Talk:Afghan War Diary (public reaction)

Tertiary sources

Most of this speculation by the news orgs etc is what WP itself calls 'tertiary sources'. It's ok to get someone's opinion on something. It is for some reason that I cannot fully fathom not ok to get the primary source...basically ignore that one. But most sources are supposed to be secondary ones; sources commenting on a primary source. So scholars comment on the Bible. You don't just use the Bible (primary source - again probably ok to ignore that rule), and you don't use a scholar commenting on another scholar commenting on the bible. Legal proceedings don't use it, where it is known as Hearsay, and it is thinning out the reliability of information considerably to do that.

The only reason it snuck into WP in the first place, apart from my opinion that wp editors could not find a wp rule if it was taped to their forehead, unless it happened to back up one of their arguments, is that the secondary sources here are the only people with the information, unless anyone wants to actually go thru the files themselves. So secondary sources are now primary sources. And so naturally enough, anyone commenting on the now-primary sources are magically a secondary source

So that is basically what this article consists of. Tertiary sources. Which is sort of a pretty good reason to just delete it, if the info ever gets organized properly. But I hate deleting things, and for now, this is one of the better sources of some of the information.

Anarchangel 11:22, 4 December 2010 (UTC)