[WikiEN-l] Chris Mahan and Hephaestos

[J.F. de Wolff]

Hephaestos makes a strong point.
Some issues are being fleshed out endlessly just to satisfy a fringe POV 
that someone once inserted and can then not be eliminated anymore, even 
though it has been NPOVed gradually.

On secondary sources: I note that many medical articles (my personal area) 
are amended to include news articles. If one searches the professional 
literature (e.g. with PubMed or even Google), the news articles are often 
overstatements of scientific findings. If one Japanese group discovers a 
peptide that decreases the rate of mitosis of neuroblastoma cell lines, the 
newspapers will blurb: "CURE FOR CANCER FOUND", even though this relates to 
ONE type of cancer in a petri dish, and even then it has not even been 
tested on patients, let alone approved by the regulatory authorities. The 
list of examples is endless. (I've made this one up, incidentally. But have 
a look at "recent findings" in the entry [[Inflammatory bowel disease]], 
which grew this way.)
If Wikipedia seeks to make core science understandable to the lay public 
(one of the many aims of a good encyclopedia), it will have to include 
primary reference material, not ruminated and regurgitated news stories 
(even from the BBC or CNN).

User:Jfdwolff|JFW


-- 
Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.7.1 - Release Date: 19/01/2005