> ... primary versus secondary sourcing ... in practice the policy is trying to avoid the situation where Wikipedians themselves research primary sources to draw their own (often non-expert) conclusions.

FWIW, I would not (and do not) have a problem with this in isolation: I entirely accept that Wikipedia is itself not a journal, and it is going to be really weird if Wikipedia is a place where information is "first published".

Though, I do have a problem with the kinds of secondary sources (mostly: "newspaper articles") that then end up getting used to demonstrate a lot of things for which a primary source would be much more accurate and trustworthy.

> A core problem that does exist is that outside of science and history there is often a strong reliance of media reporting. ... Policies that allow modern-style sourcing for such articles but also strongly favour scholarly material when it is available are hard to write :)

If that is the intent then Wikipedia could at least say it somewhere (as opposed to having a handfull of articles about how to handle sourcing for specific subdisciplines): as it stands, they seem to have one overall policy, with some exceptions.

However, there are numerous cases in these non-scholarly-yet-"noteworthy" (to remove "notable" for a moment) where a primary source is simply more accurate than a secondary one, and yet people prefer to cite the newspaper articles.

Newspaper articles are written by busy people who have next to no domain-specific knowledge; they often don't even have first-hand vantage points: they are retelling stories heard by people told to them by other people and then "spiced up" for consumption.

I thereby contend that the problem, to me, seems deeper than just allowing "modern-style sourcing": the idea of using secondary sources to establish fact is simply incorrect. Even in scholarly fields, you usually don't cite review articles.

(I moved this comment lower, as it is the mainline argument in this thread, so I wanted to conclude on it.)

> It depends what the intended outcome is. Wikipedia deliberately pushes the idea that editors should not argue from the point of an expert - as such qualifications are impossible to prove, and other editors as badly placed to peer review your argument/work.

> On the other hand training in your chosen topic is useful! I've attended a number of sessions organised by Wikimedia chapters which put Wikipedians together with, say, historians so they can collaborate and learn from each other.

I am not certain how this fits with the policy. It is fairly obvious that writing in an article "I am a totally epic person in this field, seriously; thereby, trust me on this: X is true" would be incorrect.

However, Wikipedia makes it very clear in numerous places that I have referenced that you are not supposed to source something back to something that would require specialist knowledge to understand or verify.

If I wanted to, thereby, source an article on a subject in Mathematics back to the original article that proved it, I would be unable to, as only a mathematician is likely to understand the notation and terminology of the article.

This is the case even if the information that is in the article did not require any "interpretation" and is not "drawing conclusions": the rules are quite clear that facts must be able to "be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge" [1].

Instead, I'd have to cite a secondary source. However, summary/review articles (the scholarly "secondary source") are actually kind of rare... you don't see them published often, because there is really no need to do so until there is a large amount of work to condense.

As a specific example of this "getting weird", the article on "Coppersmith%27s_Attack" (a way to break RSA encryption in some limited settings) is citing a review article "Twenty Years of attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem" (specifically rather than the actual paper).

What if that review article didn't exist yet? The attack in question came out two years before that summary article did, and AFAIK there haven't been any new attempts at an updated review in the subsequent 13 years (partly as there simply hasn't been "enough" new stuff).

The result is that there are a few interesting new attacks that aren't covered in the main "RSA_(algorithm)" article, all of which came out after 1999 (the date of the aforementioned summary article), such as even one just this year. It would be great to include them.

Yet, there is seriously an extended discussion about a recent "attack" on RSA that wasn't even an attack on RSA at all. This does reference the primary source, but only seemingly because it also was able to reference a New York Times article (?!) and... a blog post. Yay! :(

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

(everything after this point is after this point because you added it in an edit, and I had already written the rest of my response; it thematically doesn't belong here, but I don't "have it in me" to rewrite the above to fit these comments in)

> Again I disagree. Wikipedia doesn't want editors interpreting sources, but it also doesn't want blind copy/paste.

The reason I use the term "copy/paste" is because you are explicitly disallowed from using any specialized knowledge to understand the citation. This is very different from interpreting (at least, the way Wikipedia defines this) the citation. There is no original research happening when I read a paper on number theory, but it is due to the specialized knowledge I gained from attending college as a math major that lets me understand what it says.

> Original research is another matter, unrelated to tracking down source material and understanding context.

This is not true according to Wikipedia's written guidelines, and this is certainly not how I've seen it work out "in the field": articles are often purposely and almost twisted-ly written in ways that rely on "for the layman" summary articles when primary sources are trivially available (as they were cited by the summary article) or which rely on articles in Wired (yes, Wired) even when all the reporter for Wired did is visit the web page of the actual primary source and then write an obviously-confused "scoop" of the topic at hand.