> You're arguing to swap that bias for your own? i.e. you look at primary source material and decide which items are notable for their own article. What about if another editor disagrees?

treelovinhippie's stated opinion was "remove the "must be noteworthy" rule" (from which I am mentally rewriting his statement to "notability"). I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness.

I would rather see the idea of "notability" replaced with an "article score" based upon the history: there have been a few glorious visualizers for Wikipedia designed to really make this information hit center, and I think any of them would be a better global solution than "notability".

> In academia secondary sources are an established way of processing primary information; an expert reviews the primary material and, citing it, draws conclusions. Other experts may do the same, and disagree with the first one.

I imagine this is determined heavily by the field? I can't imagine in either mathematics or algorithmic computer science there being any need to wait until a review paper is published "drawing conclusions" (whatever that would mean) from the information in the primary research.

However, I honestly feel like you are dragging me down an academic rathole in these very specific cases, such as medicine: the kind of material that we are explicitly discussing here, Diggnation, is not going to be covered in anything remotely approaching a scholarly source.

Instead, what we are comparing are situations like 1) referencing a New York Times article stating that "person Y said X" and 2) directly linking to the blog or Twitter feed of person Y and demonstrating first-hand that they said "X": in these situations, removing a layer of required trust.

In my experience discussing situations like this with Wikipedia editors, in addition to my direct attempts to read through the rules that Wikipedia publishes for how their website should be used, it is quite clear that Wikipedia would prefer you to cite the NYT article rather than hotlink the information.

> This is a problem, and one with no easy solution. The approach of requiring sources to have their own review process (i.e. media has editors who theoretically vet content) should fix this, but as you point out, in practice it is not 100% reliable.

So, Wikipedia specifically states that "mainstream newspapers" are an example of "the most reliable sources". Can you provide me a reference to where Wikipedia is claiming that you can only depend on sources that "have their own review process"? (Or, was that just a potential idea for a fix?)

Personally, in this situation, I would much prefer a reality where Wikipedia simply admits that secondary sources (in this field; again: not medicine, and possibly not even history) are nothing more than opinions (in the general case, this is how Wikipedia defines secondary sources: opinions and interpretation).

If they did this, then they couldn't cite a New York Times article for a sentence that simply stated a fact: they could only cite a New York Times article and state "the New York Times states", for which the New York Times should be a perfectly valid (and I will argue "authoritative") reference.

Yes: in this case that would probably make it impossible to just state "Diggnation has 250,000 subscribers" without some kind of in-article qualification; however, I don't think that that is inherently a bad thing: I feel like if I were writing a scholarly article on this subject, I wouldn't be able to say anything definitive either.