On 3/25/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Point remains, we don't use primary sources in the plant articles, such
as
the original research of a scientist published in a primary resource otherwise known as a peer-reviewed journal article, but rather we use
the
secondary information from the primary source, the primary source's introductory material or background material used in its conclusions,
and
use review articles (which, although this may be changing, not that I've seen) rather than conclusions originally and solely drawn in primary sources.
You could use primary sources, though. There is no rule against that. (You have to be careful to keep things neutral, but that shouldn't be too hard with papers about plants - just be careful if there is disagreement in the scientific community about something.) There is a rule against OR, which is why it's important to distinguish between the two.
The official description of a species is a primary source. If the description has been accepted by the governing international society there is no question of disagreement from the scientific community. The merger principle suggests that these definitions many not even be copyrightable. If they are to be meningful at all these descriptions will not change.
Ec
This is not correct, at least in botany, that if a species description is accepting by the ICBN, there is no question of disagreement, because the plant is not only about its description. That's what the journal Taxonomy publishes, in fact, the disagreements precisely of this nature. The morphological descriptions of the plants themselves don't change that much. There are a few exceptions. However, in zoology, this is not the case, due to the greater diversity of cellular structures and cell types found in animals compared to plants.
But I don't know that the point to all of this is. The descriptions of plants from their primary sources are not generally used as sources for Wikipedia articles. For one thing, they're written in botanical Latin. KP