Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (history)
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This is a project to work towards guidelines for History-related articles equivalent to those about reliable sources for medical articles.
History articles should always comply with the major content policies: Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:No original research, and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. It may be helpful to consult the essay Wikipedia:Reliable source examples#History and the B-Class criteria of WikiProject History, which are also used by the Wikipedia Military History Manual of Style.
Nutshell
[edit]- Historical articles on Wikipedia should use scholarly works where possible.
- Where scholarly works are unavailable, the highest quality commercial or popular works should be used.
Historical articles
[edit]- Articles which deal with events in the past, or the scholarly process of producing history.
Articles that deal with current events, or events occurring entirely in the previous one or two years are not regarded as historical articles, since they have not been studied by historians. When historians first begin to write about an event, then it should be regarded as a historical article. Sources that were previously satisfactory, such as reports in the mainstream press, should be replaced by sources from historical scholarship.
Scholarly historians ensure their work is worthy through a disciplinary practice called historiography. This may include methodology, jargon and theory. An article on such scholarly discipline is a history article, but, may also be relevant to other scholarly fields or knowledge communities. For example, exegesis is jargon primarily used in theology but also used in historiography.
Who is a historian
[edit]Historians carry out original research, often using primary sources. Historians often have a PhD or advanced academic training in historiography, but may have an advanced degree in a related social science field or a domain specific field; other scholars and reliable sources will typically use the descriptive label historian to refer to an historian. See also "objective historian".
What is historical scholarship?
[edit]Historical scholarship is a group process by a community of experts on a specialized topic of historiography, who read and critique each other's work. Material submitted for scholarly publication is vetted by editors and outside advisers. Scholarly books typically have a page or more of acknowledgments naming the people who assisted in finding, and evaluating sources, and helping the author avoid mistakes. Editors give a high priority to ensuring that the authors have dealt with the current standard scholarly historiography on the topic. A submitted paper or manuscript that is unaware of major relevant scholarship will be sent back for revision, or rejected. Scholarly books are reviewed in the history journals, with the goal of evaluating the originality and contribution, and pointing out misinterpretations or mistakes.[1]
The results of the scholarly process appear in numerous forms:
- Books published by academic and scholarly presses by historians, as reviewed in scholarly historical journals or as demonstrated by past works of a similar nature by the historian.
- Chapters in books published by academic and scholarly presses by or edited by historians, as reviewed in scholarly historical journals or as demonstrated by past works of a similar nature by the historian or editors
- Research articles by historians in scholarly peer-reviewed journals
- Books, book chapters and articles by social scientists and scholars in the humanities, working within their area of expertise
- Other works that are recognised as scholarship by other historians (by review or discussion), which were reviewed or edited by a scholarly press or committee. This includes unpublished papers read at scholarly conferences.
- These works could include signed articles in encyclopaedia that are aimed at a scholarly public of historians
Historical scholarship may include:
- University level textbooks that summarize the scholarly literature.
- Popular equivalents of the above published by historians who normally publish in the scholarly mode
- Publications like the above, reviewed to scholarly standards by historians, that were authored by non-historians
- Popular publications by non-historians that were reviewed favourably in explicit book reviews or review-articles by historians in scholarly peer-reviewed journals
- Publications by non-academic historians in popular modes, demonstrated as accepted by the general scholarly community by repeated reviews over time of that non-academic historian's work in scholarly peer-reviewed journals
- Publications by any of the above in politically sectarian presses, where such works have been reviewed favourably in scholarly peer-reviewed journals
- Publications that are held in several academic libraries may be scholarly. The more libraries holding the work, the greater the implication that the work is held by academic libraries for its scholarly value; rather than as an example of popular opinion or fallacious scholarship. Correspondingly, when works are held primarily or only in popular or deposit libraries this may indicate that the work has not been judged by professional librarians to be a reliable secondary source.
Historical scholarship is generally not:
- Journalism
- Opinion pieces by non-scholars
- Popular works that were not reviewed, especially works by journalists, or memoirs—these may be useful to supplement an article that relies upon scholarly sources
- Any primary source; however primary sources may be used in accord with the WP:Primary rules. This includes primary source collections, or the primary source sections or appendixes of otherwise scholarly texts
- Annotated editions of primary sources, with the exception of the explicit annotations
- Online editions of primary sources produced by libraries and archives.
What is "recent" scholarship in history?
[edit]Historians produce material after the fact. Recent scholarship is scholarship which displays the currently acceptable methodological practices, and that refers to other recent material. This constitutes a shifting window of "recentness" that depends on the area of historical studies, and changes in historical scholarship. The only way to judge this is by becoming aware of the higher order debates within a field of history, this can be done by reading the reviews.
The main driver for new ideas is the opening of new primary sources, such as archives. Also new historiographical models come into use. They are usually added to old models, but sometimes older models are rejected or abandoned.
- For example, scholarship before 1990 will not include post-modern or narrativist methodologies. See also historical revisionism.
- In Holocaust studies, as the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars began to gain access to the archives of former communist countries, which offered new perspectives.[2]