Wikipedia:Identifying and using tertiary sources: Difference between revisions
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'''Better than nothing:''' Tertiary sources are also commonly used when a secondary source has not yet been found. For example, a field guide about cacti has probably been reasonably well fact-checked, and can be cited as a source for the range of a particular species, if no source focusing on that species (and perhaps with more recent data) has turned up yet.
'''Older but still relevant details:''' Older tertiary sources can be used to source former, obsolete views or facts that need to be reported on in a Wikipedia article, for completeness, especially when it's difficult to find modern sources that even mention a long-replaced idea, name, person fulfilling a role, or whatever. As detailed below, there is a major difference between using a tertiary source to report obsolete facts as such, and trying to use them to preserve obsolete facts as still verifiable (e.g., you can use 19th century encyclopedias to show that the [[phlogiston]] hypothesis was once taken seriously, but such sources cannot be used to try to contradict modern scientific works).
=== Problematic uses ===
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