I'm sorry taustin, but where are these published policies about "persuading the masses" and "public opinion on what the facts are"? I bounced around a few seemingly relevant policies, and the closest thing I could find this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe...ade_up_one_day

The tone of the article is open to interpretation. Your interpretation is certainly one of them. On the other hand, the whole page feels like a thought experiment. It basically outlines the no original research policy and the conflict of interest policy, then goes over what it would take to get your own work published. Hypothetically.

Look, I'm not going to say that Wikipedia's policies are perfect. Yet I suspect that Britannica's policies pretty much have the same outcome. That is to say, no original research and everything has to be verifiable. I suspect that Wikipedia is leery of primary sources because of that. Primary resources may be good for supporting a statement of fact. Yet, taken alone, they are also strong indicators or original research. Also, while an individual primary source my be verifiable and accurate (e.g. census data) the interpretation of that source may not be verifiable (e.g. there may be contradictory data).

Even though secondary sources don't solve those problems, they do address them. A good secondary source will take multiple primary sources into consideration, would have undergone some academic discourse as to the interpretation of those primary sources, and will be independent of conflicts of interest.

Return to that article by Timothy Messer-Kruse for a moment. At first he tried modifying the article based upon original research. The records were verifiable (i.e. the court records), the interpretation was not. Even a peer review article should not be taken as a verification of the interpretation. It was, as the "keeper" noted, a minority view. More important, peer review may only suggest that the research is sound. Peer review does does not suggest that it is an accepted interpretation. Yet Messer-Kruse went even further to create problems: he used his own article as a source. That is a clear conflict of interest.

Messer-Kruse effectively outlined what an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, is not: they are not venues for academic discourse. They attempt to take accepted knowledge as it currently stands, and presents a summary of that knowledge. Accepted knowledge is always a "popular opinion" and is not always correct. That is true even if you limit your definition of popular opinion to the popular opinion of experts.

Part of the problem is that the development and the correction of knowledge is a time consuming thing. First you have to collect evidence. Then you have to have some sort of discourse on the evidence, primarily relating to its interpretation. After that, you have to wait for it to become accepted. That last part is the most difficult to accept, but it does have an upside. If we made anything into a fact based upon the evidence of the moment, we would end up chasing after a bunch of wildly incorrect theories based upon weak evidence.