On Feb 25, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
We have a more practical reason to base WP on secondary sources, which is that we don't have big-name experts writing the articles, so we fall back on amateurs acting as the experts' proxies, via published works. By their nature, primary sources are full of traps for the uninformed; in areas where I'm expert, I can look at a primary source and instantly know what its defects are likely to be, while a random person not only doesn't know about them, but doesn't even know that there *are* defects. (A falsified birth date in government records? How is that possible?! :-) )
Absolutely. Primary sources require skill. But the problem is that writing an encyclopedia entry requires skill. Wikipedia was never intended to be written by random people and idiots. It was intended to be written by volunteers. It's not idiot-proof. In fact, it depends on having experts on articles. The assumption is that someone who knows something about a topic will go to edit it. Yes, the system is succeptible to the clueless and the crazy. And the fix is to use the talk page, get reasonable people to come have a look at it, etc, etc. In cases where the clueless/crazy are particularly intractable we have a system whereby intelligent, sane people are given bansticks. And in bad cases we have the arbcom.
There is no good mechanism to have an encyclopedia written by idiots. If we do not assume that our userbase is primarily comprised of reasonably competent people who will follow the principles described we are screwed.
-Phil