Talk:Secondary source

Thank you for this article.  :) I think a lot of us may have been in denial. Hephaestos

This and primary source are good articles, and nice to have. However I quibble with contemporaries being considered good sources. I'm a contemporary of the Second & Third Gulf wars, however most of my 'information' comes from major news sources, and propoganda outlets (US military/administration, Arab news, Iraqi claims), so while I'm a contemporary, I'm really no better than someone else writing about it from their college textbook a 100 years from now. And even though I know some vets, and I talk to them, and I write about what they tell me, doesn't that still make it second-hand? ~ender 2003-04-13 02:47 MST

Contemporary is a fidgety word. Times are not the same everywhere. Someone in 14th century France wouldn't be a contemporary of the birth of the Renaissance, but the same person in 14th century Italy would be. To more extreme, almost no American of the time can be said to be contemporary to the October Revolution.

Contemporary means existing in the same times. The times are the events. You can't be contemporary without being with the times. You can't have been a contemporary unless you moved in similar circles. Musical performers and composers living in the same times are considered contemporaries because they have the same past influences and the same occurring influences.

Unfortunately, it's a point not often made. Sounds too much like a pseudo-science version of General Relativity, I guess. ~Daelin 2004-04-24 12:24 EST

Why I re-wrote

The examples were overly abstract ("imagine a historian used a source which used another source"), and whether something is primary or secondary is how it is used, not what its content is. Furthermore there was too much bias in favor of the accuracy of primary sources which is completely uncritical, unwarranted, and not how history is actually done. --Fastfission 15:07, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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new comment by Birger Hjørland The way in which primary source, secondary source and tertiary source has been defined in Wikipedia is not in accordance with the way in which is has been defined by UNISIST in 1971 and taken over, by among others, the present writer. (See Fjordback Søndergaard; Andersen & Hjørland, 2003).

Also, the normal language in Library and information science is to speak of bibliografies and the like as secondary sources (or secundary literature).

There are variations in the use of these concepts between the humanities and the sciences, however, if a general terminology should be established, we recommend the UNISIST terminology.

Fjordback Søndergaard, T.; Andersen, J. & Hjørland, B. (2003). Documents and the communication of scientific and scholarly information. Revising and updating the UNISIST model. Journal of Documentation, 59(3), 278-320. Available at: http://www.db.dk/bh/UNISIST.pdf

Looking over that link, that use of the term "secondary source" is to mean something very different from how historians use the term or how it is generally used in the English language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks like the technical use of the term in some sort of information management system, and has little bearing on what most people mean when they distinguish between primary and secondary sources. As a historian, I will at least say that I've never heard of UNISIST, and it sounds like something only librarians would know about -- a relatively slim audience. However I could just be wrong about this -- could you clarify what UNISIST is and why its terminology should trump common usage? --Fastfission 17:33, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)