<<In a message dated 1/2/2009 3:09:03 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
The issue is that we want to be very, very careful in how we summarize and use primary sources. But their use, generally speaking, is more or less a fact of life.>> --------------------------- Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary sources where there is no secondary source mention. That was deliberate.
Will Johnson
**************New year...new news. Be the first to know what is making headlines. (http://www.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000026)
On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary sources where there is no secondary source mention. That was deliberate.
We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is that these sources have to be considered "secondary sources" in order to mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people like to consider them "primary sources".
The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more applicable when "primary source" means "blog post".
But as long as we try to treat * Inventiones Mathematicae * Being and Time * drudgereport.com as the same type of "primary source", we're doomed to an incoherent policy.
- Carl
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Carl Beckhorn cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm wrote:
[...] But as long as we try to treat
- Inventiones Mathematicae
- Being and Time
- drudgereport.com
as the same type of "primary source", we're doomed to an incoherent policy.
Perhaps it is time to simply separate out RS into domain-specific subpolicies that acknowledge this, and avoid the whole problem for everything not in the humanities...
RS as a very high level guideline, with RS-SCIENCE and RS-MEDIA and RS-BIOGRAPHY and RS-PHILOSOPHY as subpolicies as applicable, etc...
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 8:11 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Carl Beckhorn cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm wrote:
[...] But as long as we try to treat
- Inventiones Mathematicae
- Being and Time
- drudgereport.com
as the same type of "primary source", we're doomed to an incoherent policy.
Perhaps it is time to simply separate out RS into domain-specific subpolicies that acknowledge this, and avoid the whole problem for everything not in the humanities...
RS as a very high level guideline, with RS-SCIENCE and RS-MEDIA and RS-BIOGRAPHY and RS-PHILOSOPHY as subpolicies as applicable, etc...
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Yes, because subguidelines haven't been a train wreck for things like notability, and led to total incoherency where one main guideline would serve far better, or...
Oh, wait.
Using primary sources as described, for purely descriptive claims, is not a problem. Rather, treat the criticism itself with the weight it deserves as well. If no other reliable sources have seen fit to comment on the criticism (be that to agree with it, refute it, what have you), it's not that important and doesn't deserve much weight. Same with any refutation of the criticism from its target. We can very easily state "A states B is wrong because C. B denies this because D." That's not an inappropriate use of a primary source.
Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary sources where there is no secondary source mention. That was deliberate.
We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is that these sources have to be considered "secondary sources" in order to mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people like to consider them "primary sources".
The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more applicable when "primary source" means "blog post".
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That's what survey articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other papers, works like Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much better to cite those.
To take an even more direct example, in the medical field, summarizing the results of all the studies that have been done on a particular subject is a "meta-analysis", and a publishable, first-class research project in itself. If no prominent meta-analysis in an area exists, it would be original research for Wikipedia to attempt to directly crawl through the primary literature and write our own, beyond something simple and non-committal like "studies have found both positive [1,2] and negative [3,4] results".
An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing the paper that proves it. But if, say, an antidepressant was "shown to be no better than placebo"---now we're in a controversial, murky area, where anyone can cherry-pick primary sources to make an argument for all possible conclusions.
-Mark
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research.
That sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on).
One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way.
An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing the paper that proves it.
This is exactly the situation. Being "encyclopedic" means that our articles will often include slightly obscure (but still relevant) results and facts, the type of results that will not appear in an introductory textbook. These can sometimes be cited to gradtuate textbooks, but other times the primary literature is the best source. This is especially true if we're looking for a source that comes out and says something directly, to make it easier for a half-trained reader to verify the citation.
The situation with medical research is entirely different, unless there are some medical journals publishing papers that employ the axiomatic method.
That's what survey articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other papers, works like Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much better to cite those.
Mathematical Reviews should be cited extremely rarely on wikipedia (I could go on about this issue, since I'm a mathematician, but I won't). If other papers are classified as "primary sources" then we run into the problems Phil has been complaining about. Also, it's possible for several articles to talk about the same "idea" without explicitly mentioning each other, depending on how meticulous the authors' citation practices are.
