User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Thoughts on reliable sources

Why we cite our sources

Uncited text or poorly cited text is a red flag for the following problems:

Factual inaccuracy
Original research
- looking at an issue and making your own non-expert conclusions, and presenting them as fact
Undue weight
- giving certain ideas more prominence than experts have given them, which un-balances the article

What are reliable sources?

Quite simply, reliable sources are sources written by experts, with some kind of quality control process. Examples:

Many
news organizations
Most books
Most academic journals

Of course, anything

self-published

has no quality control process and is unreliable:

Social media
YouTube
Blogs
Personal websites

The importance of trusting the right sources

Trusting the right sources is very important to being a good intellectual. A person's brain can quickly fill with strange ideas, propaganda, and factually incorrect statements simply by trusting the wrong sources. It is important to avoid this echo chamber of lies. Examples of bad sources:

Far-right pundits. I once had a co-worker that listened to Rush Limbaugh all day every day on his headphones in the warehouse. Talking politics with him was painful. He just had so many factually incorrect statements and assumptions.
State propaganda. The Russo–Ukrainian War comes to mind. I've seen a couple video clips where Ukrainians call their relatives living in Russia and tell them what is going on, and the Russian relatives don't believe it and start talking about de-nazification. The Russians believe state propaganda over the word of their own relatives.

Those are extreme examples, but the idea carries over into more moderate examples. Relying on mediocre sources will make you a mediocre intellectual. A person that reads AP News every day will be receiving more accurate knowledge than a person that reads Daily Mail every day.

How do we know what is true?

In life, there seems to be a pattern where if you dig deep enough, there will always be abundant evidence of the truth, and a lack of evidence for or evidence against a falsehood. This is important because it means that people — investigative journalists, researchers, intellectuals, even you — are capable of sifting through lies and uncovering the truth.

This tendency for the truth to have lots of evidence, and falsehoods to have a lack of evidence, or evidence against them, is why it's quite hard for governments to keep secrets over a long period of time: evidence leaks. This is also why conspiracy theories are rubbish: there is a complete absence of credible evidence.

Why is this important? It means that we as intellectuals and Wikipedians are capable of evaluating evidence, and evaluating sources, and figuring out which sources are trustworthy and which are not.

Knowledge is not just a guessing game. It's a jigsaw puzzle, and it can be gradually solved.

Evaluating the quality of a source

News organizations

It's too hard to evaluate the quality of every news organization on our own. We need some way to rank them.

There are a couple different rankings of reliable sources on the Internet, such as the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart.

Wikipedia has its own in-house system:

WP:RSPSOURCES. Under the assumption above that a person is capable of spending some time investigating and can figure out the truth based on the presence of absence of credible evidence, Wikipedians debate the reliability of each source at the Wikipedia:Reliable Sources/Noticeboard

. Wikipedians look at if a news organization has a track record of publishing accurate, neutral articles. When a consensus is reached, the source and its reliability rating (reliable, no consensus, unreliable, deprecated, blacklisted) is added to the aforementioned list.

Use

WP:RSPSOURCES

as a fantastic starting point for figuring out what news organizations are reliable.

Opinion pieces

Beware of

opinion pieces

. This is a special type of newspaper article that is subjected to lower standards than regular articles. Even if a source is normally highly reliable, if an article is marked as opinion, that makes it much less reliable. It is just a person's opinions on a subject, and they are often a non-expert.

Books

Most books are reliable because they have gone through a publisher.

Be careful of eBooks and self-published books. Anyone can buy an ISBN or list an eBook on Amazon.com.

Textbooks are often a fantastic source.

Academic journals

There are a few things to watch out for when evaluating academic journals:

Studies are
primary sources, and their conclusions are usually not reliable by themselves due to the replication crisis. The replication crisis is a problem in science where they've found that many studies cannot be replicated when they try to do the studies again, which suggests major problems with the original study. You should instead look for a special type of journal article called a review article
, which summarizes a bunch of studies and draws conclusions from the aggregate data. Because review articles are looking at multiple studies instead of just one, review articles are much more reliable.

Beware of journals with low standards such as the Frontiers in... series. See also: predatory publishing.
Beware of journals posting on a controversial subject that is not in their topic area. A journal publishing something not in their topic area makes them non-experts, and it is no better than an opinion piece.