|
> Wikipedia is not a primary encyclopedia, its a secondary source. Technically, Wikipedia is a tertiary source. A "third hand source", as you say. A secondary source is something like e.g. a book written by a historian based on research they did translating and putting together some primary-source ancient writings. The secondary source can be considered semi-authoritative on a topic; but is still interpreted through a lens. You can quote a secondary source, though always with attribution. What you cannot do, is to state claims from a secondary source as [cited] fact (like you can with a primary source.) Because of the "anyone can edit" part, though, Wikipedia has no authoritative-ness to it — nobody is standing behind and vouching for the validity of any given text that exists on Wikipedia; there's nobody to take responsibility for the inaccuracy of a statement, nobody's professional scholarly or journalistic or critical reputation is on the line. So it's not valid to quote Wikipedia even as a secondary-source "attributed fact." So it's not a valid secondary source. Thus, tertiary. Mind you, it's also bad even for a tertiary source. A dictionary is a tertiary source, but writers on grammar like https://www.grammarphobia.com/ might still cite historical editions of dictionaries to prove extant historical understanding of a meaning of a term. Not to take the dictionary as authoritative, but just to, effectively, "do cultural anthropology to it" — seeing the dictionary as a well-known work of writing at the time, that can be analyzed for its word choices regardless of who wrote it. In theory, you could cite [a particular point-in-time snapshot of a page from] Wikipedia for similar reasons; but it's one of those rare exceptions where you have to really know what you're doing. You might say that it's challenging to cite Wikipedia, both in a technical sense, and in the sense of doing so being the best thing to do. |