On 12/20/06, zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com wrote:
Someone who can read music should be able to report from a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires specialist knowledge. What the policy *should* require (somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that the score is in E-flat. The fundamental skills of the field should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.
Not for all music. There are scores for which it requires more than trivial music knowledge to know whether it's C major, A minor or atonal. But I'm quibbling :)
- Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not databases and
libraries." Nobody suggested libraries. I don't see that databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that the process of extraction of the information from the database is verifiable.
More generally: We can use *anything* as a source. We just have to use each source for the *right purpose*. You wouldn't use even the most detailed academic research paper by the most respected researcher on molecular biology to back up a statement about Pokemon. And it's perfectly acceptable to use a cheap trashy blog as a source to back up the statement "as Smith himself wrote...".
So there are no good sources and bad sources - just misuses of sources.
Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the victims one by one. I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.
You can cite the book, and even page numbers, so yeah.
It comes under "research that consists of collecting and organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR) I can't see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all the articles on a particular subject in a particular database give the same story about something, provided that that observation is one that anyone can verify. Of course this criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't eliminate the cases where it is.
All these things are sliding scales. It's easy to objectively say "all the victims were women". It's just *harder* to objectively say "all the papers supported notion X". Maybe it's ok. Maybe it isn't.
Steve