Well Syn3rgist, based on your question, it strongly suggests; a) you do not really know how Wikipedia works & b) you have not read the guidelines, rules & regulations in enough detail on what you can & cannot do on Wikipedia.

Q: Is it true that primary sources are not permitted on Wikipedia?

A: Primary sources are NOT prohibited on Wikipedia, but their use is subject to certain guidelines & restrictions.

Primary sources can be valuable and appropriate additions to articles, but they should only be used to make straightforward, descriptive statements that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source. Primary sources should not be used to support novel interpretations or original analyses of the material. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary or tertiary source, (when using primary sources, extreme caution is advised).

Q: How would I challenge the fact that all the secondary sources are incorrect? If you believe that a secondary source on Wikipedia is incorrect do the following;

• Check the source & verify that the secondary source is indeed incorrect by checking the primary source or other reliable secondary sources
• Start a discussion on the article's talk page to discuss the issue with other editors. Provide evidence to support your claim & explain why you believe the secondary source is incorrect.
• Find a reliable secondary source that supports your claim and add it to the article. Be sure to follow Wikipedia's guidelines for reliable sources.
• Work with other editors to reach a consensus on the issue. If there is disagreement, try to find a compromise or seek input from other editors or administrators.

If you are challenging a secondary source on Wikipedia, be sure to provide strong evidence & follow the guidelines very closely for reliable sources.

Jimmy Wales has repeatedly said that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should not be cited as an academic source.

See, e.g.: Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation

Wikipedia itself writes that "Normal academic usage of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is for getting the general facts of a problem and to gather keywords, references and bibliographical pointers, but not as a source in itself."

Furthermore, as Wikipedia notes in its “About” section, “Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information.”

For much more on why no one should cite Wikipedia as a source, see
The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia

First, let's leave Mr. Roth's letter aside. In my view, the letter betrays a rather unfortunate lack of due diligence on the part of Mr. Roth and his literary agent; it seems they didn't look too closely into how Wikipedia works. He did have a frustrating experience, but in my view, his agency should have familiarized themselves with Wikipedia's production model and given him better advice, which could have avoided the drama of a public letter. (If you're really interested in the issue, look here -- which addresses some of what lead up to the open letter. NB, the more recent communications were private. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Human_Stain#The_book.27s_author_requests_this_article_be_corrected ) Mr. Roth's complaint has more to do with the nature of private assertions vs. published works, than it does with primary vs. secondary sources.

The question of primary vs. secondary sources is a complex one. People often mean different things by the terms; and also, in different contexts, their relative merits can be different. But, the idea that Wikipedia policy doesn't permit primary sources is incorrect.

To put it very simply -- maybe even oversimplifying a bit here -- people writing about themselves, their own experiments, their own work, etc. often present things in a way that has important differences from how the rest of the world perceives them. With a work like Wikipedia, where we assume no expert knowledge on the part of the writers (see Wikipedia's "no original research" policy), secondary sources -- ideally written by people with relevant expertise, and published by reputable entities -- are the glue that permits editors to develop a shared understanding of how the author's work is received and interpreted by his or her peers.

Here is the relevant passage from Wikipedia's "reliable sources" guideline:

Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources.

Tertiary sources such as compendia, encyclopedias, textbooks, obituaries, and other summarizing sources may be used to give overviews or summaries, but should not be used in place of secondary sources for detailed discussion. Although Wikipedia articles are tertiary sources, Wikipedia employs no systematic mechanism for fact checking or accuracy. Because Wikipedia forbids original research, there is nothing reliable in it that isn't citable with something else. Thus Wikipedia articles (or Wikipedia mirrors) are not reliable sources for any purpose.

Primary sources are often difficult to use appropriately. While they can be both reliable and useful in certain situations, they must be used with caution in order to avoid original research. Material based purely on primary sources should be avoided. All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rs#Primary.2C_secondary.2C_and_tertiary_sources (emphasis added by me.)

Click here if you want a more thorough discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources

What does Jimmy Wales think about Wikipedia's reputation of being 100% unreliable?
Most people think that people can just change whatever they want. They don't know that every change has to go through huge amounts of people before becoming added. I have never seen an incorrect fact on Wikipedia ever. I understand that it shouldn't be used for academic papers though.

I’m not Jimmy - but you can try and change whatever you want. If you’re just vandalising a page, the odds are it will take all of a minute before someone camping the recent changes will notice what you have done and revert your edit. There are pages that are protected - the page about the State of Palestine is for example protected due to it (and many other pages about the relationship between Israel and Palestine) getting extremely heated at times.

