> Literature reviews summarise the state of knowledge in a given field, and given Wikipedia articles are about the knowledge on a subject rather than the contents of a specific paper
every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.
it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.
in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.
wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.
the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)
every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.
it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.
in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.
wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.
the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)