alt Hacker News>Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?
Kind regards and thank you for your time.
Sure. Check the Wikipedia rules for citation. Primary sources are all but prohibited. (See Wikipedia for details.)
This violates the principles of empiricism. If I state as a matter of empirical fact that you've asked a question and I refer someone else to your question for viewing as evidence that you did in fact do so, that's what we call a primary source. This is logically the best evidence of a fact, still according to the most modern principles of scientific philosophy. (See Locke, Hume, etc. Or search "scientific empiricism" and follow philosophers into modern time to see that this principle is widely agreed upon in the forum.)
Conversely Wikipedia establishes that it's better for me to instead cite the BBC or other news outlet (secondary source) for their opinion about your question, rather than use a primary source.
Implicitly, contribution is confined to a strict subset of sources, especially those controlled by a small group of corporations and colored by interpretation rather than those exhibiting empirical fact.
More importantly, this is logically unscientific.