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