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 <[email protected]> To: English Wikipedia <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 4:53 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC... [email protected] 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
