Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Secondary literature and news

The best sources are generally academic sources -- secondary literature -- that are reviewing, studying, discussing, criticizing the topic of our article. So if we're covering physics or medicine or theory of music or the history of the Zulu Kingdom, we should look for academic sources on those topics.

If what we're trying to cover is current events, we may not find any academic sources. The academic production lags behind. The articles, academic articles about ongoing things like, say, COVID-19, only started appearing months into the pandemic, because it takes time to write and to research and to do peer review of that research. The academic process takes a while,

So if we want to cover current events, and I just said that we shouldn't be too eager, too hasty, to repeat every piece of information that's available, we can use news sources. It would be good if we are very careful about distinguishing between news -- actual reporting of factual information -- and opinion, because those are, of course, brought to us in the same vessel: the newspaper, the printed newspaper, or the news website, includes news and opinions. They're generally marked, they're generally somehow differentiated. But if someone just sent you a link, it's very easy to just start reading the link without noticing if this is an opinion or a column or reportage.

But we should pay attention, because if you want to cite it on Wikipedia, it should be from the factual part, not the opinion part. It should be from news reportage, not from what's called the "op-eds", the opinion pieces, or columnists' takes on the news.

Eventually we will have academic works on current events, and then they would be better sources than the news sources.