According to Help:Sources and Help:Sources Style Guide, on WikiTree there are two basic types of what could interchangeably be called "sources" or "citations" and WikiTree's preferred style is the Evidence Explained format, based on the Chicago Manual of Style.
According to Evidence Explained:
- 'a primary source is “a traditional concept within the humanities that is variously defined as an original record, a contemporary account, or a firsthand account, but not necessarily all three simultaneously. The term is no longer used in sound genealogical analysis because any source (and any statement within a source) can be a combination of both firsthand and secondhand information.' (Mills 2007, Appendix A, p. 827)
- 'The term citation is not synonymous with the term source, and the two should not be used interchangeably.' (Mills 2017, p. 12)
Evidence Explained accordingly differentiates between three types of Sources (original records, derivative records and authored narrative) and three Information types (primary or 1st-hand, secondary or 2nd-hand and unknown). (Mills 2017, p. 12)
Evidence Explained further defines Sources as follows:(Mills 2017, p. 24)
- 'Original sources—material in its first oral or recorded form.'
- 'Derivative sources—material produced by copying an original or manipulating its content;'
- 'Authored works—A hybrid of both original and derivative materials, produced by writers who study many different sources, reach personal conclusions, and present a new and original piece of writing.'
In summary, the term 'primary source' is a misnomer that should be phased out of WikiTree parlance and there is fundamental inconsistency between WikiTree and Evidence Explained whereby EE correctly views the terms 'source' and 'citation' to be non-interchangeable.
Edit: Show as 'EE correctly views'.