Wikipedia talk:Identifying and using primary sources: Difference between revisions
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:I agree that separation need not be temporal, although temporal separation is the simplest concept to explain, and the most relevant to notability issues (since what's wrongly touted as a "secondary source" in the weeks after an event will be derided as merely primary at the successful AFD years later). An investigative report can be a secondary report. A report about a crime may also be a primary report: merely repeating the statements made by involved parties is not sufficient separation. It's [[Wikipedia:Identifying_and_using_primary_and_secondary_sources#Not_a_matter_of_counting_the_number_of_links_in_the_chain|not just a matter of counting links in the chain]]. As someone else said recently, a secondary source is a work of the mind, not simple regurgitation of what you saw or what someone else told you. [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing|talk]]) 04:58, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
::[[Tropical Storm Nicole (2010)]]? <b>[[User:Will Beback|<font color="#595454">Will Beback</font>]] [[User talk:Will Beback|<font color="#C0C0C0">talk</font>]] </b> 07:38, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
:::Press releases are marked as such in news papers precisely because they are word for word what the company said and are thus primary sources regardless of where they appear. Newspapers are responsible to some degree for what they print, but they distinguish press releases to establish that what is said is something for which they are not responsible.
:::If a reporter is reporting what involved parties said, that report is still secondary--the statements are those of involved parties, and the reporter has the necessary degree of separation. Editors are responsible for vetting the content, if the newspaper is reliable, and thus we can take that report as a secondary source for what was said, as opposed to taking an involved party's later statement later about what they said--that's a key difference. Person X says Y. If a reporter reports that, it is a secondary report of what X said. Person X says they said Y, that's a primary source. Whether Y is true or not is a different matter. I agree that if a reporter is a witness to, say, a demonstration in the street in Syria, they are acting as a primary source, but if they are reporting what others have claimed, they are a secondary source for those claims. You've referenced [[Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary and secondary sources]], but that is an essay, not a policy or guideline. What policy states is "Secondary sources are second-hand accounts, at least one step removed from an event. They rely on primary sources for their material, often making analytic or evaluative claims about them."
:::As for " a secondary source is a work of the mind", that's not always true, and a primary source is often a work of the mind as well. Research papers drawing conclusions about the results of an experiment, for example, as primary sources the way we look at it, while an analytical paper drawing conclusions across a number of research papers would be a secondary source, but equally a work of the mind.
:::In regard to temporal separation, it is not so simple as you make out. A report from 1901 about an event in 1601 we would generally take as a primary source for what people in the early 20th century held about that event, but not as a secondary source for the event in 1601. For that we would look for more recent historical works, as we assume that historians build upon one another's work.
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