[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Delirium]

Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> Indeed, that text still appears in our 'No original research' policy. 
> However, efforts to stamp out use of 'primary sources' to spread 
> information that no other national (or international) 'news' / 'reporting' 
> entity has deemed worthy of commenting on have led to a wide-spread view 
> that 'primary sources' in general are bad. They aren't. Once something has 
> been verified as notable we should often take primary sources OVER 
> secondary ones.
>   

I strongly disagree with that, and think this comes out of an 
unfortunately widespread view that non-scientific research isn't 
"really" research.  Gathering, interpreting, cross-referencing, and 
checking the validity of the primary sources on an individual like, say, 
Thomas Jefferson, in order to write a biography about him, is original 
historical research, and best left to reputable historians.  At 
Wikipedia, we should prefer secondary sources on his life---published 
biographies of Thomas Jefferson written by reputable historians.  If you 
discover some new primary sources relating to his life that have not 
been mentioned in the existing secondary sources, that constitutes 
original historical research, and you should publish it in a history 
journal or book, or at the very least convince someone to write a 
newspaper article about it, before it should go into Wikipedia.

The same actually goes for too-close-to-primary secondary sources.  We 
should not write our article on World War II by referring to 
contemporary newspaper reports, which were often wrong and require 
expertise to properly use, but instead should write it by referring to 
existing, published histories of World War II written by reputable 
historians.

-Mark