Wikipedia talk:Identifying and using primary sources: Difference between revisions
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This is saying two things: one, that primary vs. secondary as it applies to books and media articles is less a matter of what the sources ''are'' than how they are ''used''; and two, that the distinction has to do with context and cultural factors, as anything written in the 1930s about slavery -- even a scholarly source that is doing some interpretation -- is going to be inextricable from a pre-Civil Rights Era perspective, and perhaps less useful for what it says about slavery than what its existence says about those scholars.
Meanwhile, the supposed James Cook University material does not, in fact, originate from James Cook University. If you actually read the "secondary sources" section, you will notice that it is cut off after "More generally, secondary sources...". The oldest version on the Internet Archive is cut off in the same place, suggesting that it was copied (poorly) from somewhere else. Googling the text turned up a lot of sketchy term-paper sites, but I believe I have found the origin: [https://eslm.lpude.in/LIBRARY%20AND%20INFORMATION%20SCIENCES/BLIS/DLIS105_REFERENCE_SOURCES_AND_SERVICES/index.html#p=25 a textbook/pamphlet from Lovely Professional University]. (The place where the James Cook page cuts off is right before some bullet points, which checks out if someone is hastily copy-pasting.) Skimming through this pamphlet, it seems of somewhat low quality; the sources it cites are [https://www.library.illinois.edu/village/primarysource/mod1/pg8.htm this University of Illinois guide], which basically says what the Yale guide does ("it is important to consider by whom, how and for what purpose it was produced"), and something called "buzzle.com," [https://web.archive.org/web/20001214082400/http://www.buzzle.com/about.asp which does not seem particularly reliable and is part user-generated]. The irony of a Wikipedia essay about usable sources depending upon a plagiarized source is left to the reader.
The other university library pages' text has also been heavily copied-and-pasted across other university libraries, but it's hard to tell which was the original since most are are unsigned. Only the last page given (University of Michigan) lists its author, a graduate student. Basically, the whole thing is a mess, but at the very least the plagiarized ones need to go. [[User:Gnomingstuff|Gnomingstuff]] ([[User talk:Gnomingstuff|talk]]) 02:37, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
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