On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 8:11 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: 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. 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. 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

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:04:39AM -0800, Delirium wrote: 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

2009/1/6 Carl Beckhorn <cbeckhorn(a)fastmail.fm>fm>: 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.