I found your response highly surprising, and I see my confusion now: Wikipedia is making (I will even admit correctly) a distinction between actual research (which it very clearly calls a "primary source") and a "review paper" (which it calls a "secondary source"). [references below]

You really thereby can't say "a journal article would certainly count as a secondary source", as most journal articles are research, not reviews of research: the page you link to even very directly states "many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources".

Of course, I will totally admit that at least some of the articles in JSTOR are going to be review papers, and thereby must retract part of my previous statement as written. In the specific case of JSTOR from those examples, and thereby my entire first aside, there would be at least some marginal benefit, even under Wikipedia's rules.

However, I will point out that the underlying argument I was making quite stands: sending people to conferences, teaching them more about historiography, and getting them access to more sources of research, are all ways to make people better at performing what Wikipedia continues to call "original research" (and clearly wants no part in). Put differently, the goal of these activities is to make people better at interpreting primary information, not copy/pasting secondary information.

Indeed, Wikipedia makes it quite clear that primary sources may only be used in cases where people with no specialized knowledge can plainly understand the information (which, honestly, to me seems unlikely to be plausible: journal articles are not written for the layperson), and even goes so far as to be quite explicit that secondary sources must be used to make the primary sources trustworthy.

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It does, however, at least seem like the medical parts of Wikipedia do not believe that a newspaper article is even a valid secondary source, so good on them. ;P I tried to find a similar document for the field of History, and they do seem to be working on a similar document (still marked "essay") and it also looks like it could be pretty good (as in, "no journalism").

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

(I imagine an interesting benefit with Wikipedia/History is that you don't run experiments, so of course much of the material you find is technically a secondary source; you thereby don't actually find the usual discussion of "primary" vs. "secondary" in this essay: "primary" gets defined as the actual source documents, as arguably history is all opinion ;P.)

Even reading the history-specific documentation, however, does not seem to indicate that you could both follow the rules and get much value out of having a strong background in history and history research: I maintain that attending conferences and taking courses in the field is seemingly not something that Wikipedia would look favorably on.

This quote, however, was quite uplifting: "Historical articles on wikipedia should be the result of scholarly works.".

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(additional quotes from Wikipedia backing up my statements:)

"...similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment."

"A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge."

"For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research"

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

"A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. ... Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made."

"A secondary source is... Examples include literature reviews or systematic reviews found in medical journals, specialist academic or professional books, and medical guidelines or position statements published by major health organizations."

"All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." (emphasis copied from original)

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS