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This page deals primarily with the last question: Identifying and correctly using primary sources.
==Background information==
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The concept of [[primary source|primary]], [[secondary source|secondary]], and [[tertiary source]]s originated with the academic discipline of [[historiography]]. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events.{{efn|name=Yale|According to Yale University: "Primary sources provide firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic or question under investigation. They are usually created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later".<ref>{{cite web |title=Primary Sources at Yale |url= http://primarysources.yale.edu/ |publisher=Yale University}}</ref>}}
Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source was a source that was created at about the same time as the event, regardless of the source's contents. So while a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an ancient dictionary is actually a primary source—for the meanings of words in the ancient world.
There are no quaternary sources: Either the source is primary, or it describes, comments on, or analyzes primary sources (in which case, it is secondary), or it relies heavily or entirely on secondary or tertiary sources (in which case, it is tertiary). The first published source for any given fact is '''always''' considered a primary source.
The historians' concept has been extended into other fields, with partial success.
Wikipedia, like many institutions, has its own [[lexicon]]. Wikipedia does not use these terms exactly like academics use them. There are at least two ways in which the term ''secondary source'' is used on Wikipedia. This page deals primarily with the classification of reliable sources in terms of article content. The classification used specifically for notability is addressed [[#Secondary sources for notability|in a separate section at the end]].
==How to classify a source==
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