[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Stan Shebs]

Delirium wrote:
>
> [...]  I would 
> say that the idea that an encyclopedia should be a tertiary source based 
> strictly on a neutral survey of the existing secondary literature is a 
> fairly recent shift, and most encyclopedias don't fully implement it.  
>   
We have a more practical reason to base WP on secondary sources, which 
is that we don't have big-name experts writing the articles, so we fall 
back on amateurs acting as the experts' proxies, via published works. By 
their nature, primary sources are full of traps for the uninformed; in 
areas where I'm expert, I can look at a primary source and instantly 
know what its defects are likely to be, while a random person not only 
doesn't know about them, but doesn't even know that there *are* defects. 
(A falsified birth date in government records? How is that possible?! :-) )

Stan