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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 3965507" data-attributes="member: 40166">NOR is essential to being an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are secondary sources, not original ones. It also keeps the reliability of Wikipedia up; anyone can check to see whether or not Nature really did publish an article on the extraordinary flatulence of guinea pigs, and if they did it was because some professional editors and scientists looked over the results. If Prosfilaes writes that he has done the studies and found that, what reason do you have to believe him? How can you disprove him without redoing the studies yourself?It also makes editing a lot easier. You don't have to argue against "Gary Gygax is merely a mask of Satan"; you invoke NOR and go on. For a deeper example, the theory that "the [[De Havilland Comet]] crashes (i.e. BOAC Flight 781) were caused by German bombs" was rejected because of NOR. The nominator of that idea made lots of arguments on the talk page, but is Wikipedia better served by reprinting the well-established cause of the crash, or by trying to have people who earned their degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from the TV show "Air Crash Investigations" vet and publish a new theory of the crashes?I do think there's a lot of people who are too quick to delete articles, but I also don't think Wikipedia is served by tons of tiny, hard to reference articles. Where's the value in merely repeating large sections of the Monster Manual or the DMG? I think there should be a wiki for all the dieties and atifacts and whatever in D&D, and keep the encyclopedic material in Wikipedia, the material that goes beyond just repeating the books.</blockquote>

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