<<n a message dated 1/6/2009 2:37:30 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm writes:
* 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. >> ----------------------------------- I'm not comfortable with the idea that Wikipedia is going to be the *source* for a new summary and synthesize of primary source material. That is the very position that we strove to exclude in the policy language.
Rather, we should be the source for a new summary and synthesize of secondary material, with balancing primary interjections where needed.
Once we begin to collect primary material as a new presentation, than we are becoming the very textbooks that we are supposed to be citing as our sources.
Encyclopedias are not textbooks, they summarize textbooks. Authors of encyclopedia articles sometimes interject some primary material, but only in brief, sporadic, isolated cases, and perhaps in some cases where they themselves are editors of new material outside the work.
I think that the policy patrollers would agree with the essential understanding that primary source material should supplement articles. Articles should not be essentially based upon it. It's use should be auxiliary. *If* there is a specific situation where an article has no secondary source citations, than a realistic question could be raised as to why we have an article on it whatsoever.
Specifics would be helpful.
Will Johnson
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On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Specifics would be helpful.
The result described at [[Green-Tao_theorem]] was groundbreaking and of extraordinary scientific interest. It will no doubt eventually be covered in a text some day. The present article is just a stub, but if we were to expand the article to something longer, the main sources at the moment would have to be journal articles. There is a 0% chance this article would be deleted at AFD.
The stub [[Ω-logic]] describes a much more esoteric theory [1]. There is a "secondary" source for this - a survey article written by Woodin himself. Again, any expansion of the article would need to use journals as its main sources. I think this has a much lower chance of being covered by a text any time soon.
I picked these because they are already existing articles. I can also think of several research programs that could have a wikipedia article but do not.
Going farther, there's a large collection of articles for which there are secondary sources on the broader topic, but only journal sources for large sections of the technical material.
I will write a separate email on the topic of creating new survey articles on Wikipedia.
- Carl
[1] If the Unicode link doesn't work, pick the second article in the list at [[Omega-logic]], the one with a capital Omega.
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
I'm not comfortable with the idea that Wikipedia is going to be the *source* for a new summary and synthesize of primary source material. That is the very position that we strove to exclude in the policy language.
An issue here is that there is a continuum between "list of" articles and "prose" articles, not a discrete spectrum. On one hand, we probably all agree that [[List of cathedrals]] is permitted to draw from as many primary sources as desired provided that there are clear and appropriate criteria for inclusion. That is, nobody would say we have to directly copy our list of cathedrals from a list someone else has compiled, or that it even has to cite secondaryu sources at all.
One step removed from this are articles like [[List of cohomology theories]]. These, again, are permitted to draw from primary sources at will, provided the standards for inclusion are valid.
One step further are articles that consist of a series of summary-style paragraphs on several related topics. These are essentially glorified disambiguation pages. One example is [[Reduction (recursion theory)]]. In this particular case there are plenty of secondary sources, but if we were to really tighten up the referencing some things would need to be cited to journals. And none of the sources presently included would be readily understandable by an untrained reader, apart from the verification of direct quotes.
- Carl