<<In a message dated 1/6/2009 5:33:44 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm writes:
The idea that we have to wait a few years for secondary sources to sort things out before we write about a piece of news would be very surprising to the people who edit biographical articles about current politicians and articles about the latest release in the Harry Potter series. The general practice on wikipedia is simply that if material is verifiable and a consensus of editors on a page favors it, then it can be included. Why would academic articles be different - why would we have to wait for history to judge a new mathematical theorem, when we don't have to wait for history to judge some political scandal? >>
That's not quite the case. "Verifiable" doesn't cover it all. That is why we have long side discussions on reliability and types of sources. That is why the talk pages of V and RS are some of the longest in the project.
New textbooks are being written *every year* on every topic imaginable. The idea that a person cannot find a new textbook on say "Differential Equations" published in the last *five* years and therefore must refer to Journal articles simply to establish notability, and then to introduce 14 new concepts, never published in any secondary text, is simply untenable. The greater likelihood is that they didn't try :)
Will Johnson
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On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:50:45PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
New textbooks are being written *every year* on every topic imaginable. The idea that a person cannot find a new textbook on say "Differential Equations" published in the last *five* years and therefore must refer to Journal articles simply to establish notability, and then to introduce 14 new concepts, never published in any secondary text, is simply untenable. The greater likelihood is that they didn't try :)
Textbooks labeled "Differential equations" will contain the same thing next year that they have for the past 50. In the same way, books labeled "Calculus" will not be amended to cover contemporary research in mathematical analysis. The "textbooks" that might cover contemporary results are graduate-level monographs, many of which are themselves primary sources because of the volume of unpublished material they contain.
- Carl