Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/What is Verifiability

So in order to support Wikipedia's Voice and keep it worthy of the trust that many people do place in it, we want to make sure that everything Wikipedia says is verifiable. Verifiable simply means you can check a source. You can verify for yourself. We want our readers to be able to go to the source that we relied on when we created a particular sentence on Wikipedia, so that they, the readers, can check for themselves whether or not this source does indeed say what we in Wikipedia are saying that it says. That's verifiability: allowing our readers the ability to trace the knowledge that we're offering them conveniently in Wikipedia, allowing them to at least potentially take the trouble and go to the various sources from which we had synthesized this knowledge and created this nice Wikipedia article.

Perhaps you're thinking "well, but who would do that? Who does that?" And the answer is: very few people. Yes, very few people do that, but some do. And everybody should be able to, if they choose, if they have reason to doubt something that Wikipedia says, or if they just want to win an argument, and they cannot just say, "well, it says so on Wikipedia", they need to show a reliable source -- we want them to be able to do that.

So it doesn't matter how many people do that every day on every article they read. I don't verify sources on every article I read on Wikipedia. Like most people, I generally trust Wikipedia, but not because I know it contains no errors. On the contrary! As a Wikipedian, I know full well it contains errors, but I trust by default that most of the time most of the knowledge is reasonably correct, and the more central or popular the topic, the higher the reliability is likely to be. But if it's something that I'm going to have to depend on, I do check sources. Or if it's something that looks fishy to me, and I say to myself "that doesn't sound right!", or "is that true? It sounds a bit extreme. It sounds a bit unlikely. I want to see where this is from.", I do click on those footnotes! And so should you! I'm not trying to create the illusion that all our readers are constantly checking all our sources. Obviously not. The citations are there so that people could do that, when they choose.

By the way, this is unlike traditional encyclopedias. These days they are harder and harder to come by, but those of you who have maybe seen a traditional print encyclopedia like the Britannica or any other one, will know that the article in an encyclopedia just provides information about its topic and generally does not cite its sources. It just gives you knowledge in "Britannica's Voice". You have to trust it, and if you don't trust it, tough luck! There's no way for you to directly, from the text, go and see what this encyclopedic account is based on.

In that sense, Wikipedia is a more responsible source of knowledge, because it tells you, it shows you, where its content comes from, ideally. Not all articles meet that ideal. Not all articles do cite their sources, and in that sense they are deficient articles. They need to be fixed. They need to be cleaned up and fixed, and sources do need to be added. And if some claims in those articles cannot be supported by sources, those claims should be removed. We do not pretend that every article on Wikipedia has perfect citations. We know that's not the case. That is what we aim for. That is what should, ultimately, be the case. And it's a wiki! It's gradual and it's a process and we're getting there.