Wikipedia:Identifying and using tertiary sources: Difference between revisions
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SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) →Appropriate and inapppropriate uses: better example (phlogiston theory was abandoned by around the beginning of the 19th c.) |
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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
=== Problematic uses ===
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