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Source literacy

Understanding A Source's Track Record Over Time

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Photo: Magnifying Glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany / Tiffany Studios (CC0), via Openverse

A single article on its own offers a fairly narrow view of a source's overall reliability, while a track record built up carefully across many stories over a longer period of time gives a considerably fuller picture: how often past claims genuinely held up, how corrections were actually handled, and whether accuracy improved or steadily declined.

Building this kind of careful assessment takes real patience, but even a fairly modest personal history of checking a source's past claims against what later turned out to genuinely be accurate provides a genuinely useful, evidence based foundation for extending genuine ongoing trust going forward from that point.

A source with a strong, long established track record still deserves to have its individual claims checked on their own merits, but that history reasonably shifts the starting level of confidence compared with an entirely unfamiliar or previously unreliable source encountered for the very first time by a reader.

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