On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 06:51:10PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > I'm not comfortable with the idea that Wikipedia is going to be the *source* > for a new summary and synthesize of primary source material. > That is the very position that we strove to exclude in the policy language.
An issue here is that there is a continuum between "list of" articles and "prose" articles, not a discrete spectrum. On one hand, we probably all agree that [[List of cathedrals]] is permitted to draw from as many primary sources as desired provided that there are clear and appropriate criteria for inclusion. That is, nobody would say we have to directly copy our list of cathedrals from a list someone else has compiled, or that it even has to cite secondaryu sources at all. One step removed from this are articles like [[List of cohomology theories]]. These, again, are permitted to draw from primary sources at will, provided the standards for inclusion are valid. One step further are articles that consist of a series of summary-style paragraphs on several related topics. These are essentially glorified disambiguation pages. One example is [[Reduction (recursion theory)]]. In this particular case there are plenty of secondary sources, but if we were to really tighten up the referencing some things would need to be cited to journals. And none of the sources presently included would be readily understandable by an untrained reader, apart from the verification of direct quotes. - 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
