Daniel Mayer declared that:
...Wikipedia is not a primary source. Once and /if/ that person is able to get a real publisher to publish their autobiography, then and /only/ then do we use their autobiography as a source. We need some sort of filter.
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?
I thought our original aim was to have articles written by contributors who actually know something about what they're writing. People are always encouraging me to spend less time editing other contributors' work or rewriting factoids I discover on-line on in books -- and more time contributing my unique knowledge of my two areas of expertise: the Unification Church and software development.
Last year and the year before that, a lot of the talk on this mailing list was about how to attract experts in their fields; how to avoid driving them away once we hooked them. Have we given up on that goal?
Is Wikipedia destined to be little more than an annotated collection of web links and bibliographical references? If so, I'm going to continue to lose interest in the project.
I want Wikipedia to become MORE authoritative, not less.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
--- "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source? ...
Er, a primary source would be the /first/ place a new fact is published (such as a journal). Sorry, but we are not such a place.
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?
Er, a primary source would be the /first/ place a new fact is published (such as a journal). Sorry, but we are not such a place.
That's not the usual meaning of primary source. It generally refers to documents directly related to an event, original manuscripts, archival material, etc. Any written book or article based on these materials by a person who was not directly involved is a secondary source.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Er, a primary source would be the /first/ place a new fact is published (such as a journal). Sorry, but we are not such a place.
That's not the usual meaning of primary source. It generally refers to documents directly related to an event, original manuscripts, archival material, etc. Any written book or article based on these materials by a person who was not directly involved is a secondary source.
This seems to vary by field. In a field such as classics, journals are indeed secondary sources, containing discussion of primary sources (which would include things like Aristophanes's plays). In scientific fields, journals are generally primary sources: a documentation of novel research written by those who performed the research. In this context, a textbook or encyclopedia article on neural networks is a secondary source, but the classic journal article by Kohonen documenting self-organizing maps is a primary source. And I think that's the sort of stuff we're trying to avoid.
-Mark
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?
[...]
I want Wikipedia to become MORE authoritative, not less.
The best way for Wikipedia to become more authoritative is to steadfastly refuse to be a primary source. A primary source isn't primary because it's authoritative, it's primary because it is the first or original source for something. Primary sources can be unreliable, reliable, biased, whatever.
There's no shame in being a secondary source, and secondary sources is where the authority business gets really strong and interesting. :-)
For us, as a social culture, avoiding the idea of being a primary source helps us to resolve some otherwise impossible dilemmas. Do we publish quack physics theories? No, because we are not a place for original research.
--Jimbo
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 11:03 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Primary sources (was: Clearer policy on self-writtenand obscure biographies)
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?
[...]
I want Wikipedia to become MORE authoritative, not less.
The best way for Wikipedia to become more authoritative is to steadfastly refuse to be a primary source. A primary source isn't primary because it's authoritative, it's primary because it is the first or original source for something. Primary sources can be unreliable, reliable, biased, whatever.
There's no shame in being a secondary source, and secondary sources is where the authority business gets really strong and interesting. :-)
For us, as a social culture, avoiding the idea of being a primary source helps us to resolve some otherwise impossible dilemmas. Do we publish quack physics theories? No, because we are not a place for original research.
--Jimbo
One point of view (Ed's) could be seen as thesis, the other (Jimbo's et.al.) as antithesis.
We might be ready for the synthesis: Wikipedia (just like any printed encyclopaedia) is not the place to publish one's original research. But it certainly does not do any harm (rather the opposite I'd guess) if people who in real life carry out research themselves also contribute to Wikipedia about topics related to their own field: They are usually educated, principled, intellectual, and trying not to appear biased, and I think Wikipedia should try to attract them.
Kurt (aka KF)