Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Guidelines by field and topic

But what about the rest? If what I want to cover isn't an academic subject and also isn't a current event, what if I just want to cover sports statistics? What if I want to cover Nigerian hip hop? Something maybe not studied by academics. When will I ever have reliable sources about Nigerian hip hop? What do I do about that?

Depending on the field, on the topic, some fields have guidelines on Wikipedia and you have links here. Let's do a quick example and look at this page. This is called Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). This is, sort of, the collected wisdom of the English Wikipedia community about what can and what shouldn't be cited for medical information. There's a whole page here that distinguishes between the types of sources and gives you advice and gives you diagrams of the kinds of information you can use. And you want to use up to date evidence and you want to check for bias. There's a whole theory here. So if that's a topic you cover regularly, you should read this, even though it's a long text, because it will really teach you how to pick the appropriate medical sources for Wikipedia.

And by the way, it's okay if that's not your thing, right? I don't write about medical topics on Wikipedia at all. So I'm not really worried about how to pick medical sources because I never write anything about medical science.

But we have here a whole list of the kinds of sources that are good and the kinds of sources to avoid. There was a list here: "list of predatory journals". These are journals that pretend to be peer-reviewed academic journals, but are in fact just making money from selling people the right to appear there. And there's a whole list that warns you about those journals so that you don't cite them, because they publish junk articles. And there's advice here on how to search for those sources, etc..

So it's a whole big page that really teaches you the art of citing medical information. And there are similar guidelines for other topics like history, and how to cite historical facts, and what search engines can be used.