On 3/21/06, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Well...IFF the dispute is over what the Quran says on a certain subject, then this is entirely justified.
OTOH interpreting the Quran seems to be a full-time job for near enough every single Muslim, so if they're arguing over interpretation, they need to be sourcing those different interpretations.
The lack of a clear line between "fact" and "interpretation" is never more evident than with scripture, but it is only an extreme variation of the sorts of things one is involved with in most historical texts. (And even scientific texts, with all of their attempts at standardization and specialization of language, can be quite ambiguous at times.)
Appealing to a primary source when the question is, "is the quote X or Y?" is of course useful and a basic part of fact checking. But I doubt that's the issue here (it rarely is, though in cases of translation even that aspect can be difficult to ferret out).
There is an anthropologist whose work I enjoy who talks about the use of scientific testimony in front of a jury and the ways in which certain forms of testimony, when presented in certain ways, make juries feel that they are cable of understanding a very difficult concept when they are in fact not. For example, if you juxtapose two brain scans which look very different, one which says "normal" underneath it and one which says "the client's", most jurors will think that it provides clear evidence to the client's brain abnormality. An expert on brains though would know that superficial analysis like this, relying only on two images at that (there are many types of "normal"), is practically worthless, and certainly that someone without training in neuroscience is not qualified to even make sense of such images. The anthropologist calls this sort of evidence "expert images," in that they give one the impression of being an expert, though real experts find them unclear and contestable. Anyway, I bring this up as just an analogy -- I think primary sources often serve as "expert sources" or something along those lines for Wikipedia users, which is why I am so cautious about people using them.
If we stick with secondary sources, then we dodge the problem alltogether. Furthermore, if Wikipedia cites a secondary source, it will never be "wrong" (viz. Nature) in a factual sense -- our greatest sin would then be one of picking the wrong sources or giving too much attention to marginal ones (which is a real question in and of itself, of course).
FF