[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Phil Sandifer]

On Apr 2, 2007, at 12:37 PM, John Lee wrote:

> If there are no extant secondary sources, any interpretation  
> whatsoever of
> the primary source is novel. I suppose one could argue for the face- 
> value,
> literal meaning interpretation as non-novel, but it's suprising how  
> often
> people can disagree on a literal reading of a source.

Well, yes and no. First of all, this is where talk pages become  
useful parts of our process. Second of all, there are cases,  
including in academia, where you have to allow for some slippage  
here. My usual example here is [[Jacques Derrida]]. There are  
hundreds of secondary sources on him, but the good ones are A) no  
easier to interpret than the primary sources, and B) POV to high hell  
about what it is his philosophy means. The accessible general  
overviews are of mediocre quality at best, and are far from respected  
by any important Derrida scholars.

Attempting to write an article primarily from secondary sources about  
Derrida is a doomed proposition.

The way to write a good Derrida article is to have a bunch of people  
who use Derrida's ideas in their own scholarship write up summaries  
of Derrida's thought, and have points of disagreement and tension  
(i.e. the points where people disagree on exactly what On  
Grammatology means right here) sourced to secondary sources and  
explained in an NPOV fashion.

This is important. The best way to write this article on a major  
philosopher who nobody would even think to nominate for deletion is  
from primary sources, using secondary sources only when needed.

(This was, it should be noted, how [[Michel Foucault]], a similar  
article, was written and became a featured article. No citations  
anywhere in the "Works" section aside from the implied citation to  
the primary sources. Damn good artlcle, and a great overview of  
Foucault's work. This should be a model.)

-Phil