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Wikipedia frequently-encountered sources, color-coded by perceived reliability
- BelenusMordred 6y agoThis is honestly a good read, even though it's likely quite confronting for many people. I've been balls-deep in the Australian propaganda industry and it's frankly disconcerting how much power certain people hold over society in the media industry. It's obvious that Goebbels wetdreams came true in the 21st century and western governments are lapping it up while improving on his techniques. Propaganda is no longer a dirty word, it's a way of life.
- arthurcolle 6y agoWhat's the Australian propaganda industry? Are you referring to Rupert Murdoch?
- BelenusMordred 6y agoYou can choose your own adventure there. Rupes or <Nameless>, it's honestly all the same. They A/B test you for outrage and optimise. When was the last time the news told you everything was actually all fine?
- 0xy 6y agoABC Australia and SBS are extremely slow to retract false or misleading news. SBS has refused to retract false information outright (they have zero oversight for online operations). ABC takes over a month to retract, sometimes as long as 3 months. News Corp and Fairfax both retract false information fast. From my limited experience, News Corp issued a retraction within 10 minutes of my email and Fairfax within 2 days. Both fair. ABC? 2+ months. SBS? Never. Without commenting on quality, at least the private sector bothers to correct what they say. ABC and SBS couldn't care less.
- roenxi 6y ago> and it's frankly disconcerting how much power certain people hold over society in the media industry Without disagreeing, most people don't cling to power. They very willingly find someone likeable and give their power to them. There are always going to be people with a disconcerting amount of power. One of the internet's more transformative facets is that now literally everyone has access to a channel where they can stand up and be that likeable person without being vetted by the media establishment.
- 0xbadcafebee 6y ago> Propaganda is no longer a dirty word About 80 years ago, it wasn't a dirty word, because it literally means " Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause". It is inherently not good or bad, it is simply information you use to convince people of something. Climate change data is propaganda for climate change science. It's the rhetoric of smart people combined with the assumptions of stupid people that have given it a permanently negative connotation.
- yread 6y agoHacker News is missing!
- kozhevnikov 6y agoI presume it would follow the same guideline as Reddit and r/IAmA, i.e. a primary source for verified accounts, but "generally unreliable" for everything else.
- dfxm12 6y agoI'm not sure if you're making a joke or what, but why would Hacker News count as a source? It is a bunch of semi-anonymous comments on aggregated stories (which might not even be news). It absolutely should not even be considered as a source. I just think a big issue is that people are ignorant about how to recognize and what it means to be a primary source vs secondary source vs opinion based in fact vs opinion based on falsehood vs something pulled out of thin air. I've too often seen people on here make "arguments", citing only some unsourced op-ed piece to back up their claim, as if it means anything. It's exhausting.
- kristopolous 6y agoI like how they list themselves as unreliable.
- acebarry 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_r...
- kristopolous 6y agoIt's funny because in practice probably all of us use Wikipedia as essentially gospel when it comes to almanac facts such as historical people's birthdates or survey numbers, ie average rainfall or the region some tree owl lives in.
- learnstats2 6y agoPrecisely because we expect that Wikipedia has sourced this information, such as climate data, from a reliable location - i.e. not made it up for itself.
- dfxm12 6y agoThe great thing about Wikipedia is that you can very easily see if something is sourced and where it is sourced from. Trust, but verify.
- baud147258 6y agowell, checking the source can be complicated, if it's a web page that had disappeared before being archived or a book/publication.
- kristopolous 6y agoThe link rot on wikipedia is pretty bad. I don't really have an easy solution. People aren't doing it in bad faith. Do laws prevent archiving for the purpose of referencing? IANAL but it certainly sounds like one of the copyright exemptions. If so there could be a "wikisource" that fetches sites when referenced and then archives them. This isn't IA, it's a different goal really.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoIt's the usual NYTimes, WaPo good, FoxNews bad list.
- MivLives 6y agoFox News is listed as a good source of any non politics and science news, with those two being in the no consensuses category.
