On Feb 25, 2007, at 4:19 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
If the conclusion from being only unable to find
secondary sources is
that we can't have an article on a subject which many will agree to be
otherwise valid that indicates that there is something seriously wrong
with our criteria.
Exactly.
Another important thing to recognize about the way print
encyclopedias use citations is that they not cite every statement.
They give a summary. If they're using data or something they'll
source the data - particularly if it's time sensitive. (i.e. "Top ten
oil producing countries" or something, to use an example where I had
the job of finding that data.)
But more often they summarize the situation and then put some "see
also" type links at the bottom.
That's the gap that gets crossed when you move from verifiability to
"cite sources." In verifiability, all I have to do is be able to
point to places where you can go look and learn more, confirm this
isn't a hoax, etc. Cite sources I have to tell you where you can find
each and every piece of information.
Verifiability is acceptable for most of the information on Wikipedia.
Claims that attract particular skepticism (and we can easily tell
these by the skepticism they attract) should be sourced directly. But
compare that to something like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Oriel_College (our featured article from yesterday), where the name
of the college is sourced. Really. There's a citation two words in.
This was not a useful citation to add. Whoever added it is very silly.
Compare also to [[Jacques Derrida]]. Here the problem is different.
In the humanities, nobody writes a significant secondary source on
Derrida that is not A) nearly as impenetrable as the original, and B)
deeply involved in the same debates as the original in such a way as
to be dreadful resources for providing a general overview. I don't
mean this just in terms of NPOV issues either. I mean that the
secondary sources are not meaningfully distinct from the primary
sources in their quality or usefulness. There are sources intended
for novices, but they're crappy and would lead to an article of
questionable accuracy. And, really, there's something profoundly
silly about an article sourced to books like "Derrida for Beginners"
and "Derrida: A Very Short Introduction," or to introductory notes in
a textbook. That's just not reputable in the humanities, and would
make the article look laughable to any actual subject expert.
The way to write a good article on Derrida is to have a few people
who have done some work using Derrida (there are thousands) to hash
it out. The talk page should be used to smooth out debates. Good
faith should be assumed - when one person says "Actually, you should
really have another look at The Post Card where Derrida says X," the
other person should. Classically thorny points and controversies
should be sourced - especially the criticism section. But for the
most part, it should be written by some people who know a decent
amount about the subject going "OK, what needs to go into a general
overview here."
And then at the end you should have a bibliography of books on the
subject.
The problem is that somewhere along the line we went from a
definition of "good article" that was based on looking at what other
encyclopedias did to a definition of "good article" that was based on
an internally decided principle.
Somewhere along the line, [[WP:NOR]] lost what was a vitally
important line - that use of primary sources was acceptable so long
as it did not produce "novel interpretations." That is to say that we
never used to hold that the way to write an article was to consult
entirely independent sources. And thank God, because that's no way to
write an article, and not the way anybody else writes articles.
-Phil