, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry to disagree but, at Wikipedia, secondary sources trump primary sources.  This seeming contradiction to your experience with academic papers actually makes perfect sense when you understand the rationale.  When you write an academic paper using primary sources, you are performing "original research" based on your understanding of the sources.  Whether your work is respectable and legitimate enough to be considered by the academic community is based on some sort of peer review (usually a peer-reviewed journal or an editor at a respectable publishing company).  Wikipedia has no such mechanism for vetting submissions and so it relies on the concept of a verifiable reliable source which, in plain English, means "a published source which has been through some kind of peer-review process".  If a Wikipedia editor writes text that is based primarily on primary sources, he is vulnerable to the charge of performing "original research".  All we can say is "Unknown Wikipedian X believes A, B and C based on his own interpretation of the primary sources."  If we cite a secondary source, at least we can say "Published author Y asserts A, B and C based on his peer-reviewed interpretation of the primary sources."  There is still room to debate how reliable "published author Y" is (he could represent a fringe POV, for instance).  However, in such a debate, Wikipedians bring more information from other secondary sources to either assert or refute the reliability of "Published author Y".  The basic principle here is "not published => not reliable".  And self-published doesn't count.    18:09