On Sep 17, 2006, at 9:55 PM, Kim van der Linde wrote:
The New York times is a primary source, an encyclopaedia is a tertiary source.
Erm, no, the NYT would be a secondary source.
Tertiary sources should be much more reliable than primary.
This is true only insofar as you decide to equate the purposes of the two, which seems silly.
The way you approach Wikipedia is more as if it was a primary source.
No... (And certainly Liu's policy doesn't do this.)
You went from claiming that Wikipedia was reliable to saying that everything is unreliable.
Again, no, I didn't. I argued against the notion of some magic reliability that can be taken uncritically. If you are trying to direct your students to sources that require no thought and critical evaluation, you're fighting a doomed battle. If you're trying to teach your students how to use sources, Wikipedia is both good enough to use and good enough to be worth teaching.
So, the issue we talk about is the degree of unreliability, and my contention is that Wikipedia for a tertiary source is to unreliable to be used as a source for research.
I'm not sure what sort of research you're talking about here. At least in my world, no research-based project on an undergraduate level or above should be relying on tertiary sources at all.
Wikipedia unfortunately is often a primary source, with articles that are not more than a first year essay on a topic.
Examples?
-Phil