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I am not in any way arguing that people should do "original research"; can you point out where I have done so?

You also seem to be taking a non-Wikipedia view of the definitions of these various varieties of "source".

o Wikipedia makes it clear that articles should be based on secondary sources, using primary sources only sparingly and preferably only when backed up by secondary sources.

o Wikipedia makes it clear that research in a field, such as the results of an experiment or the proof of a theorem in a field such as mathematics, is a primary source.

o Wikipedia makes it clear that for their purposes a newspaper article is a secondary source (not a primary one), and in fact is an example of "the most reliable sources" available.

o Wikipedia also, at least, makes it clear that a summary article written in an academic journal is a secondary source. This is really not that bad, but I demonstrate in another thread how summary articles are a painful limitation.

Yes: in the field of history, these are defined differently, and even Wikipedia drops their notion of "secondary source" and instead comes up with something different. However, I am not talking about scrounging up ancient newspapers when I say "primary source": I mean either bypassing the error-laden filter of the New York Times or citing the actual experiments when discussing those experiments, rather than citing summaries or even journalism.




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