If you look in the top right hand corner of a page you can sometimes see a padlock (indicating a page that needs protection and extra admin supervision), a plus (a good article), or a star (a Featured article). Those last two are the pages that have successfully been through peer review.

100% unreliable? Not even close. Wikipedia has been comparing favourably to the Britannica for more than ten years and has left it in the dust. But anyone can edit most of it. It’s just that you are likely to be spotted fairly fast.

It’s pretty reliable and has compared favorably with encyclopedias in comparison tests. For most matters it’s not bad. Problems arise with controversial topics where opposing factions edit and re-edit the page.

When I first heard about the term “Rapture,” it was before Wikipedia even existed and none of the standard references on religion even mentioned it. When I first looked it up on Wikipedia, it gave the standard account of it being a cult doctrine originating in 19th century Scotland. When I looked again, the article had been completely taken over by the Religious Right who rewrote it to be a long-standing doctrine going back to the Early Church. So if you look up anything on Wikipedia, and the topic is partisan, it could very likely have been taken over by some faction.

For non-controversial topics, content may be pretty stable, but even so, it’s not considered a reliable academic source because it’s not primary. Even worse, Wikipedia rejects original research. To see why, read about Google’s rival project, Knol, which allowed anyone to submit articles on anything. The ones I looked at were excruciating garbage by fly-by-night authors pushing their own pet theories. So Wikipedia does not want authors contributing their own work.

This policy can backfire sometimes. A historian, Timothy Messer-Kruse, was teaching a class touching on the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886. Most books treated the trial of anarchists afterward as railroading, but a student asked, “If the trial went on for six weeks, what did they talk about all that time?” And Messer-Kruse didn’t know. So he investigated and found that a great deal of investigation had been done and evidence presented. When he tried to edit the Wikipedia entry, he was turned down, often within minutes.

Wikipedia actually refused to accept the trial documents because they were primary sources. And even when Messer-Kruse published articles on the subject, his edits were rejected. Apparently there are things on Wikipedia “everybody knows” and challenges are harshly rebuffed.

The saving grace of Wikipedia is very extensive documentation. So even if a Wikipedia article is not an acceptable source, it has a very good chance of leading researchers to acceptable sources.

Thanks for your A2A. I am, however, as always, not Jimmy Wales, nor particularly close to him. I've had conversations with him a handful of times regarding Wikipedia business, that's about it.

In this case, though, as Mark Moran has stated, he's made his views on that clear. You shouldn't be using Wikipedia as a source in a university, and anyone who says that is absolutely right. And twenty years ago, before Wikipedia existed, you shouldn't be using Britannica as a source in a university, either.

Encyclopedia articles are meant to be a basic overview of a subject, not an exhaustive treatment. They may elide or gloss over details that are crucial to an advanced understanding of the subject.

Where Wikipedia would help you in a university is to look at the "References" list at the bottom of the article. Those in-depth references would often be a great starting point for university-level research and writing. And the article itself might be a good starting point to understand the main points of the subject. But at that level, you should be reading, understanding, and citing that original material, not "summarizing a summary" as you'd be doing if you just used the encyclopedia.

Quora is never going to become more useful than Wikipedia.

I agree that Quora has tons of useful and knowledgeable answers but none of them match the amount of knowledge that is out there on Wikipedia.

If you need to get information on anything out there in the world, the first place you would go to would be Google and the first search result is most likely to be Wikipedia, which will have pages and pages of information for you to learn.

On the other hand, Quora is basically Wikipedia’s reference section broken down into Questions and Answers.

There is a reason why Wikipedia’s logo is this:

That’s a sound method of teaching. Beyond a very early primary school level, students shouldn’t be citing an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are meant to provide a brief overview of a topic, but may gloss over or omit details that students may need to know about.

However, Wikipedia does offer one very substantial advantage. Articles will list the sources which were used to write those articles themselves. Some of those sources may be quite suitable for students to cite. It would not be a bad idea at all for a student to use a Wikipedia article to find sources on the facet of the subject they want to explore more deeply, and then go look at those sources.

Wikipedia is a great starting point for deep research, but it’s a terrible end point for it. Articles aren’t intended to deeply and exhaustively cover their subjects, they’re designed to provide a beginner to intermediate level overview.

Wikipedia is good at finding things to do with popular culture. For example today I wanted to know which year a Neil Diamond single was released (1968) Whilst it might not have been but its not really that consequential. OTOH one featured article page on wikipedia, for three years, told me that Richard II was king of England in 1345, now if I'd written that in an essay I'd have been rightly taken as a fool. Actually the page in question still implies that date for Richard II if you read closely.

