This being what I was taught, I have never let my students cite encyclopedias, and so I have never had to ban Wikipedia. I use it, though, and I let them. I also encourage them to contribute to it — some parts of it need help — although none have done that yet. But I would truly take a good Wikipedia entry in lieu of one more paper.

People keep telling me that I’m OK with Wikipedia because I learned how to “do scholarship” before it existed, so I can cut through any B.S. that is there. But I don’t think it is Wikipedia that is corrupting the minds of the youth, I think it’s commercial television, Christian “balanced” news, talk radio, Creation Science, and so on. _Those_ are examples of irresponsibility and distortion.

Wikipedia on the other hand is serious and I think its work-in-progress nature is a GOOD thing. I also don’t mind the occasional wrong entry, the fact that people can write entries on themselves and so on; I think it’s sort of Borges-like and funny; I do appreciate authoritativeness and so on but there are other reference works that have that; I don’t get the anti-Wikipedia craze and I think it’s a phobia, I think it is a cover for some other fear, I am not sure what.

I think terms like primary or secondary can definitely be discipline-specific and, as I pointed out initially, it’s a small point relative to the overall argument about what researchers should or shouldn’t be citing. But I do think the confusion feeds into the question at hand. The confusion between different types of resources and their relative reliability leads to the “this encyclopedia is better than that one” argument. But they’re both encyclopedias, and most cases (assuming the encyclopedias themselves aren’t the focus of the research) they’re probably starting points that should lead to other resources.

I agreed with much of what Nate said, too.

For instance, historians typically treat documents written by the subjects of one’s inquiry at a specific moment (or moments) in the past as primary sources, while the secondary sources would be other scholars’ arguments that draw on primary source materials. So ordinarily historians consider letters, diaries, journals, economic records, newspapers, etc. that came from the period in question as primary sources, while other arguments about that time period written after it occurred by other scholars are secondary sources (e.g. books, scholarly journal articles, etc.)

As a result, sources like Brittanica and Wikipedia are often placed in yet another, (typically lower) echelon of “tertiary” sources, which are distinguished from secondary sources by the fact that they strive for an entirely objective presentation of “facts” (which as Dave pointed out above, is a bias within itself — objectivity is just one of many subjective perspectives). Secondary sources, on the other hand, openly acknowledge the fact that they are making an argument — just read the introduction and the author typically lays out a pretty clear sense of what he or she will be trying to achieve or persuade his or her audience of in the course of the book/article.

However, the issue of the scope of one’s study can quickly turn what is ordinarily considered a secondary source into a primary one (or can turn a tertiary source into a primary one). For instance, if one is studying how textbooks’ presentation of the Civil War has changed from 1945-present then the textbooks become the primary source material of the scholars investigation. Although textbooks are ordinarily considered tertiary (though more are becoming more overtly argumentative), in the hypothetical study above they constitute the key area of investigation and the essential source material. Similarly, encyclopedias of all stripes (Brittanica and Wikipedia) can become primary sources if one wants to study the way in which they construct knowledge of have changed over time.

Ultimately the debate over what constitutes a primary, secondary, or tertiary source is, as Dave made clear, a semi-moot point. We shouldn’t strive to give students a cookie-cutter definition of each and then tell them that certain types of sources are off-limits, but instead we should help them understand the different characteristics of these sources, how to analyze their authorship and credibility, and how to use them appropriately in light of what one wants to study.

I don’t see how David is working on a bad definition of “primary source.” Please expand.