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

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/23 Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:15 PM, <wjhonson at aol.com> wrote:
>> The way it was discussed in-project a teritiary source summarizes
>> several secondary sources into one cohesive article.
>
> Is a work that summarises/draws on multiple news articles secondary or
> tertiary? I wonder, because I've considered writing articles based on
> very old newspaper articles (eg, late 1800s). But I realise that it's
> actually pretty hard to do, to not take events out of context, etc.
> I'd be much better off using a book written by a historian...who has
> read the articles. Is that book secondary? Tertiary? Somewhere in
> between?

In this context, I think it's safe to say that the contemporary news
articles are primary sources; the book by the historian is a secondary
source; we're synthesising that and some other materials to be a
tertiary source.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk