Ensuring high quality sources where needed, especially science/academic topics (narrow focus)

@Slrubenstein

Sorry to reply you this late, liquid thread hate me :(

Before going further i have to provide some evidences that i have a minimum of understanding in Reliable Source and Quality article building so my opinion won't be dismissed. Tired to pass for the village idiot.

As member of En anime/manga project my specialty is Reliable Source hunting whatever they are primaries, secondaries or tertiaries. I usually provide French RS resources and go as far as translating reviews into English. Furthermore i have sometime "Wall of references" duty. I think the number of references i put in articles should be over 1000.

Quality article writing wise i participated to one of the few GAs with near-zero English reliable source proving again that not-in-English doesn't mean not notable and not a subject for good article. I also took part of a GA-rescue. Related to quality, i happened to get involved in the A class at en:WP:ASSESSMENT leading to en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Assessment working group which didn't produce anything worth mention.

My editing stance can be found here

Now back to current discussion subject which is ensuring the quality of the sources used.

Depending of the nature of the projects and the subject of the article possible avenue of reliable sources will differ greatly ranging from academic paper to blog post.

Sources have two aspects Credibility and Weight.

Credibility is always limited to an area of expertise.

Weight is related how much importance should be given to the "Point of View" expressed by the source.

Reading the proposals made i should ask, what is your definition of a "high quality source" ? A Credible Source with a lot of weight in its area of expertise?

Here few ideas:

• Most projects have a list of reliable sources that fall within their scope. We should make a global database out of those lists so it could be used by a wider population of editors.
• In the same way we should also report non reliable source to this database, we often find non RS during peer reviews or GA reviews.
• Bolder we can also exchange the list of RS between the different language projects which would also help editors fighting the systemic bias.

What can't be automated is the "weight" given to a source. It's each editor responsibility to balance the weight of the various Credible opinion on a subject to be the closest to NPOV.