- dr_orpheus 6y agoAnd Fox News was not the only thing identified with this separation. On the flip side, HuffPost basically fell in to the same category of good source for general news, don't use for politics.
- kangnkodos 6y agoIt states that Fox News (politics and science) is viewed as biased and opinionated by most editors. There is no similar warning on The New York Times. In my opinion, they are both equally biased and opinionated, but in opposite directions, left and right. So this pair of ratings shows the left bias of Wikipedia, and its editors.
- pmyteh 6y agoAnd there are other (better) right-leaning sources listed as reliable for politics. The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, for example.
- kristopolous 6y agoWashington times and examiner got a fairly positive treatment as well.
- psychometry 6y agoDoes that list usually contain hundreds of other entries, with accompanying explanation? What exactly was the point of your comment?
- honkdaddy 6y agoPretty much just a color-coded list of American-Left == right, American-Right == wrong. Quite congratulatory for those who agree, but makes for pretty dull reading for those already weary of this forced dichotomy.
- Miner49er 6y agoKind of, but it just depends on what you consider American-Left and American-Right. Most actual leftist publications on there are listed as biased and are in the "no consensus" category. Though I only see two or three that I recognize and would call leftist.
- throwaway99x99 6y ago> Though I only see two or three that I recognize and would call leftist. That may say more about you than about the list ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Miner49er 6y agoMaybe, but I just mean publications that are left of liberalism. Not sure what else to call them besides leftist.
- Udik 6y agoExcept for the ADL, essentially a pro-Israel lobbying group, marked as "reliable".
- ars 6y agoYou are confusing ADL with AIPAC. ADL is not a lobbying group at all.
- RivieraKid 6y agoWell reality has a well-known liberal bias.
- skytreader 6y agoCurious and funny: The Onion is slightly more reliable than some non-satire websites. For Wikipedia's purposes, I would think Onion would be an outright "Do not use". I wonder what cites The Onion? The only reason I can think of would be for meta-Onion entries, e.g., Wiki entry on The Onion itself, perhaps their management board, etc.
- itcrowd 6y agoI guess something to the extent of: "[action X] was widely mocked in the press ..."
- mattkrause 6y agoI clicked on a few random references. Several use The Onion to establish "Cultural Significance": the logic seems to be that if something is well-known enough for The Onion to mock, it has a reasonable amount of cachet. Clever, as I doubt there are many sources that literally report "X is a household name."
- belorn 6y agoIt should be noted that plenty of sources that is describe as reliable has disputed quality in term of bias, which I would generally describe as the difference between fact and narrative. The factual reporting from those are usually true, but the narrative might not be, and thus WP authors need to take care of omissions and added opinions by the journalists.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- clairity 6y agoyes, npr has been my main news source for a while, but i can no longer listen for more than a few minutes at a time (to try to stay informed) because the outrage narratives have been turned up to 11. it's non-stop and highly grating. certain voices are an insta-off for me and the list of those voices only keeps growing.
- Bresenham 6y agoI have to laugh at the Times of India (rated yellow) comment - "It tends to have a bias in favor of the Indian government". Times of India, An Phoblacht, CGTN, Global Times, Press TV, Ria Novosti, Russia Today, Sputnik, TASS, Telesur, Venezuelanalysis and Xinhua are all yellow or red. BBC, Bellingham, Economist, Forbes, Fox News, New Republic, NPR, Reason and Weekly Standard are all rated green. It is pretty clear - sites generally supportive of the US/UK governments and their businesses are OK. Sites generally supportive of India, Venezuela, Russia, the Irish minority(/majority) in north Ireland, China etc. are not OK. It's just a myopic view of the world from two English-speaking countries, and English Wikipedia.
- dash2 6y agoWhat makes you sure that the BBC, Economist et al. are not genuinely more reliable than, say, Russia Today?
- Bresenham 6y agoThe BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. So starting from the vantage of a news service banning interviews with members of its own country's parliament, outlets like Russia Today have to be below that bar. A number of Russian outlets are listed as unreliable - perhaps some of them are tabloids like English language tabloids, but it seems that all Russian outlets with a standard mild or heavy support of their government are not OK, whereas this is not the case for the US and UK outlets with the same mild to heavy view of things from their country's vantage. It is just the myopic view of the English speaking countries.