- Carl
Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research.
That sort of research is usually known as "writing" and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on).
One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only "original reasearch" in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way.
I agree that *some* amount of original research is impossible in any sort of writing that involves synthesis, and I also agree with you that this varies by disciplines. I'd say most of the problems with directly citing journal articles to construct novel summaries of a topic have happened in medical, historical, and political articles, which has driven some of the policy developement. That's particularly problematic because in, say, history, synthesis of sources is basically what research in the field *is*. But I'd also be skeptical of a general mathematical article, on something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]], which was constructed mostly from journal articles.
Especially with overview articles, secondary or tertiary sources provide not only citations for specific facts, but citations that give evidence for something really being consensus in a field, or considered an important issue in a field. Just a bunch of primary source references isn't really verifiable in the sense that I can track down the references and thereby be confident in the article's accuracy, because I have no idea why these references were selected out of the thousands of journal papers written every year, whether they are representative of the field, whether they're a highly biased subset, etc. So I'd be skeptical if our [[calculus]] article had an impeccably cited section on a part of calculus that no textbook or widely cited survey saw fit to mention.
I guess I tend to view it mostly pragmatically, looking to see if a particular use of sources jumps out at me as likely to be due to someone trying to push a novel theory or not. The skepticism goes up when there are in fact already a number of secondary or tertiary sources---then I wonder why the article author felt it necessary to write their own novel overview of the subject directly from the primary literature, rather than referring to any of the extant ones.
-Mark
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:04:39AM -0800, Delirium wrote:
But I'd also be skeptical of a general mathematical article, on something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]], which was constructed mostly from journal articles.
Of course. Articles like [[Calculus]] are sufficiently elementary that they can be (and universally are) written almost exclusively from textbooks. Moreover, any result that might be of interest but is not in elementary textbooks would probably not be included in these articles because of their scope. Such results would be in more specialized articles. These are the articles that I am concerned with in this thread. They are also, I believe, the articles Phil is concerned with.
Apart from sources cited only to maintain the historical record, the main reasons for citing primary sources in the math articles I have worked on are:
* For results that are of sufficient encyclopedic interest to be included, but not of sufficient interest that textbooks cover them. These often unproblematic because the claims made in the article are just brief summaries of results.
* For results that are sufficiently new that they are not yet covered by secondary literature. I can think of several research programs with numerous papers by numerous independent authors, with significant scientific interest, but no coverage outside of journals. These areas have no sources that on their face are accessible to a reader without specialized knowledge; the wikipedia article may be the most accesible writing on the subject.
- Carl
On Jan 6, 2009, at 5:36 PM, Carl Beckhorn wrote:
- For results that are sufficiently new that they are not yet
covered by secondary literature. I can think of several research programs with numerous papers by numerous independent authors, with significant scientific interest, but no coverage outside of journals. These areas have no sources that on their face are accessible to a reader without specialized knowledge; the wikipedia article may be the most accesible writing on the subject.
A secondary aspect of this which has recently occurred to me is the "lies to children" problem - elementary textbooks in scientific fields (chemistry, I know, does this. YMMV with other fields) simplify things for practical purposes. Advanced education in chemistry is, from my understanding, in part about learning all the ways that you were lied to in earlier classes,
The moral of this story is that source-based writing is a dodgy model. In fact, one does not learn simply by reading the sources, and one, by extension, cannot summarize knowledge simply by regurgitating them. There is a reason that schools supplements reading with oral lessons. Complete reliance on published secondary sources is a myth at best.
-Phil
2009/1/6 Carl Beckhorn cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm:
The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more applicable when "primary source" means "blog post".
And even then that can be just silly. e.g. [[EXA]] - the original developer's blog post announcing it is a highly relevant source, and it's ridiculous to purge it based on robotic interpretation of the wording of the NOR rule.
It is unfortunate that we can no longer assume that guidelines will be interpreted with a drop of good sense, and instead have to write them in damage control mode.
- d.