User talk:Wjhonson/Sources

Comment on secondary sources

It is good to know that the very long thread at WP:RSN, which seemed out of order there, may yet have a useful result in the form of this essay. There is one more point that I hesitated to make in the original thread for fear of making it even longer.

Wikipedia should normally make all interpretations and draw all conclusions from the language used by secondary sources. It is WP:OR or WP:SYN for us to re-summarize evidence in a new way that no secondary source has yet offered. The original paragraph about that Bible translation that led to the transcript discussion was trying to make deductions about the qualifications of a translator based on what college courses he had taken. Since there was no secondary source making that inference, it was out of order for us to claim it. Your essay might be expanded with a couple of examples of correct use of secondary sources.

Since we consider court documents to be primary sources, this principle leaves them in a kind of a gray area, since judges do summarize and draw conclusions. Court documents are usually primary sources for us because they are 'strange;' they need interpretation (e.g. in the press) before it makes much sense to use them. Scientific papers are also in the gray area. Some of them do summarize and draw conclusions, but it is preferable for us to cite review articles if we have a choice.

Your essay might want to comment on what is and is not a publication. Papers in somebody's attic are not a publication. Lettters by a famous person that are deposited in a library are not a publication, even though biographers use them. It seems that college transcripts may be publications if it can be verified that the college will release them to anyone. Scary though it may sound, the property tax records of the city of Boston are a publication, since anyone can view them online, not just the owner. Though it's hard to know in what cases it would ever be relevant to cite them in a WP article. The language of WP:PSTS may need to be fixed up on the point of what is or is not a publication, since it blurs the difference. EdJohnston (talk) 17:45, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

There is a distinction to be drawn between direct quoting and indirect quoting here Ed. We've always believed that you can directly quote a primary source. So we could directly quote any part of a primary source only reserving the effort to keep the quote in-context. The primary source is the final arbiter on what the primary source actually states. I've never been a great believer in the ability to paraphrase primary sources, I always try to quote them. However, secondary sources, which we'd hope are writen by experts in the field, do paraphrase, analyze and synthesize primary material into brand-new forms. We can quote them as well. What is generally preferred however, when we are dealing with secondary material is to paraphrase, cut and join the material so that the text flows smoothly although composed of various disjointed secondary statements.Wjhonson (talk) 02:02, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

My thoughts

I too appreciate that a lengthy thread resulted in something constructive in the end! I would be interested in some clarification about ""Amending" and "Editing" i.e. taking the product in its current unfinalized form and adding comments, analysis, interpretation, citations and copyediting;", and in particular the inclusion of the words "analysis and interpretation". My researches as part of the original thread were that secondary sources (e.g. http://www.library.unr.edu/instruction/help/primary.html) provide interpretation and analysis of primary sources, and the current WP:PSTS seems to use language congruent with this. Coming from a health background, I work a lot with research articles that are structured as a lit review, an experiment and results, and then a discussion, analysis and interpretation of these results in the context of the state of knowledge to that point. To my mind, while the unanalyzed experimental results are primary information, the synthesis and discussion of the meaning of those results make these journal articles secondary sources. Do you agree? Perhaps I am being misled by the words "analysis and interpretation" and this is not what you meant? Is this something worth clarifying? --Slp1 (talk) 14:41, 26 January 2008 (UTC)