[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 00:37:38 +0800, "John Lee" <johnleemk at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Wait a minute. As I understand it, the policy Phil is defending in his
>present post states that primary sources are acceptable where the
>interpretation drawn is not novel (i.e. new). This is how I understand our
>policy, although Phil in another post seems to have criticised this
>interpretation (that primary sources should not be cited unless there are
>secondary sources available).

>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.

That's pretty much how I see it, too.  A subject which has *no*
reliable secondary sources is probably unencyclopaedic, a subject
which is primarily drawn from reputable secondary sources may
undoubtedly contain individual facts drawn directly from primary
sources, provided no novel conclusions are proposed as a result.

And I suspect Phil and I would agree on the majority of calls either
way, although we might well disagree as to what constitutes a reliable
secondary source for a given article.

In some cases we have articles where the level of quality of the
source is reduced and reduced until a non-trivial one can be found, on
the grounds that it is "obviously notable", like bands that have
appeared on Eurovision.  

And in some cases people are still psychologically back in the "good
old days" of 2004 and earlier, when we actually needed lots more
content.  By now a pretty high proportion of new articles are vanity,
spam or both.  And the spammers are getting smarter - some companies
now employ SEOs directly.  But I digress.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG