Wikipedia's 'Ban' of 'The Daily Mail' Didn't Really Happen (theoutline.com) 70
Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that editors at Wikipedia had "voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website," calling the publication "generally unreliable." Two months later, not only previous Daily Mail citations on Wikipedia pages are still alive, several new ones have also appeared since. So what's going on? The Outline has the story: There are no rules on Wikipedia, just guidelines. Of Wikipedia's five "pillars," the fifth is that there are no firm rules. There is no formal hierarchy either, though the most dedicated volunteers can apply to become administrators with extra powers after being approved by existing admins. But even they don't say what goes on the site. If there's a dispute or a debate, editors post a "request for comment," asking whoever is interested to have their say. The various points are tallied up by an editor and co-signed by four more after a month, but it's not a vote as in a democracy. Instead, the aim is to reach consensus of opinion, and if that's not possible, to weigh the arguments and pick the side that's most compelling. There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote. (emphasis ours.) So what happened? The article adds: In this case, an editor submitted a broader request for comment about its [the Daily Mail's] general reliability. Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source, with one editor and four co-signing editors (more than usual) chosen among administrators declaring that a consensus, though further discussion continued on a separate noticeboard, alongside complaints that the debate should have been better advertised. Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited. An editor I met at a recent London "Wikimeet" said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about.
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It's fake turtles all the way down.
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It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news. Actually, it'd be fairly hypocritical for any news media outlet to accuse another these days, except maybe Reuters, who still seems fairly neutral.
Re:Fake newsception (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news.
Only if you live in a black-and-white world where everything is absolutely wrong all the time or absolutely right all the time. Back in the real world, certain news media outlets, which not perfect are a lot more reliable than certain other news media outlets.
To equate them all is as wrong as the news stories you are decrying.
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It's not that wrong. While not all stories are fake, there's far too many of them, and all the media outlets have a clear cut bias which colors their reporting commensurately (many of them are owned by the same parent company). This does not lead to cool heads and objective analysis.
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It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news.
Only if you live in a black-and-white world where everything is absolutely wrong all the time or absolutely right all the time. Back in the real world, certain news media outlets, which not perfect are a lot more reliable than certain other news media outlets.
To equate them all is as wrong as the news stories you are decrying.
This.
There are levels of trust. Whilst I find the Guardian as guilty as the Daily Mail in exagerating and outright fabricating the facts there are two important distinctions,
1. The Daily Mail is far worse at it. This does not excuse the Guardian, but it means I'll trust the DM far less.
2. The Guardian is far more eloquently written. This means that there is a minimum intelligence level required tor read it. Intelligent people are less likely to fall for propaganda and dont like to feel like their back
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I'll grant you I conflated fake news with bias, but I believe them to be related. By reporting with a bias, they can lead readers or viewers to draw conclusions "between the lines" so to speak, which may not have any basis in fact, only innuendo.
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Wish I had mod points, you would get them.
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So then the previous article was fake news about a ban on citing a fake news source?
Worse, the Slashdot article isn't even internally consistent:
There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote.
Or...
Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source
Which is true? Seems like there is hair splitting going on here. Especially since the original Guardian article included the following that is entirely consistent:
Based on the requests for comments section [on the reliable sources noticeboard], volunteer editors on English Wikipedia have come to a consensus that the Daily Mail is ‘generally unreliable and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist’.
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"Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited."
Which is entirely consistent with the original:
“This means that the Daily Mail will generally not be referenced as a ‘reliable source’ on English Wikipedia, and volunteer editors are encouraged to change existing citations to the Daily Mail to another source deemed reliable by the community. This is consistent with how Wikipedia editors evaluate and use media outlets in general – with common sense and caution.”
Notability would ban that subject in the 1st place (Score:5, Informative)
An editor I met at a recent London "Wikimeet" said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about.
According to Wikipedia's notability guideline [wikipedia.org], if no reliable sources can be found about a subject, any article about it would fail Wikipedia's verifiability policy [wikipedia.org]. For this reason, the subject shouldn't have an article in the first place. That's what Wikipedia means by "non-notable": there is no way to make a verifiable article about the subject.
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Paragraph-by-paragraph verifiability (Score:2)
There are other guidelines dealing with material within an article
Very true. But each paragraph of an article also has to be verifiable. Otherwise, a paragraph supported solely by unreliable sources should be removed. This goes double if the subject is a living person. As Wikipedia:Verifiability puts it: "Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed. Please immediately remove contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced."
