David Gerard wrote
Charles Matthews wrote I don't think 'original research' should cover original scholarship.
That's
a stretch.
I don't think it is. Wikipedia is not somewhere people writing on a
subject
should be coming to new conclusions.
Take [[apple pie]], which cites an original source. WP doesn't need to police whether the conclusions drawn are safely derivative or not. (That's apple sauce - sorry.) Any more than if I wander around Cambridge and see something encyclopedic, I need first to check that it's in a guidebook.
That being said, 'secondary source' is a good enough definition to go into a WP mission statement, such as 'master secondary source on the Web'.
Charles