[WikiEN-l] Secondary sources

[Carl (CBM)]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Ray Saintonge<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> How does becoming old, and being held in only 12 libraries suddenly
> cause a book to revert to primary source status?

I have seen the dual argument as well: that sources which would
certainly be counted as primary if they were 100 years old must be
counted as secondary sources if they are recent. For example, if we
wrote an article about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln entirely
from newspaper articles published in 1865, nobody would say we had
written this from secondary sources. But some do argue that an article
written entirely from newspaper articles published in 2009 is written
from secondary sources.

> It seems that a lot of people are prone to gaming source levels to suit their own objectives.

Yes, this happens quite often. It's partially a consequence of certain
policies, such as WP:N, directly referring to "secondary sources",
even when this is not the right metric. For example, one reason that
people want to count contemporary newspaper articles as secondary
sources is to establish notability immediately for contemporary
events, without waiting a year for better sources to develop.

- Carl