyone--without specialist knowledge--who reads the
primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia
passage agrees with the primary source. Any interpretation
of primary source material requires a secondary source."
That seems to be broken. Examples of specialist knowledge
which might be required are the ability to read a foreign
language and the ability to understand mathematical notation.
Someone who can read music should be able to report from
a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
specialist knowledge. What the policy *should* require
(somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
the score is in E-flat. The fundamental skills of the field
should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.
I agree, that needs to be changed, but I'm not sure what to. We need
to define what kind of specialist knowledge is ok, and what isn't. For
example, is being able to speak Latin acceptable specialist knowledge
to use, basically meaning Latin speakers can translate the primary
source in the article? (It's definately preferable to cite a
translation, but if there isn't one, it may or may not be ok for a
Wikipedian to translate it, we need to decide.)
4. Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not
databases and
libraries." Nobody suggested libraries. I don't see that
databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that
the process of extraction of the information from the database
is verifiable.
Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the
victims one by one. I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the
victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.
It comes under "research that consists of collecting and
organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary
sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR) I can't
see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all
the articles on a particular subject in a particular database
give the same story about something, provided that that
observation is one that anyone can verify. Of course this
criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't
eliminate the cases where it is.
The key point here is that your source for the statement that all the
papers say the same thing isn't just the papers, it's the database. If
there is a way to reliable cite the database, rather than just the
sources it contains (a link to the search results page, perhaps), then
it might be ok, but just citing the papers definately isn't.