Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Sources on African topics

The other thing is there are source lists, as I mentioned, on various topics. And one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there is a source list specifically on African topics that a number of African editors have put together, and I helped a little. And you can help as well. You can build this list. It is certainly not complete, but there is a list of African sources and sources on African topics.

If you have tried to cover Africa -- and I am of course not assuming that all you write about is Africa, you can write about anything you like, but those of you who have tried to cover topics in Africa, have probably run into the fact that there are not enough sources for a lot of things, and there are great gaps in the coverage by high quality secondary sources of even very important things that are just not covered, not studied, by academics. And also that there's not enough easy and free access to the sources that do exist, because they're behind a paywall, or they're only in print and only in the library in the capital city, which may be five hours from you, etc., etc.. I get all that.

On the other hand, things are improving in Africa in terms of sourcing and coverage and access. I also think a lot more could be done even with the sources that do currently exist. It's not like we've exhausted everything we can do with the current sources, and I think a little education or help goes a long way. So if you feel you don't know how to find sources, go on the Reliable Sources Noticeboard and ask for help. People will help you, and you will learn. You will learn of of repositories that you could search that you maybe didn't know existed, like the Wikipedia Library that I mentioned, which you should all check out.

And, there are things that we could do to improve things in the longer term. They won't help you with the article you're working on today, but if we invest in it today, then in three, four, five years the situation could improve dramatically. Things like digitizing historical newspapers. Just imagine if you had 200 years of Nigerian newspapers going back to colonial times. How much more could you cover about the history of Nigeria, for example?

So these are the kinds of things that are available in some countries and are increasingly going to be available in Africa as well. And that will also improve. The sources that we have been curating for Africa, it's called the Africa Source List. This is a page that tries to cover a whole range of sources by country. These are sources that are generally -- again, generally! -- considered reliable. It depends on what we want to cite, and it also depends, as we've seen, on what part of the Web site we're citing. These sites may still include "sponsored content", lifestyle sections, etc. We need to check what we are citing, and for what. But there's a number of sources there, from a number of countries. And again, I encourage you to add sources to this list, sources that you consider to be reliable or that you are suggesting are reliable. And we can talk about it on the talk page. If we disagree, we can actually have a discussion and talk about it. So that's a resource I encourage you all to use.