Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/The General Guideline

So what are the guidelines? The general guideline is that sources used on Wikipedia should be appropriate, used carefully, and should be balanced relative to other sources. Let's zoom in:

What is an appropriate source? It really depends on the context. Different kinds of facts require different kinds of sources, and the source needs to be judged, needs to be weighed -- again, you do need to apply your judgment; you need to think about these sources and determine whether this source is not just generally reliable, but whether it is reliable for the statement that you are trying to support with this source. A generally reliable source may still be an inappropriate citation for the particular sentence that you're trying to establish. And we're going to zoom into that in this lesson. This was just a general statement of the principle that you need to make sure the source is appropriate in the context of the particular thing you're trying to cite, and we will talk about that.

You should also use these sources carefully in the sense that the source needs to still be appropriate. The age of the source does matter, especially in science and technology and academics. Older sources may be easier to find on the Internet because they're from old texts that have been digitized, etc., but they may actually not be useful as reliable sources because they have literally been superseded, maybe even disproven, refuted. And for us to rely on them would actively mislead our readers, would do a disservice. It would be giving incorrect information on Wikipedia because we cited what used to be a reliable source but isn't anymore.

For example, they used to think that the atom was the smallest physical unit, that there could be nothing smaller than an atom. And there are old physics textbooks that say that as scientific truth. Today and for over a century now, we know that is not the case. And if we were to cite a really old physics textbook that says the atom is the smallest physical unit, we will literally be saying something now known to be false on Wikipedia, in Wikipedia's Voice. We don't want to do that. That's perhaps an extreme example, but I want you to get the idea, the principle, that even something that used to be a perfectly reliable source, indeed a science textbook, can become unreliable just because the state of human knowledge has actually changed..

Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, we need to balance sources in an appropriate way. And balancing -- I say it's complex, because it's not simply "eh, fifty-fifty, or two sides", or, if there are four sides to the matter, "eh, 25% to each". You remember the example we gave about the "flat earth" theory, right? That it would be incorrect and non-neutral to say "well, some people think the Earth is round; some people think the Earth is flat." As though both are of equal weight, equally valid opinions. That was wrong, right? Because one of them was fact and the other one was an opinion, and a fringe opinion at that. Not an opinion with reliable sources at all. So what we want to do when we have citations, when we're relying on specific written sources, is to give an appropriate balance to reliable sources, not just all the sources out there.

We don't want my... Remember my uncle's neighbor's theory about the molasses flood? We just don't want that at all, as a source. We want to take the reliable sources, and to appropriately reflect the range of views in those reliable sources. Whereas on one hand some things are established by scientific consensus -- we had the example of whether or not you can contract HIV by kissing (the answer is no) -- on the other hand, on a subject like the degree to which humans are responsible for global warming, there is a dominant scientific opinion, but not consensus! There is actually very lively scientific debate about climate change in general, and about the degree of human agency within climate change, and whether the models that they're using to to forecast climate change are reliable models. There's a lot of legitimate scientific controversy surrounding that topic, and it would be inappropriate for Wikipedia to just pick a side in that scientific controversy. It would be non-neutral to pick a side and say "yes, this is exactly how climate change is; this scientist is right; that scientist is wrong."

It is not for us to determine. The scientists are arguing about this in scientific literature, which is a reliable source for what that scientist thinks or what this school of thought thinks, or what their calculations and measurements are showing. And we, in exercising the principle of not taking sides, should report about the scientific disagreement on this topic, and give balance to the reliable sources from both sides, or from multiple sides, if there are more than two. We need to convey that information in a fair and proportionate way.