Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Examples requiring citations

Here are some statements that definitely require citations: If I want to state in Wikipedia's Voice that Buhari was the President of Nigeria. That's a fact that shouldn't be difficult to establish, right? There should be plenty of official, reliable sources, so it is not okay to just state this on Wikipedia without a source. Definitely needs a citation. If I want to quote the famous phrase "be the change you want to see in the world", I need to attribute it and cite it. By the way, it is often attributed to Gandhi, the Indian leader. And it's probably not actually something he quite said. So good luck finding a reliable source for that quotation! But you could literally say, "the quote traditionally attributed to Gandhi", to acknowledge that it may or may not be true, but it is indeed commonly attributed to Gandhi. And you can show that it is attributed to Gandhi. Your citation can show that that is something people say Gandhi said. At least that you should be able to cite. If you want to state that Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State -- again, dramatic, high stakes. That's not something you can just casually mention, like a birthplace. That also should generally be easy to establish through news reportage. Most of us were not in the room when Boko Haram pledged allegiance. So we depend on reportage, on news reports that say that this happened. But that would definitely need a citation.

If we want to say that someone is the first African woman nominated for a Booker Prize. Again, that should not be difficult to establish. You don't just say that someone was nominated for a prize. Nominations for prizes have publicity. You should be able to find a report where it says that this person was nominated. But not just that this person was nominated. That sentence said something else: It said that this is the first African woman nominated. So the source actually needs to be more complex. It's not enough to cite the Booker Prize official site, for example, which just might say "X is nominated for the Booker Prize". The Booker people may not be saying, "by the way, this is the first African woman nominated for the prize". If we want to state that on Wikipedia, we need to find another reliable source that asserts that. And by the way, that's not trivial, because proving that someone is the first to have done something is like proving a negative. You're trying to prove that nobody has done this before. How can you prove that? It's difficult. The best you can do is to cite a generally reliable source, that itself asserts that this is the first American African woman nominated, or in the case of the Booker Prize, you can literally show that: Because we have the list of all the previous Booker Prize nominations, and if we are able to show that none of those nominations was an African woman -- again, maybe harder to prove than you might think -- but if we are able to show that, then we have established that this is the first African woman nominated.

I see a question in the chat: "Assuming I'm writing about a town in the eastern region of Ghana, and I want to mention some radio stations there, which I know about, but these radio stations have been mentioned on another website. Should I cite that website or just write what I know?" Good question! The answer is: Generally, as I said, everything should have a source. Don't just write what you know. Generally, you should have a source for this. It shouldn't be difficult to find a source that says that these radio stations exist. Even the radio station's own website that says "we are based in this town" establishes the fact that there exists such a radio station and they are based in this town. So that's the kind of fact I would expect to be possible to establish with a citation, and therefore to need a citation and not come out of what you know.

The last example: "India controls 43% of the territory of Kashmir". Again, that's a very precise number. Where did it come from? Did I measure this myself? Of course not. So I need to show where I got this number. I hope these are examples you agree with; these clearly require citations. But as I mentioned, there are some cases where ideally we would want a citation, but we might be okay with not having one for a while.