- rhcom2 6y ago> The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. The British government instituted that ban, not the BBC. That was also ended almost 30 years ago. Russia is very low on press freedom (142) while the UK is at (28) is high [1] which seems to be the reason for its outlets to be unreliable. https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org/spip.php?page=classement&id_rubrique=1043 https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org...
- calvinmorrison 6y agoAnd this is how 'reality' gets a left wing slant.
- andybak 6y agoWhat ratings in that table do you feel are unfair?
- calvinmorrison 6y agoOne good example is the SPLC, which has routinely marked conservative groups which they deem to have wrongthink to be grouped in with Neonazi's and other radical racial organizations. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-top-news-politics-us-news-c18f2dc991821fdde9a7194680c0f44d https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-top-news-politic...
- yorwba 6y agoThe actual evaluation of SPLC is > The Southern Poverty Law Center is considered generally reliable on topics related to hate groups and extremism in the United States. As an advocacy group, the SPLC is a biased and opinionated source. The organization's views, especially when labeling hate groups, should be attributed per WP:RSOPINION. Take care to ensure that content from the SPLC constitutes due weight in the article and conforms to the biographies of living persons policy. Some editors have questioned the reliability of the SPLC on non-United States topics. SPLC classifications should not automatically be included in the lead section of the article about the group which received the classification. The decision to include should rather be decided on a case-by-case basis. Does "biased and opinionated source" not sufficiently reflect your views?
- orwin 6y agoMaybe the color code is shitty, i agree with that. SPLC should be yellow. ``` The Southern Poverty Law Center is considered generally reliable on topics related to hate groups and extremism in the United States. As an advocacy group, the SPLC is a biased and opinionated source. The organization's views, especially when labeling hate groups, should be attributed per WP:RSOPINION. Take care to ensure that content from the SPLC constitutes due weight in the article and conforms to the biographies of living persons policy. Some editors have questioned the reliability of the SPLC on non-United States topics. SPLC classifications should not automatically be included in the lead section of the article about the group which received the classification. The decision to include should rather be decided on a case-by-case basis. ``` For information, hatewatch indeed group KKK, Neonazi with other conservative groups, anti-LGBT especially, and sometime anti-abortion group depending on the degree of proselytism. It is a antifa technique, really soft as only the organization and the leaders are on the list. It is useful knowledge, but not as much as the private antifa lists (that include members of the organization too).
- 0xbadcafebee 6y agoWhat I find ironic is that any site that covers politics is considered reliable. Trying to be unbiased or accurate in political reporting is like trying to wash the dishes with paper gloves on.
- throwaway99x99 6y agoThe "reliability" levels reveal more about the inherently biased beliefs of the most active users (i.e., editors) than about the sources themselves. It turns out that "facts" are surprisingly slippery.
- 96394032 6y ago> There is consensus that RT is an unreliable source, publishes false or fabricated information, and should be deprecated along the lines of the Daily Mail. Many editors describe RT as a mouthpiece of the Russian government that engages in propaganda and disinformation. I'm not saying that this is untrue or that RT is a reliable source, but I can't actually recall or find a specific example of false or fabricated information published by RT. Does anyone have a good example?
- 6510 6y agoAnything goes on wikipedia as long as it are established long term so called contributors doing it - there are no rules. It gets spectacularly hilarious where the best way to become a long term contributor is by deleting a lot of contributions. The more people you run off the wiki the more praise from others doing the same. You have to ask the right questions like: "Why are you not writing articles?" The logs are all there. I'm not making stuff up. Its a honest question to ask if someone is deleting well researched properly sourced contributions day and night the year round. It gets quite hilariously silly where it is argued that peoples identity can not be verified. It is amazingly easy for someone [old] with a life time worth of experience in a field to write down some completely obvious things - but not as easy as pressing a delete button in anonymity. You should ask about this and enjoy the absurd answers.