Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Principles of Verifiability

So we said nobody should trust Wikipedia just because. Just because it says on Wikipedia. People do anyway. People do trust Wikipedia. And like I said, that's a reasonable default when your life doesn't depend on it. If you just want to quickly look up, say, what the capital of Morocco is, you should be able to just quickly look it up on Wikipedia and probably don't need to consult academic sources that support it.

But if it does matter, and if you are going to make some high stakes decision based on information you got from Wikipedia, I would advise you not to trust it, and to actually look for the sources to make sure that they really do say that, that the article hasn't been "vandalized" recently -- remember anyone can change almost any article on Wikipedia at any moment, and sometimes people make malicious changes, and those sometimes survive for hours or days before getting corrected ("reverted").

So the information on Wikipedia should not be deemed reliable just because it's on Wikipedia; It should be deemed reliable because, and provided that, it came from a reliable source. And the reliable source is something we're going to define and try to learn how to identify.

When we add sources to an article -- as a general rule -- they need to be improving the article. In other words, some topics could be established with hundreds of sources; For example, we could find hundreds of sources establishing that the capital of Morocco is Rabat. But I only need 1 or 2 to establish it beyond any reasonable doubt with a high quality, reliable source; just adding the 43rd source that also states what the capital of Morocco is wouldn't actually improve the article. We're not trying to just cite every possible instance that supports what we said. If we have established it with a reliable source, that's enough. We don't need to pile on more and more sources. The quantity of sources is a lot less important than their quality.