Well to me, a review is not a tertiary work at all. Personally I think a tertiary work should only be considered those who synthesis multiple secondary works in an article on the same subject. This would be as opposed to commentary on a single secondary work as you seem to be stating below.
-----Original Message----- From: David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 9:04 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC...
In any subject, a tertiary work is almost by definition outdated.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
0A
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:15 PM, wjhonson@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@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@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@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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