Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/What is a reliable source

So, all I need is to cite some source, and that's it? No, you need to make sure the source you're citing is reliable. Not all sources are created equal. And we need to be picky about the sources we cite. Be picky!

I say this because I have seen a practice of just piling on as many links as possible onto the article in the hope that some of those links will be considered reliable. I want to tell you that that is a lazy practice that is disrespectful to the Wikipedia community, because it is basically telling us, "well, I couldn't be bothered with picking only the reliable sources, so I literally dumped all the links I could find and, you know, you guys figure it out, and I hope you like one of those sources."

I hope you see how that is not being a good citizen of Wikipedia. You're leaving the burden of sifting through unreliable sources and looking for the reliable ones on the shoulders of other people, when in fact, it is your responsibility, as the person who added the content, to support it with reliable sources, and only with reliable sources. Not to just include any and all links, piling on blogs, Facebook posts, whatever, in the hope that something sticks. That is not a constructive approach. And if you keep doing it, people will begin complaining. So you need to make sure the source you are citing is a reliable one. Now let's talk a little bit about what is a reliable source and who decides this anyway.

Who decides whether a source is reliable or not? As I already mentioned, it does have an element of judgment; it's not clearly, scientifically, one-or-zero, definitely reliable, or definitely unreliable. It's a matter of opinion. It's a matter of some some subjectivity.

Which is why the people who decide it are all of us, the community. And over the years we have developed some guidelines, and we'll walk through them. The reliability of a source can depend on several attributes of the work itself, the text that you're talking about: What is the genre of the text? For example, I obviously cannot cite a novel, a work of fiction, that, let's say, takes place in Lagos -- I cannot cite it about events that took place in Lagos, even if it mentions an actual event, a historical event that's part of the novel. The novel is not the source that I should cite for the fact that this historical event happened. I hope that's clear. So the genre of the text matters. It needs to be a fact-based text. Not fiction, not a poem. It needs to have factual information.

The scope of the text: what it is about, what is the subject of the text? What method was used to arrive at the text? Is it a journalistic work, reportage? Or is it a scientific work? Was it measured&? Are these scientific measurements? Is this a philosophical text that is making hypotheses? These are all very different methods.

So we need to really understand the nature of the text we want to rely on. And that's why this skill is more complicated than Neutral Point of View, which is more intuitive. You need to really have information literacy to to be able to look at a text and answer these questions. What is the genre of this text? What was what is the method of its composition? How was it arrived at? And if that sounds like something that's going to be hard for you to do, it is going to be hard for you to determine whether sources are reliable. But it is also a learnable skill: a skill that you can practice. And with practice, you will get better. If you have the patience and the willingness to learn, you can get better at it. Another factor of the reliability of a text is the author. Does the author have the relevant credentials to be offering us factual information on this topic? And we're going to see some examples in a minute. And the publisher, the venue where this text was published, also matters. The person may have relevant credentials, and the work may be fact-based, but if the publisher is that same expert's personal blog, that's different from that same expert sharing their expertise in a peer-reviewed academic article. Not the same! So the publisher -- where the text appeared and in what context it appeared -- actually matters a whole lot.