[WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

[Delirium]

Carl Beckhorn wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
>   
>> Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary  
>> sources where there is no secondary source mention.
>> That was deliberate.
>>     
>
> We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published 
> in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they 
> contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is 
> that these sources have to be considered "secondary sources" in order to 
> mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people
> like to consider them "primary sources". 
>
> The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be 
> silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more 
> applicable when "primary source" means "blog post".
>   

I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I 
personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite 
a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal 
articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context 
is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That's what survey 
articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other papers, works like 
Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much better to cite those.

To take an even more direct example, in the medical field, summarizing 
the results of all the studies that have been done on a particular 
subject is a "meta-analysis", and a publishable, first-class research 
project in itself. If no prominent meta-analysis in an area exists, it 
would be original research for Wikipedia to attempt to directly crawl 
through the primary literature and write our own, beyond something 
simple and non-committal like "studies have found both positive [1,2] 
and negative [3,4] results".

An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, 
which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if 
some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing 
the paper that proves it. But if, say, an antidepressant was "shown to 
be no better than placebo"---now we're in a controversial, murky area, 
where anyone can cherry-pick primary sources to make an argument for all 
possible conclusions.

-Mark