Keep in mind that HN comments are actually a fairly decent set of secondary sources: the discussion of expert-level commentators is exactly what Wikipedia wants to link to, rather than basing things off the first-hand claims.
Except that the quality of HN comments varies widely: not all commenters on HN are experts in the subjects they're writing about (and the people voting up a comment aren't necessarily experts either). A general reader following a link here from Wikipedia is not likely to be able to tell the difference between an expert and a non-expert. Thus, HN would make a much worse secondary source than something like an industry publication that has an editor and fact checkers (rare as these seem to be in our field today).
I, for example, comment regularly on HN and I know next to nothing.
I can report the same.
And in that case, a reader who does know the difference would hopefully edit the page to remove any secondary sources that aren't of good quality, such as links to HN comments that are flat-out incorrect.
And who identifies them as incorrect? Not the editor.. Wikipedia looks for expert opinion published in reliable outlets to avoid the problem of people enforcing their own point of view.
At least in theory.
HN comments are usually interesting, but lack any form of editorial control :)
> Not the editor..
You say this as if there's ever anyone else.
Re:Wikipedia links to HN
by BHSPitMonkey on Sunday September 15, 2013 @04:14PM
(#6390149)
I've seen no shortage of uncontested bad and outright incorrect advice given on this site. We mustn't be so quick to trust the discussion here as perfect, especially given the growth over the past months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript links to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037801 with the sentence "On December 24, 2010, Ashkenas announced the release of stable 1.0.0 to Hacker News, the site where the project was announced for the first time."
"80legs has been criticised by numerous site owners for its technology effectively acting as a Distributed Denial of Service attack and not obeying robots.txt." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056960 (which makes sense because the discussion includes site owners)
Others are questionable:
"While ZumoDrive encrypts transport of all content with 256-bit SSL, and stores that content encrypted on Amazon S3 servers, that content is still accessible to ZumoDrive administrators" It would seem that the direct link http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-03-11-zumodrive-rolls-a... is far more relevant than the comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183308 (and many of the comments actually are opposed to the claim)