That's truly begging the question. Wikipedia is a survey of secondary sources, but it's much too much to claim that all encyclopedias need to be. As others have

That's truly begging the question. Wikipedia is a survey of secondary sources, but it's much too much to claim that all encyclopedias need to be. As others have pointed out, many encyclopedias include references to primary research and primary research itself. Indeed, the first encyclopedia included new material never before published. cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia