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They rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them. [d] For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. [e] Whether a source is primary or secondary depends on context. A book by a military historian about the Second World War might be a ...
An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources. [3] Secondary sources are at least one step removed from an event. They rely for their material on primary sources, often making analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or ...
Edits that rely on primary sources should only make descriptive claims that can be checked by anyone without specialist knowledge. Wikipedia articles should rely on reliable, published secondary sources wherever possible. Secondary sources are documents or people that summarize, analyze and/or interpret other material, usually primary source ...
This page in a nutshell: Cite reliable sources. You can add a citation by selecting from the drop-down menu at the top of the editing box. In markup, you can add a citation manually using ref tags. More elaborate and useful ways to cite sources are detailed below.
A primary source can have all of these qualities, and a secondary source may have none of them. Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are appropriate on any given occasion is a matter of good editorial judgment and common sense, not merely mindless, knee-jerk reactions to classification of a source as "primary" or "secondary".
The White House's summary of a George Bush speech is a primary source. Publicly available databases, such as citation indexes and census surveys, are primary sources. Primary sources that have been published by a reliable source may be used for the purposes of attribution in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it's easy to misuse primary ...
This biography of a living person relies too much on references to primary sources. Please help by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful.
When the policy says that "articles should be based upon" secondary sources, the policy means that a majority of the content and the major themes for an article should be cite-able with reliable secondary sources. It doesn't mean that you can't ever cite a primary source for anything. About whether editors should prefer the primary literature: