Source quality
Source Quality
Section titled “Source Quality”Not all sources are equal, and this project deliberately mixes research-grade and practical evidence. This page defines how a source is assessed, where it is filed, and how it is cited, so that “worth keeping” and “credible” stay separate judgments.
Assessment dimensions
Section titled “Assessment dimensions”Every filed source gets scored on these dimensions:
- Rigor — Is the method visible? Controlled and replicated, or a description?
- Relevance to humans scale — Is the practice transferable to a garden or small plot, or does it assume machinery/hectare scale?
- Specificity — Does it address the exact crop and question, or a distant cousin?
- Transparency — Are conditions, cultivars, dates, and methods stated?
- Recency — Is it current enough for climate/cultivar/agronomy claims? (Some classics stay relevant forever; label their age.)
- Independence — Is there a commercial or advocacy interest that could motivate the claim?
- Corroboration — Do other sources independently agree?
These feed the evidence level (evidence.md) of the claims it supports, but they are not the same thing: a high-quality source can still report a single Limited-level observation; a low-quality source can be the only report of a real technique.
Source types (and where they go)
Section titled “Source types (and where they go)”| Type | Directory | Default assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Academic paper | research/academic/ |
Assess rigor rigorously; note framing |
| Extension/agronomy bulletin | research/extension/ |
Note region |
| Government | research/government/ |
Note jurisdiction |
| Book | research/books/ |
Note edition/age |
| Commercial farming info | (see below) | Flag commercial interest |
| Practical grower / community | research/growers/ |
Default lower evidence |
| Video (YouTube etc.) | research/youtube/ |
Capture timestamped claims |
Commercial material has no dedicated folder in the initial structure; file it under the most relevant type and flag the commercial interest in the source note.
Source note format
Section titled “Source note format”Every source gets a file in research/<type>/ following the templates:
templates/academic-source.mdtemplates/video-source.md- (books/commercial follow
academic-source.mdmutated as needed)
Naming: research/<type>/<first-author>-<year>-<short-topic>.md.
Stable source IDs
Section titled “Stable source IDs”Assign each source a stable id S-####. This id is what crop pages and structured data files reference, never the filename. Allocation rules:
- The first contributor to identify a source… is not the owner; there is no ownership. Any contributor may assign a fresh ID from the lowest unused number.
- IDs are chronological/batch, not grouped by crop (a single source can cover many crops).
- Keep
research/searchable; the source id is final once cited anywhere.
Citation style in narrative pages
Section titled “Citation style in narrative pages”Inline, compact:
— M · scientific — cultivar X, dryland, Spain, 2019 (S-0117)
And the full detail lives in the source note. The source note must record a bibliographic reference (journal, volume/pages/DOI or URL, authors, year) so any reader can locate the original.
Assessing our own confidence
Section titled “Assessing our own confidence”Distinguish three things in a source note:
- What the source claims (verbatim/close paraphrase, in its context).
- What we assess about its quality/credibility.
- What evidence level we assign the resulting claim.
Keeping these in separate lines prevents us from laundering a source’s opinion into our own.