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Very true. But each paragraph of an article also has to be verifiable.
Yes, but your previous post was about the NOTABILITY guideline. Obviously if you declare X source is not "reliable," then a paragraph with only that source can be removed.
But that has nothing to do with the notability guidelines. The entire point of your previous post was about how to pre-emptively ban an entire article through notability guidelines. As the summary notes, whether or not a particular source is "reliable" is often a judgment call. Even a "scholarly" souce can be unreliable if it's discu
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deletionism is contributing to the ruin of Wikipedia.
Would using Wikipedia as a tool to promote hoaxes be superior to deletionism?
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"It could also be the only source for a "subject" of a paragraph or even a sentence within an article that has multiple sources."
But that in itself can be deeply problematic, as one of the biggest problems with The Daily Mail is not that it outright fabricates stories (though it has done that too) but that it over-exagerates the impact of things, makes up numbers, and so on and so forth.
So if the paragraph their quoting has no secondary source other than The Daily Mail, due to The Daily Mail's history there
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Yup. Locked in a little room with madmen and shills, the "conflict resolution process" is a fancy name for "the runaround", and if you do get some sort of moderator intervention they do the most shallow reading of the situation possible, and display all the even-handed wisdom of an old irc-moderator defending territory...
Oh, and you're supposed to pretend that you're treating everyone with respect, consequently you'
Re: So much goddamn bureaucracy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia is a group endeavour, people on the left are more likely to seek community solutions, people on the right are more likely to work alone.
Once you've largely written your encyclopaedia, there's nothing for talented individuals to do, they don't want to spend all day arguing over conjunctions and which picture is best, so the only people left are the ones with bizarre ideas about consensus.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Slashdot has the same issue, of course.
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Mwah-ha-ha.
You see bureaucracy (Score:2)
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Tell us what else leans to the left from your perspective. The horizon, maybe?
I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists", but I'm willing to concede that putting one dictator in charge is an effective way to get rid of bureaucracy. We'll probably differ on whether that's a good thing.
Liberals: We, thegroup. Conservatives: Individuals (Score:2)
> I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists"
Liberals (aka the left) tend to think in terms of "we", that the group should do this or that. They tend SOCIAList and COMMUNist (social and community). Conservatives (aka the right) tend to think of individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Naturally people on the left side of the spectrum therefore form groups, commitees -bureaucracies- through which the whole of society is supposed to work together. Conservatives tend to
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From my understanding of politics, the left wants government to control everything and everyone, government to them is beneficial to a society, if you're fully to the left, you end up with communist and socialist ideals - the government takes a proportional amount of resources and provides free food, free housing, free healthcare and a number of other resources for everyone, ultimately having rules and regulations that covers every single entity and interaction is most important to make society a better pla
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Nothing of the sort.
The terms "left wing" and "right wing" come from the times of the French revolution, and had to do with the seating arrangements in the parliament.
To the left of the president, sat the "revolutionaries" that opposed monarchy (the establishment), and to the right sat those those that supported the monarchy.
The terms came to mean:
- Left wing: strongly promotes social equality and is willing to eschew tradition and cultural values;
- Right wing: very conservative and their policies lean more
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You should definitely re-evaluate your understanding of politics.
Anarchists are generally left-wing (except anarcho-capitalists, maybe), communism specifically requires the complete withering of the state, there have been plenty of authoritorian right-wing regimes.
It's not a left/right one-dimensional axis. It isn't even two-dimensional, it has a hell of a lot of dimensions.
Personally, I lean towards libertarian socialism. Think on that for a while, it's a real thing.
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Why's it curious? Right-wing thinkers almost by definition lean toward strong centralized control by authority figures. The left is constantly looking at more distributed systems with more bottom-up control, in the hope of empowering individuals (you know, democracy and freedom and all th
Daily Mail (Score:2, Insightful)
"Not a Reliable Source" as a consensus on the Daily Mail seems reasonable to me. However, Wikipedia policy doesn't say, "No citations to unreliable sources allowed anywhere" It's more "mark it as unreliable if you really need to use it".
