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Many of the best sources are not available online, or are only available under subscription. For example, many books are not available online at all, and subscription to academic databases such as JSTOR can be fairly expensive. However, it is possible to use the open web to find many good sources to use in writing encyclopedia articles.
Sources that are reliable for some material are not reliable for other material. For instance, otherwise unreliable self-published sources are usually acceptable to support uncontroversial information about the source's author. You should always try to use the best possible source, particularly when writing about living people.
Google Books often offers readers a few sentences even when full access is not granted, and can help editors find reliable sources quickly, either by looking at the book's references or by citing the book itself. Check that a particular book is published by a reliable academic publishing house.
For this reason books are seldom very reliable sources. When you cite a newspaper, you are also relying on the author but mainly on the publication. Rather than checking facts, newspaper editors will expect reporters to check their own facts and they'll fire them if they don't and reporters know this.
However, reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject. Common sources of bias include political, financial, religious, philosophical, or other beliefs.
Among genealogists, a primary source comes from a direct witness, a secondary source comes from second-hand information or hearsay told to others by witnesses, and tertiary sources can represent either a further link in the chain or an analysis, summary, or distillation of primary and/or secondary sources. In this system, an elderly woman's ...
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Better sources available: While a good tertiary source can usually be used without incident to source non-controversial facts, such citations can and should be superseded by ones to reliable secondary sources. WP:Identifying reliable sources tell us: "Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being ...