[WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources

[Fred Bauder]

This is excellent, could you add this information in this vein to
Wikipedia:Cite sources?

Fred

> From: zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:18:37 -0800 (PST)
> To: wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
> 
> Following up on the recent discussion about citation and sources,
> I'd like to make a few points in no particular order.
> 
> 1. Some primary sources are too difficult for most editors to access.
> Examples include unpublished material in archives and old
> newspapers in foreign languages.  Other material is readily
> available - for example almost every university with a Law
> School or Political Science department will have the UN official
> records that I located recently.
> 
> 2. Primary sources are not necessarily better than secondary sources.
> Many types of primary sources require experience and knowledge
> to interpret because they are written for people in the know and
> not for outsiders.  In this case a presentation and analysis of the
> material by a specialist who understands the context and knows
> about other relevant sources is to be preferred.  (Conversely,
> presentation of genuine primary material in a misleading fashion
> is taught in Propaganda 101.)
> 
> 3. Many secondary sources are written by people whose purpose is
> to deceive their readers.  We Wikipedians did not invent the
> art of POV-pushing.  For every topic which provokes edit-wars
> in Wikipedia, there is an active information-war out there trying
> to
> convince us of one or the other POV.
> 
> 4. The combination of 2 and 3 is a catch-22.  We need the specialists
> but can we trust them?  There is no easy answer to this but some
> partial answers can be given.  One is that people who work for
> advocacy groups or governments are the least trustable.  Next
> least trustable are the "independent experts" the media like to
> consult.  The most trustable are academics; not the teachers you
> may have taken a course from, but those who publish their research
> in peer-reviewed journals and get cited by other such people.
> However, this only goes for academics writing on their own
> specialties.
> 
> 5. Academic specialists have prejudices and political opinions too
> and there is no such thing as an unbiased secondary source.
> 
> 6. The first rule of citation is to state the actual place you got the
> information from.  If you want to report on some document D
> you read about in book B, your first obligation is to name B.
> It is a sin to only name D unless you looked at D yourself.
> 
> 7. If it is necessary to cite one of the less trustable sources (see
> 4),
> the source should be identified sufficiently to warn readers
> that the source may have a motivation in slanting the evidence.
> That is, say what organisation the source belongs to or what job
> they have which might influence their opinion.  However, it is
> not necessary to pass judgment on the source (say "member of
> the XYZ political party", not "member of the XYZ political party
> which some people claim to be a lot of racist scum").
> 
> 8. Random web pages which make unsourced claims are not
> sources at all in my opinion and should be avoided altogether.
> 
> Zero.
> 
> 
> 
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