Neither The Guardian, nor The Outline really understand the Reliable Sources policies on Wikipedia. Also, finding one WP editor who did "X" doesn't mean "X" is following the consensus or not.
Also, theoutline sucks down bandwidth with rather large (almost full page) ads in
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However, Wikipedia policy doesn't say, "No citations to unreliable sources allowed anywhere" It's more "mark it as unreliable if you really need to use it".
I think the expectation is that people use "this has sat in the article for a month without a reliable citation" as an excuse to remove a contentious claim from an article.
the aim is to reach consensus of opinion (Score:2)
In other words, truth be damned. The truth is achieved by a vote in Wikipedia land.
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An angry virgin admin or prolific editor takes over a Wikipedia page and fervently reverts any edits he doesn't like, throws a hissy fit on the talk page, often citing ambiguous rules or guidelines that he doesn't apply to his own edits, then locks the page from editing due to "abuse".
This happens all the fucking time any any page remotely related to anything political or controversial.
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Yup, you're no super sleuth. The last edit I made to Wikipedia involved an article about a famous bird. The edit was reverted by some assclown for some shit about "no original research" despite the fact that I was quoting an official source regarding that bird.
That was about a decade ago, I guess.
Wikipedia is shit.
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You have to admit I was pretty close.
Anyway, you could have cited your source, if you really had one, and that would've more than likely been the end of it. If you didn't have a source to cite, then obviously the policy has to be to strike that info, because anyone can just say "I'm quoting an official source!" without backing it up.
In any case, while many Wikipedia pages are "shit", as you so eloquently explained, they are far outnumbered by the useful pages that have sources cited for most, if not all, of
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No, you weren't correct. You specifically talked about political opinions. This was about a bird.
I did cite my source.
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By teaching the controversy. If one set of reliable sources says one thing, but another set of sources of comparable reliability says something else, the article can mention disagreement on facts. But editors must be assess "comparable reliability" carefully to avoid giving undue weight to fringe viewpoints [wikipedia.org].
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Wikipedia arent interested in the truth, they are interested in verifiability - which is an altogether entirely different thing.
Give me a break (Score:3)
Wikipedia has things which by pretty much anyone else's definition are rules, but Wikipedia officially calls some of them "guidelines". Wikipedia does things which by pretty much everyone else's definition are votes, but Wikipedia doesn't officially call them votes because they are not followed 100% of the time (even though they are followed often enough that other people would call them votes).
Claiming that the story is wrong because they weren't really rules or votes is just privileging Wikipedia-terminology over real-world terminology. It's like claiming that a story about small and large drinks at Starbucks is wrong because they're really Short and Grande drinks, not small and large at all.
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The one I like is insiting that "writers" and "writing" has to be termed "editors" and "editing". I was trying to work on the "guidelines" once upon a time, and you're essentially forbidden from using phrases like "When you're writing a piece like this, you need to ask yourself--." No one ever writes anything at wikipedia, the words just magically appear to be hacked up by editors-that-aren't-really-editors.
Another good one is "weasel words": the wikipedia meaning of that phrase was essentially made up
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Ah yes: avoidance of second-person is of course critical to the process of writing good articles. Why did I not see this?
Re-writing that phrase as something like "When writing a piece, the author should consider--" would be trivial, provided the concept of "authorship" didn't violate the house religion.
It certainly is fun to think of ways to counsel against including personal biases when writing, when you're supposed to pretend that there is no person doing the writing.
In other words (Score:2)
Wikipedia "banning" the Daily Mail was analogous to when Google announced they were going to pull h.264 support out of Chrome. A tale... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Fact "Checking" (Score:2)
It reminds me of these recent fact checks: http://imgur.com/a/tSs3o [imgur.com]
"Pants on fire" - (Number is correct, but fails to mention the cause)
"False" - (Transgender girls aren't boys)
"Mostly False" - (The numbers are valid, the comparison is questionable)
thou shalt not deviate (Score:2)
I once read a book by Linda Hill that I personally found amazingly valuable, but only because I was careful not to light any matches, because her presentation was dry, dry, dry.
Because of the Indian incompetence story here on Slashdot this morning, I went to paste a link into my files, and chanced upon a past entry concerning HCL Technologies, a topic that Linda Hill has addressed in video, and soon I found myself watching a clip of hers on YouTube I hadn't seen before.
Linda Hill on empowering young sparks [youtube.com]