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Comment by postingposts | Hacker News Reader

The real stinker of a rule is that they prefer media sources to first-hand accounts or direct sources. For example: an article about Linux CANNOT link to posts Linus himself has made on forums, but CAN link to media articles that get his posts incorrect. Then, because the editors enforce this real crap rule, you can have an article that lists the media opinion about some Linux component but you CAN’T even INCLUDE what Linus wrote! It is unchecked madness.

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That's not true, actually. The Wikipedia page for Linux has a bunch of direct-from-Linus citations. Here's one I found literally on the first row of citations.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux/c/5Rcys5xYuJc/m/Dp...

It’s just an example. Shall I craft another example for you? Or should we talk about the point the example is trying to make? :)

Your example being wrong disproves your entire point.

> It’s just an example.

No, it's a non-example.

Ah, so by "craft" you mean "make up something untrue that would have taken ten seconds to verify". I feel like I suddenly understand "Hackers and Painters".

You’re being a numpty at best. When someone is trying to illustrate a point, I can say something like “he was so drunk he saw pink elephants!”, and if you are stupid enough to confuse the illustration with the point that’s on you. “Why not come up with an example that doesn’t use pink elephants!?” Why not be less of a mindless pedant?

You weren't using metaphor, you gave a _specific and untrue_ example, the revelation of which completely undermined your argument!

Also, if you want Wikipedia to reflect a change to your name/pronouns you need to wait for someone to write a new article including them, or contact the publishers of existing articles and hope they make the change.

My father has some niche research interests and did a lot of primary research. Soccer clubs, dead kingdoms, a painter from the midwest. As a kid I spent hours in the library with my dad looking at microfiche. He essentially had to - for many of these things, make websites so he could quote the website on wikipedia. He's actually gotten quite adept at creating a digital papertrail for some of these interests.

Digitizing with OCR is nice - but someone still needs to write the story. Piece together the different news clippings.

In one case - it was a soccer team - Bethlehem Steel, which one of my great great something or others played for. They won a bunch of championships, there's a whole story, but nobody had really compiled it into a usable work. When Bethlehem Steel the name got resurrected as a feeder club for the Phila Union, they called HIM for the info - It was kind of fun watching my dad go onto an AM radio broadcast!

Another, he's currently interested in is a fairly important but not well known artist who did a lot of work in the midwest from the area we are from. He is currently writing up the story, interviewing family, etc. I guess he'll have to publish a news story in order for it to be real!

Looking at that artist's wikipedia page though - it does appear that most of his citations are directly to news clippings... like

Fayetteville Democrat, 23 January 1935, p. 1.

Kansas City Times, 23 May 1936, p. 18.

Kinda cool

You can quote printed sources directly, you don't need to make them into a website first.

That’s a carefully considered rule. In general, primary sources are frowned upon, instead they have editors use secondary or tertiary sources.

You've simply restated the rule in a context where justification was expected.

First, I need to restate the rule to give it nuance. Original research isn't allowed on Wikipedia. Primary sources are acceptable for simple statements of fact, but editors can't make analysis of or synthesise what is contained in that material. That analysis or synthesis requires reliable secondary sources.

The epistemological basis for the "no original research" rule seems to be because Wikipedia is not a suitable vehicle for synthesis or analysis: it is written by anonymous editors with varying degrees of expertise in the subject area. They are not assumed to be competent to conduct such analysis. They are only assumed competent to find secondary sources that make such analysis and cite them.

The rule also has some pragmatism about it. If such analysis was allowed, it would have to be performed on Wikipedia with its reasoning clearly articulated and developed. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it shouldn't be cluttered by such reasoning.

The appropriate place for analysis and synthesis of this kind are peer reviewed journal articles or other secondary sources where the author's expertise or authority to speak to a point, and their reasoning, is made plain. A reader should, at least in theory, be able to check the source and verify as such.

It is also not seen as acceptable for editors, who lack accountability for what they post, to offer such analysis. A news report is expected to have some degree of accountability, to put the relevant statement into context and to consider competing views. A Linux kernel mailing list post does not do this.

That said, in my experience, a blind eye is turned to uncontroversial analysis.

Many of those things are the Wikipedia equivalent of legal fictions. They may not be true in any meaningful sense. News reports have very little accountability outside of cases where someone can sue the newspaper, and the "analysis" that people are assumed to be incompetent at and the "finding secondary sources" they are assumed to be competent actually require fairly similar levels of competency.

How is it a fiction that news reports come from identified individuals, while Wikipedia is edited by anonymous individuals with questionable credentials?

I'm not convinced of the characterisation as a legal fiction, either. There is a logical justification for this position, as stated, in detail, in my reply. A freely editable encyclopedia isn't the place for contentious analysis.

Where it fails is that media lies are not considered primary sources for this stuff, but instead secondary... When their follow the political spin editors want to present...

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