This article first presents the theoretical and empirical foundations of “Station 2” of a didactic setting in which learners deal with sourcing operations and apply them to a text corpus on a topic created for this didactic setting. The core of the text corpus is a reportage about former miners who now earn their money as “snail strokers” in order to help a landscape devastated by coal mining to grow new vegetation with the snail slime obtained in this way. Through sourcing operations (i.e. through metadata-based evaluation of the texts), learners can identify intentions and perspectives in these texts and assess the credibility of the information. The paper further presents results of data analysis, which are used in the sense of design-based research for further optimization of the setting and modification of the theoretical considerations about it.