J.F. de Wolff wrote:
On secondary sources: I note that many medical articles (my personal area) are amended to include news articles. If one searches the professional literature (e.g. with PubMed or even Google), the news articles are often overstatements of scientific findings. If one Japanese group discovers a peptide that decreases the rate of mitosis of neuroblastoma cell lines, the newspapers will blurb: "CURE FOR CANCER FOUND", even though this relates to ONE type of cancer in a petri dish, and even then it has not even been tested on patients, let alone approved by the regulatory authorities. The list of examples is endless. (I've made this one up, incidentally. But have a look at "recent findings" in the entry [[Inflammatory bowel disease]], which grew this way.) If Wikipedia seeks to make core science understandable to the lay public (one of the many aims of a good encyclopedia), it will have to include primary reference material, not ruminated and regurgitated news stories (even from the BBC or CNN).
I would expect this to be a routine activity, replacing news story links with journal references. If the article is complete enough to reference the research directly, it's unlikely that the news stories will have anything to add at that point, and we don't want any extlinks that don't supply additional information.
Ideally, those news stories will link to us for their "further reading" rather than the other way around.
Stan