New subject: Primary sources (was: Clearer policy on self-written and obscure biographies)

5 Jan 2004

Daniel Mayer declared that:

...
  ...Wikipedia is not a primary source. Once and /if/ 
 that person is able to get a real publisher to publish 
 their autobiography, then and /only/ then do we use 
 their autobiography as a source. We need some sort of 
 filter.  
How can you say that Wikipedia is not a primary source?

I thought our original aim was to have articles written by contributors
who actually know something about what they're writing. People are
always encouraging me to spend less time editing other contributors'
work or rewriting factoids I discover on-line on in books -- and more
time contributing my unique knowledge of my two areas of expertise: the
Unification Church and software development.

Last year and the year before that, a lot of the talk on this mailing
list was about how to attract experts in their fields; how to avoid
driving them away once we hooked them. Have we given up on that goal?

Is Wikipedia destined to be little more than an annotated collection of
web links and bibliographical references? If so, I'm going to continue
to lose interest in the project.

I want Wikipedia to become MORE authoritative, not less.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed