From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
VIP: Please read discussion page of article on En wiki to see that the lack of a secondary source and the authorship being too closely associated with the subject means the article is not proven to be verifiable and neutral. No more should be added here whilst this situation continues. Third party sources are essential for WP. Macdonald-ross (talk) 12:37, 16 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Ok cool so how do I find a third party source unrelated to Yamanaka about the process Yamanaka's lab used to produce iPS cells? I'm not really interested in making one specific claim or another, I just want to find the facts and write them down so EFL students can understand them. Fujippisensei (talk) 01:16, 20 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Also according to Wikipedia VIP may stand for vandalism in progress? According to their article itself, valdalism refers to "editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose, which is to create a free encyclopedia, in a variety of languages, presenting the sum of all human knowledge."
Whether my attempts to contribute to the project are against the stated purpose isn't up to me to decide, but I can tell you for certain that I am not here to deliberately cause harm. I signed up with the intention of contributing to one of the stated goals of simple English Wikipedia - to provide English-language encyclopedic content that is suitable for the goals and needs of English language learners.
Reading over the Wikipedia articles for sources, it's not immediately clear to me that the source I cited violated the policy on independent sources as while it is research performed by Yamanaka's lab, it is not self-published. It's published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which obviously has more weight than if it was just off the guy's website or something.
Furthermore, I don't see anything on the En Wiki talk page akin to what you're talking about.
Remember, secondary sources are Wikipedias' favorite food! It's the opposite of what you would think, but for a Wikipedia source, articles in mainstream news (even those written by non-scientists) are considered better sources than the actual research report published in a peer-reviewed journal. There are two reasons for this. First, the mainstream news article proves that the subject is notable and the original journal article doesn't. Second, per WP:PRIMARY, in general we have to assume that all Wikipedia contributors are amateurs and do not necessarily have the expertise to interpret primary sources. The "original research" in our "no original research policy" means "We don't want Wikipedians to put their own original research in the articles," meaning we don't want the Wikipedian's own interpretation of the peer-reviewed article, what it means, or which parts are important. This is because even if the Wikipedian does have real credentials, there is almost no way to prove that they do. This was a problem in the first years of the English Wikipedia: people lied about having PhDs. So even if you, Fujippisensei, really are an expert in real life, you have to do the same work that an amateur would: Provide (secondary) sources that confirm your ideas about the primary sources. It can be frustrating, but it's worth it! Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:11, 22 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Okay thank you, got it. So basically I shouldn't treat it as science writing as such, but rather the compilation of previous reporting of science writing, and the translation of that writing into simple English. So basically like in reading history, primary sources can be a problem so I have to assume that good science journalists know better than me (which about biology and many other subjects is definitely true anyway) and rely the consensus of their reports to write the article. I can include the primary sources that the secondary sources write, perhaps, after looking to see that there's no obvious contradictions between the two, I guess.
Furthermore as Macdonald-ross said on Simple Talk, maybe people aren't happy with the current state of the English Wikipedia article on the subject so I shouldn't rely on that as a model of how an article on the subject should be written. (It obviously uses more secondary sources than I did though.)
I'll look through everything when I get some time and take another crack at writing something based on secondary sources.
Out of interest, should all of the sources I cite be written in English? I assume that there's the same issue that I can't be assumed to be a reliable translator. Fujippisensei (talk) 01:47, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
