JAY JG said:
From: "Tony Sidaway" minorityreport@bluebottle.com
SlimVirgin wrote: I agree that citing the original document is better than citing a secondary source, though others might argue that makes it hard for the reader and other editors to check that Wikipedia is quoting accurately.
I do hope that nobody would make such an argument. We should always cite primary sources where at all possible, and this instance shows the importance of correctly handling secondary sources.
Indeed. And the way *not* to handle them is to put caveats beside them stating (in so many words) that "we have not been able to verify these as truthful" (which, of course, we don't do).
But we must. If a secondary source cannot be verified it is useless. And to make it absolutely plain, I advocate that *all* secondary sources should be handled with care. The extremely loose wording of the citation was what caused the problems--it was attributed to a primary source with the appendage "cited by", while it was plain to all of us there we were not in a position to attribute the figure to the primary source as a matter of fact. That is how *not* to cite a secondary source--to give it the appearance of a citation of a primary source. Using a secondary source, we must take care to attribute the opinion (or estimate, or whatever) *to the secondary source*, appending any claimed primary sources to aid the user in his own research. We can state as a matter of fact that the secondary source says such-and-such and claims that this is sourced from so-and-so. Unless we know for a fact that so-and-so also says such-and-such (in which case we wouldn't neet the secondary source) we cannot say "so-and-so says such-and-such, as cited by Sec & Ary Sauce."