Delirium wrote:
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
Indeed, that text still appears in our 'No original research' policy. However, efforts to stamp out use of 'primary sources' to spread information that no other national (or international) 'news' / 'reporting' entity has deemed worthy of commenting on have led to a wide-spread view that 'primary sources' in general are bad. They aren't. Once something has been verified as notable we should often take primary sources OVER secondary ones.
I strongly disagree with that, and think this comes out of an unfortunately widespread view that non-scientific research isn't "really" research. Gathering, interpreting, cross-referencing, and checking the validity of the primary sources on an individual like, say, Thomas Jefferson, in order to write a biography about him, is original historical research, and best left to reputable historians. At Wikipedia, we should prefer secondary sources on his life---published biographies of Thomas Jefferson written by reputable historians. If you discover some new primary sources relating to his life that have not been mentioned in the existing secondary sources, that constitutes original historical research, and you should publish it in a history journal or book, or at the very least convince someone to write a newspaper article about it, before it should go into Wikipedia.
The same actually goes for too-close-to-primary secondary sources. We should not write our article on World War II by referring to contemporary newspaper reports, which were often wrong and require expertise to properly use, but instead should write it by referring to existing, published histories of World War II written by reputable historians.
I don't have the same faith in "reputable historians". Being reputable is often nothing more than a mastery of the party line. Historians certainly differ on whether dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a necessity or a war crime. Of course all agree that it was in fact dropped. For me NPOV is a far more important principle than NOR. Omitting something just because it has never been considered by "reputable" historians strikes me as unconscionable, and intellectually dishonest. If a new primary source contradicts the "reputable" historians it should be mentioned in the interests of NPOV; otherwise NOR is nothing more than an excuse for suppressing distasteful information.. In the case of Jefferson, are we to avoid quoting the Federalist Papers just because they are a primary source?
We want readers to think for themselves. We want them to consider alternative views. We don't want them to just cut and paste into their school essays. We want them to question the political correctness of "reputable" historians. We want them to be aware of how distortions can so easily arise en route from the primary to the secondary source.
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