Again until recently a page on wikipedia would have told you that Thomas Rainsborough was a famous Ranter. Once again if you'd put that in your school work the teachers would be laughing in the staff room for the rest of the year.

Its not just the howlers you need to watch out for on wikipedia. There are plenty of subtle errors there too. Most often people swap and change links about so that [[xyz]] suddenly points to an entirely different [[xyz]] then hat intended. No one ever checks whether the [[xyz]] links make sense anymore. One amusing one which was suddenly changed link from non-religious Jews in England, to Atheist Jews in Israel.

That sort of thing goes on all the time. And is independent of anyone actually meaning to make the articles nonsensical.

Everywhere you look on wikipedia you'll find errors, mistakes, and just plain nonsense. If you are doing school work then you really need to learn where the reliable resources are to be found. Wikipedia won't save your education, a good library will.

There are a number of things wrong with the question

Maybe it would be best to give some simplified defintions

Primary source means original research or items

Secondary source means analysis and information on primary sources

Tertiary source means a collection of secondary sources

Hearsay means conjecture and speculation that isn't backed up by material evidence

So, for a start, you can see that hearsay does not mean the same thing as a secondary source

But also the premise of the question is wrong, the Wikipedia guidelines state that articles should be based on reliable secondary sources and to a lesser extent on primary and tertiary sources - there is no ban on primary sources

None of this necessarily makes the information 100% reliable - but it is exactly the same as every other encyclopedia

Jimmy always stays cheerful in the face of such situations:

"If you learn nothing else during your life, learn that the way to achieve happiness is by being cheerful always, even in the face of suffering. You may have to fake it, though" -- Jimmy Wales' Senior High School quote

It's fundamentally upside-down. For most people with most common way to access Wikipedia pages is via a search on another site. The focus should be on the pages themselves, not the site's front-end.

Redesigning Wikipedia's pages and editing system is a much bigger challenge because:

1. They're pretty good already.
2. The plane we'd like to rebuild has to stay in the air.

Wikipedia is established to a point where its history should be considered as part of any improvement program. That said the use of horizontal rules and the lack of a clear grid or plan for the typography in this proposal are poor in my view.

If I was doing this I'd:

1. Build a grid that works on monitors and mobile
2. Address the editing system. It's Wikipedia's most powerful tool and weakest link. Live edits would make editing straightforward and the need to manually code links can be removed.
3. Ask a foundry to create a typeface for maximum readability and which can then serve as the identity across all media regardless of layout and design choices.
4. Optimize pages for print and PDF if required by readers.
5. Build tools to make viewing media simpler, faster and prettier.

The print metaphors of indexes and directories has been stretched to breaking point. Wikipedia needs an architecture fit for the 21st century.

Knowing how to use an encyclopedia is a big skill for a third grader. If your teacher lets you use World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica as a source but not, Wikipedia, then perhaps you have a gripe. But, using an encyclopedia is not genuine research. Encyclopedias contain general knowledge and do not delve into subject matter with depth. Your sixth grade teachers and beyond all the way to the university expect you to learn to use books, the "card catalog" (I know they are not on cards anymore), scholarly search engines, microfiche (does that still exist?), regular periodicals, scholarly periodicals, etc. The internet is a great way to access some of these as well, but you should expect to spend some time in the library if you are a student.

I hope this answer helps: Todd Rush Chambers's answer to What does Jimmy Wales think of teachers telling kids not to use Wikipedia?

If it is ok, I need to give a bit of context first. Traditional encyclopedias hire experts, and those experts then write the articles. You know you can trust the articles because you can trust the expertise of the people who were hired to write them. Thus traditional encycopedias don’t need to worry much about where the authors gained their information - wherever it may have been, through primary or secondary sources, as experts they can be assumed to have validated what they said and can be assumed to be able to accurately validate their sources.

This all falls apart on Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia’s editors are anonymous, we have no idea if they are experts or not. Even if someone could prove their expertise - a difficult task in itself - the way Wikipedia operates means that an expert’s additions could be changed at any time. Thus Wikipedia cannot trust the contributors.

If it can’t trust the contributors, then the only thing it can do is trust the sources. That way it doesn’t matter who added the material - if the sources are relaible, it can be assumed that the information in them is reliable as well, irrespective of who added that information to the article.

