I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible.
I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
The true waste would be taking valuable research and synthesize and hiding it in an encyclopedia. Pokemon aside, most new knowledge that merits inclusion in Wikipedia deserves its own independent source.
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
And that's really all that happened here: someone tried to skip the middle step (notably: they tried to skip it while authoring the secondary source --- the author of this article published an authoritative text on the Haymarket Riot later on), and Wikipedia called that out.
Then I suppose I'm also frustrated at Wikipedia's lack of ambition. To strive toward that benchmark and not past it seems, as I said, wasteful.
One of the things that fuels this feeling for me is the work of people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think there is a role for experts to address the public directly, rather than their peers. To be sure, it can get very messy, as some of the most vocal cranks think they are experts and seek every possible venue to espouse their nonsense, but they do that anyway. I'd love to see the bar lowered for scientists to contribute to works that are easy to access via the web and written for a lay audience, without having to start and maintain their own blog.
Wikipedia is one of the most ambitious projects on the whole Internet. It is the world's most ambitious and most expansive encyclopedia. It was created entirely out of donated time using the Internet. It is hard to take seriously any argument that says Wikipedia is unambitious.
There's a whole rest of the Internet for you to build other ambitious knowledge projects on; the rest of the Internet also doesn't demand that you redefine the concept of an encyclopedia to do it.
It's not like it wouldn't be available elsewhere, right?
It goes research -> authorship of secondary source (journal article, book, magazine article, whatever) -> citation in encyclopedia.
Conventionally, sure, but Wikipedia would seem to offer an opportunity to fix the shortcomings with that system.
Why do you care so much about secondary sources? Because they're vetted. Why is that important? Because primary sources can be taken out of context, because people can't parse them out correctly, etc.
I would submit that both of those things are no longer safe assumptions.
Secondary sources can be fabricated whole-cloth and appear legitimate (entire industries, such as some branches of SEO, do exactly this) when they are not, and can even cite Wikipedia themselves. So, secondary sources aren't these bastions of truth that they seem to be.
The idea that primary sources aren't usable to the populace is also old. It's trivial these days for a user (who cares even the tiniest amount) to run a search and contextualize a source. If Crazy Eddie's Account of the Haymarket Riot is, after a fast search, the only one that has Xenu interfering then maybe it's not a credible account, yeah?
Moreover, having so many eyes seeing the same citations and clicking through them increases the likelihood that somebody who actually does have expertise in the matter can comment usefully.
If you can't trust the great unwashed masses to search out the truth of things given primary sources, why do you think giving them prechewed knowledge is any better?
You propose that an encyclopedia should, if it can, also set out to be a sprawling "book about everything"; a primary source when experts debate on its pages, a secondary source when an expert decides to write an encyclopedia article instead of a book, and a tertiary source the rest of the time.
The two goals conflict. You can't be an effective prose survey of the existing literature when any given sentence in any given article could be original research. The whole point of an encyclopedia --- a prose survey of literature --- is that you don't have to check every sentence to see if it comes from a reliable source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
In contrast, this sentence does appear: "The second half of the 20th century also saw the publication of several encyclopedias that were notable for synthesizing important topics in specific fields, often by means of new works authored by significant researchers."
This is important because people do cite Wikipedia and there is more than one instance of a "fact" appearing in an article and later being cited to a secondary source that cites... you guessed it Wikipedia. :)
The important step that publishing material adds is peer review. An editor might have excellent credentials but other editors are not equipped to peer review their material.
FWIW I don't agree it is an unnecessary repetition of work; the published material is likely to be much more than a summary, with reasoning, and so is adding significantly to the body of work on the topic - which WP can then summarise :)
Well, yes, but even Wikipedia tells people not to use it as a source, but to follow the links in the article to the sources. That's one of the reasons why sources are supposed to be important.
I should also add, Wikipedia is the only place I've had a discussions with response times measured in years. That is certainly something unique.
