Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Age of sources

We mentioned that the age of the source matters. A lot of 19th century sources on literature are still valuable! 19th century articles written about, say, Charles Dickens or about Shakespeare can still be perfectly good sources. But 19th century sources on physics are generally not, and shouldn't be cited at all, unless we are writing about the history of physics.

If we are literally writing about how, say, the atom was discovered to be not the smallest particle, we could cite that book that says that it is, to show that until this year it was thought that there was no smaller particle. That would be a relevant place to cite the outdated physics book, but only that! In almost no other context should we be citing old, very old, scientific books. Because science has changed, has evolved.

Sources might also be too new. What might be a too-new source? We just mentioned dissertations; Ph.D. dissertations that are submitted to the university. If they haven't even been accepted by the university yet, they're too new. Even though after they are accepted, they're actually a good academic source. They are too new before they're accepted. Another reason a source might be too new is that the topic that it covers is not fully understood yet. For example, they might excavate, say, a mummified body of a mammoth or a mastodon from the permafrost in northern Siberia. And the news article on the day that it is discovered, saying "they found a mastodon dating from this era and it clearly ate these fruits, etc." is probably not going to be the best, most reliable information about that mastodon. It's too new; scholars haven't studied it yet. So there might be an excited newspaper article saying they discovered a mastodon in the ice, but that's probably not a good source for us to cite when we want to tell our readers in Wikipedia's Voice the facts about that mastodon. Pardon the very random example.

A mass shooting is a much more realistic example, unfortunately. A mass shooting is immediately covered in a lot of news. But if you compare the news reports about a mass shooting, they are often wildly different. Because the news reporters are relying themselves on what people say, what the police says, what they themselves see on the ground, and they come up with different counts of how many people died, and they come up with different theories about who the shooter is. And in that case, again, this is all too new. Wikipedia should take a deep breath and cover the mass shooting after the picture clears. After the smoke clears and we can calmly say, this is what happened. This is how many people died. Here's what is known about the shooter, etc. rather than try to update Wikipedia in real time. Wikipedia isn't a news site, is not meant to be one, and isn't well-positioned to be good at real-time news.