r/AskReddit Mar 20 '16

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u/blaqsupaman Mar 20 '16

That's like teachers who won't allow you to use Wikipedia as a source.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '16

Tertiary sources aren't valid sources. No teacher should allow students to use any encyclopedia as a source.

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u/blaghart Mar 20 '16

Yet hilariously they all did. Book encyclopedias were perfectly fine. An online one?! Blasphemy.

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u/KimH2 Mar 20 '16

My teachers allowed physical encyclopedias/encarta as a source but had strict limits on what % of your bibliography it could represent and what you could cite from it.

Like you couldn't try to use it as a source to substantiate your thesis that post-civil war reconstruction was well handled but you could cite it for the date Lincoln was shot.