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

[David Goodman]

In any  subject, a tertiary work is almost by definition outdated.
There will necessarily be 4 delays before new work can be recognized:
A, The time to publish the new work, B The time  for the reviewer to
assimilate the new information by  C. The time to write the review
D. The time to publish the review.  In fields where it matters, there
are of course some media that try to shorten these steps, and some
journals (such as Nature) sometimes publish commentary simultaneously
with important papers. But in fields like the humanities, the cycle
will normally take several years.

Therefore there is a danger in relying exclusively upon such works.
We sometimes use them for determining consensus in a field, but
outside as well as inside Wikipedia, consensus can change long before
the generally available texts recognize this.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:15 PM, <wjhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> 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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