Talk:Africa Growth Pilot/Live Tutorials on Core Policies/Module4
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Evaluation of information[edit]
It is important that Module 4 integrates how to evaluate information with a critical eye. For example, Maryam Muhammad is the Director of a research institute. There is another Maryam Muhammad that is a newscaster. There is yet another one that is an athlete. Understanding how to differentiate the persons is critical when adding knowledge about them to Wikipedia. How can new editors evaluate information when such similarities exist between persons and/or entities in order not to make costly mistakes? Gaining this insight will also cut down the number of wrong in-site links in Wikipedia. Thank you.
AfricanLibrarian (talk) 19:30, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
- Great point, thank you! Asaf (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
Module 4 thoughts[edit]
I have a couple little points about this, but no overarching theme.
It is true that learning how to identify reliable sources requires no contact with the interface, but knowing how to create a citation, where to put it, and what sorts of things require citation are all necessary steps towards content creation.
And I understand the decision not to get into notability yet, since it's so amorphous and subjective, and doesn't impact people who aren't creative new articles yet, but at the end you have "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." This is not wrong, but definitely incomplete. The bar for inclusion, simpliest put, is significant coverage in reliable independent sources. Of course this requires teaching about significant coverage (pretty easy) and independence (not easy). And this is en.wp's inclusion criterion; I understand it to differ per project.
It might be valuable to name some "gotcha" style unreliable sources. I'm thinking specifically of IMDB, which appears reliable but cannot be cited at all, and I'm sure there are more relevant examples for your target audience.
Getting into independence of a source might be largely out of scope, but even if you're not contending with notability, failure to identify independence of sources can run afoul of NPOV, like if most of the facts in a legitimately notable company's article are cited to the corporate website and interviews with executives.
It's good to have realistic and achievable goals, but I feel like the overall four module series is stopping just one module short of producing a graduate who will be able to contribute effectively in all areas. Even so, I think you've got a solid foundation here. If I could add one thing it would be source independence, since it requires a degree of media literacy that takes training and experience. Folly Mox (talk) 02:27, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you, @Folly Mox, very good points all.
- We definitely agree that a module on Notability would have been a natural complement to this set, but are under fairly strict time and budget constraints to prove the efficacy of this approach in the first place; if and when we can show that high-quality structured tutorial modules implementing this curriculum can result in significantly better retention rates, there will certainly be further investment in developing additional modules, first among them a module on Notability.
- You are also correct that the difficulty in teaching the information/media literacy necessary to distinguish independence of sources is also present in this module, even without Notability. IMDb is a good example that would be familiar to many learners, and would feed a useful discussion of what can and cannot be cited from there, and what we could use to cite an actor's appearing in a film, for example.
- We shall do our best to teach this, with principles and examples, and also encourage learners to seek help and to be receptive and attentive to feedback they receive about their sourcing. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
- Overall I think it looks really good. I haven't personally identified any major gaps in the sequence of what you're trying to teach, and confess my extremely limited experience in sister projects probably gives me a tunnel vision where yall have a broader perspective. You've done a great job engaging the en.wp community for feedback and I appreciate how responsive you've been here. I really hope this works out and you're able to recruit some fresh faces from an underrepresented population. Thank you for doing this. Folly Mox (talk) 18:57, 5 July 2023 (UTC)