On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 02:14:52PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > When a secondary source brings forth a statement, it can be balanced > by a primary source. What would be wrong would be to present a > brand-new claim directly from a primary source, which no secondary > source mention whatsoever.
What would you make of decades-old papers that are well known and accepted by everyone in the area, but not covered by review texts because nobody feels a need to do so? This is the situation with much mathematical research. It's simply impossible to include every fact about a topic in a text, so the author chooses a certain perspective and set of topics. Results that don't fit are left out. More briefly: the assumption that all journal papers include contingent results or experimental data that might be invalidated later is not correct. > "The Neutrino has no mass. In other news, it's been recently found > that the neutrino is made of Spam." The only difficulty here is that the "made of Spam" claim should be attributed to the authors: "The Neutrino has no mass. Jones and Jones (2009) have recently published a paper in which they claim the Neutrino is made of Spam." That is assuming that the Jones/Jones result is of interest to people in the field and not just a crank paper of some sort. For example, if they published their paper in Science, that would be a sign it is of interest. As another example, if some new researcher claimed to have verified [[cold fusion]] and published in a respected peer reviewed journal, we could certainly include that in the article even if no other source had commented on it - but with appropriate attribution. This is assuming that all journal papers are actually primary sources in the NOR sense, of course. My own position is that NOR makes non-experimental papers "secondary sources", and in those cases there is no issue. - Carl _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
