[WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC...

[wjhonson at aol.com]

The way it was discussed in-project a teritiary source summarizes 
several secondary sources into one cohesive article.  Let us first 
set-aside those works calling themselves "encyclopedias" when they are 
really specialist works that pretend to cover a subject area thoroughly 
which is a different animal altogether.

Examining true encyclopedia articles, we can find an article on say 
"Mary, Queen of Scots" which itself may cite seven or ten other 
secondary works, as it's basis.  Each of those works may be a few 
hundred pages long, but the enclyclopedia article is only perhaps a 
thousand words.

So a true tertiary work, selects and summarizes (presumably the best) 
multiple-secondary-works per article.  This was the in-project jargon.  
This is not in-general how a tertiary work is necessarily defined 
outside the project.

I'm not familiar with slashdot and digg, but it seems they would, at 
least, not synthesize.  Synthesis is a necessary part, in my mind, to 
the creation of a true encyclopedia article.  All tertiary works are 
encyclopedias.  Not all "encyclopedias" are tertiary works, since the 
word is bastardized by some.

W.J.



-----Original Message-----
From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 4:53 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to 
Wikipedians for BBC...










WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
> I submit that there is no such language in any of our policies.  If 
there
> is, then whoever wrote it has no clue what we meant when we were 
discussing
> tertiary sources many years ago.  Tertiary sources are just summaries 
of
> notable secondary sources.  So they quite obviously provide 
notability, in
fact
> perhaps the ultimate form of it, trouncing secondaries quite roundly, 
since
> they in-fact pick the most notable topics to report out of those!
>
> Will Johnson
>
>
>

Out of curiosity... would you class Slashdot and Digg as
"tertiary sources" ?


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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