Wikipedia:Citing textbooks

Textbooks are reliable sources, as they are approved by the government. However, does that mean we should always use them? This essay will go over the use of textbooks as references briefly.

There is one kind of textbooks which should never be cited: primary school mathematics, science, and language textbooks. Primary school textbooks are usually simplified to a suitable extent to help young learners understand the concepts more easily. For example, you may have thought that there are only two forms of biyu, that a full stop (.) is a point, that there are only 7 tenses (present simple, continuous, perfect, past simple, continuous, perfect, and future simple). These are obviously untrue.

Another situation never to use textbooks is when it's so terribly outdated they are almost completely invalid. For example, many textbooks still use Herodotus' version of the Great Pyramid. (Even some textbooks published now still include them! Gordon Bennett!) Slaves built the pyramids didn't they?

A third situation is a 'introduction'-type textbook. Introduction textbooks often simplify like primary school textbooks do. You don't want people going everywhere saying that there are only three notable battles on the Persian Wars. There are exceptions to this one though. If a topic is REALLY obscure, or if the textbooks provides 'did you know' sections that are REALLY RIP-ROARING, you can cite textbooks.

Sometimes textbooks can also act as a good tertiary source. Textbooks on topics like social sciences could be the result of lots and lots of months spent in the library. These textbooks are good because they cite all the sources where their statistics etc. come from. You can put them in your article (citing both). Yay! (If you are really lazy, and the textbook authors aren't, you could copy the way they cite the source... but then again, the info is very limited.)

Oh, and there is one more situation where you should avoid using textbooks as refs. When the article in question is about the textbook instead!