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