So after all that, to answer your question:

• You can use primary sources to make factual statements. This assumes, though, that the primary source is reliable. In many cases where the content might be self-serving (such as the owner of a company describing their product as the best selling on the market, or a politician making claims that would support their own agenda) you cannot use the material, or if you do use it you can’t use it as a factual statement but instead have to say “According to XXX, the owner of the company, this is currently the best selling product on the market” - although even that can fall foul of being too promotional. If a statement is controversial you can almost never use a primary source.
• You cannot use primary sources to come to a conclusion that they don’t clearly state. This would be original research, and as Wikipedia can’t trust anonymous editors to accurately come to a conclusion based on primary sources, it isn’t allowed. Instead you need to find a reliable secondary source that has come to the same conclusion and reference it.
• Because primary sources will tend to be biased, an article can only be written if there are sufficient reliable secondary sources to be able to create it. Which is why Wikipedia has the “notability” rule - if secondary sources have not taken note of the topic and written about it, it is assumed to be impossible to create an article.
• When writing about living people it gets stricter, and it has very limited use of primary sources due to the risk of harm. This excludes most official government documentation, including things like drivers licenses; birth, death and marriage certificates, and in most cases court documents.

tl;dr version: you can use primary sources for uncontroversial statements, especially where you attribute them in the text to the source, but only with caution and only if you do not use them to come to a conclusion not explicitly stated in the source. If reliable secondary sources exist they are prefered.

To understand why Wikipedia works the way it does, you need to undestand the problems that Wikipedia faces and is trying to fix.

In traditional encyclopedias, contributers are hired because of their expertise. We can trust the contents of articles in traditional encyclopedias because we know that the author was hired because they were an expert.

Wikipedia editors, on the other hand, are largely anonymous. Even when they use their real name, or link to their Facebook page, there is no verification - so at best you can suspect that they are who they claim to be, but you can’t normally know for sure. (There are exceptions to this, but it is a good general rule). Given that you can’t even know for sure who someone is, it is pretty hard to judge their expertise. So you can’t trust that Wikipedia articles are accurate based on the expertise of the contributors, because you can’t know if the contributors have any expertise in the first place, and it is quite likely that they don’t.

Given this, how can Wikipedia create articles that you can trust? The answer is that if you can’t trust the contributors, maybe you can trust the sources that they get the contributions from. So many of Wikipedia’s policies exist to provide a means of ensuring that those sources are good.

This brings us to primary sources. Interpreting primary sources takes expertise, so Wikipedia much prefers that the interpretation is managed by experts, not random contributors who may know nothing about the subject. Thus the interpretation of primary sources on Wikipedia - “orginal research” - is out. Evaluating primary sources is a different thing. Wikipedia doesn’t ban primary sources - you can use them - but not to make a case (as that would be original research) and not where those primary sources are potentially self-serving. Even then, you need to consider weight - you could fill a biography with primary sources about the person, but would that be a balanced account of their life? Instead Wikipedia asks that primary sources be limited in their use, and instead rely on what other sources have noted about the person, on the grounds that contributors who are not necessarily qualified to evaluate the importance of primary sources might over or underemphasis them if it was their decision alone.

So tldr: Wikipedia does allow primary sources, but in a limited fashion. The reason they are limited is that Wikipedia can’t afford to trust the judgement of its own body of anomymous editors.

I know much about my life. My memoirs could say much, and I would try to be honest. But I only see myself from one point of view. Mine. And much, no matter how honest I might be, would be unverifiable.

I know quite a bit about my brother. But he’s my brother, and my feelings about him would interfere, or rather a reader wouldn’t know whether they interfered or not, which would spoil my reliability.

My last boss at the phone company, ten years ago, is someone I could write about without bias, in part because I have barely seen him since then. However, being smart, kind, efficient and pleasant does not make him notable, so even though I’m a secondary source it doesn’t matter. Instead, I write what other non-participants have written on various topics, read what they variously say, weigh them against each other, and summarize them in the encyclopedia.

Sometimes, having developed these sensitivities in editing Wikipedia, I read something in my 1943 Britannica that won’t fit my standards. “Arab” fails to mention that Arabia is one of the places where Arabs live. “Arabia” holds as “completely unjustified” a Saudi territorial claim against one of the Trucial States. “Lenin” is a hagiography of the greatest, kindest, smartest leader the world has ever known. That’s what comes from hiring one expert to write an encyclpedia article. These authors were too close to their subject. Most of us Wikipedia editors aren’t nearly as smart as those guys were, but we can more easily stand a distance from our subject, even from today’s subjects, and hash out differences.