> ...if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject...

It is nearly impossible to verify an article based on secondary sources. To take a non-Wikipedia view of this for a second, I went and pulled the descriptions of these sources from academic institutions. Princeton's reference desk describes a secondary source as follows. After that, a similar description from the UCSC library.

> A secondary source interprets and analyzes primary sources. These sources are one or more steps removed from the event. Secondary sources may have pictures, quotes or graphics of primary sources in them.

> The function of these is to interpret primary sources, and so can be described as at least one step removed from the event or phenomenon under review. Secondary source materials, then, interpret, assign value to, conjecture upon, and draw conclusions about the events reported in primary sources.

(At this point I also feel it important to point out that both of these sources believe that encyclopedias are "secondary sources". If you do a search on Google for "tertiary source", which Wikipedia adamantly believes is a third category that includes encyclopedias, you get only 43k hits, half of which mention "wikipedia". The few universities that mention "tertiary source" list encyclopedias as being in both categories: only Wikipedia seems to believe that encyclopedias are clearly and definitively a "tertiary source".)

If you are interested in opinions and analysis, you can happily refer to a secondary source, but if you want to verify what actually happened, you cannot be taken seriously unless you can show a clear trail of evidence that terminates in a primary source.

(Certainly, if it is impossible to obtain primary sources, then one can use a secondary source, but that is something that should only be used as a last resort: if you have access to the primary sources that a secondary source used, you should verify them yourself.)

The result of attempting to find truth from secondary sources is that you will forever be plagued by horrible bias, both in terms of what things you can find to be "notable" and in terms of the validity of the opinions you can find in them.

Worse, as encyclopedias--which today pretty much means "Wikipedia" to a very large percentage of the public--are used as reference material for the construction of secondary sources, everything from newspaper articles to books, claiming secondary sources to have anything to do with "validation" just makes your chain of evidence circular.

And, in fact, there have been multiple published large-scale examples of such circular information ending up in Wikipedia, as temporarily un-sourced information gets used in newspaper articles which then reinforces the information in Wikipedia when editors attempt to find sources.

Regardless, the entire notion is kind of preposterous anyway, as the way that most secondary sources operate they just print what they are told by the people they interview for articles without the citations required to verify the ultimate source of the information.

This means that if someone, whether it be the Roth example from a few days ago or anyone else wanting to provide a paper-trail for information on Wikipedia, wants to be able to get something into Wikipedia, they really just need to be in the position to tell a reporter the information: they do not need to post it themselves directly.

As an interesting contextual example of this, Wikipedia now actually does have an article on Diggnation. In this article, it states quite firmly that "there are an estimated 250,000 regular subscribers to the show" along with a sourced citation to... the New York Times.

However, the article in the New York Times quite clearly was entirely itself sourced by simply asking the people who worked for Diggnation and Revision3 a bunch of questions; it even quite clearly states that that number came from them: "Revision3 says it counts roughly 250,000 views each week".

In such a situation, the way the New York Times operates (and I know this first hand, as there have been articles about the things that I do published by them) is that they will happily publish whatever number you tell them, and at best "fact check" it by calling you back to verify they heard you correctly.

This does not make the number true; it barely even demonstrates "Diggnation was important enough to have an article written about them", due to the "slows news day" phenomenon. The idea that this source is somehow different from any other source is just a fantasy, and one that, as far as I've been able to tell, one that only Wikipedia believes.

Wikipedia, in fact, seems to take the exact opposite stance on all of this, claiming that "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources", along with a long list of rules about how primary sources (which are apparently even more dangerous in their world-view than tertiary sources) can technically be used, but only in highly limited and nearly useless circumstances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

The result of this insanity is then numerous situations like the one that treelovinhippie ran into. Re-telling him what the rules of Wikipedia are--when it is quite clear that he got to experience them first-hand and was sufficiently unimpressed as to ask for their removal--seems to be missing the point: for this purpose, the rule really is "arbitrary", and couldn't possibly have anything to do with "verifiability"; if anything, Wikipedia's rules on "notability" at the same time cause numerous topics to be unable to be covered and cause the information that does get published to be based on shaky foundations and unreliable sources.