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(a)gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)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(a)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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