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Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and out

Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and outcomes. On the other hand, this seems like increased politicization I note that there was no reference to testing anything. Has anyone tried taking large numbers of Fox citations, counting whether they are good or bad, and comparing that to baselines? Instead, per this article, it seems like the decision is based on volume of editor complaints. I'm looking at the removed article[1] Slate references on Seth Rich. It doesn't seem so bad. It cites a private investigator and an anonymous FBI officer for evidence saying that Seth had been emailing with WikiLeaks at about the time of the DNC leaks and observes (correctly) that Assange refused to say if Seth Rich was involved or not. If Fox made up the private investigator and the anonymous FBI source then I agree that would be bad. But if they are just citing people who turned out to be wrong, or those people were lying, then I can think of quite a few organizations guilty of that failing. 1 - https://archive.ph/TZWuE https://archive.ph/TZWuE

Beltalowda 4y ago
> Has anyone tried taking large numbers of Fox citations, counting whether they are good or bad, and comparing that to baselines? Not necessarily a bad idea, but it suffers from some amount of bias in that "bad stories" are less likely to be used as references, so it doesn't necessarily say all that much about "when should or shouldn't you use Fox News as a reference" in general. It might be better to use a random sample of Fox News stories from the last few years.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  My intuition would be to test the sample that wikipedia editors do reference rather than the sample they might reference - but I think either methodology is an improvement over "argue about it and then summarize the argument".
tablespoon 4y ago
> Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and outcomes. On the other hand, this seems like increased politicization...it seems like the decision is based on volume of editor complaints. Yeah, I read some of the discussion, and the person who proposed the deprecation was also extremely active in the discussion (it helped that he had a very visually distinctive username). It was almost like he was acting like a prosecutor. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-20% of the whole discussion was that one guy.

Beltalowda 4y ago

> Has anyone tried taking large numbers of Fox citations, counting whether they are good or bad, and comparing that to baselines? Not necessarily a bad idea, but it suffers from some amount of bias in that "bad stories" are less likely to be used as references, so it doesn't necessarily say all that much about "when should or shouldn't you use Fox News as a reference" in general. It might be better to use a random sample of Fox News stories from the last few years.

ALittleLight 4y ago
My intuition would be to test the sample that wikipedia editors do reference rather than the sample they might reference - but I think either methodology is an improvement over "argue about it and then summarize the argument".

tablespoon 4y ago

> Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and outcomes. On the other hand, this seems like increased politicization...it seems like the decision is based on volume of editor complaints. Yeah, I read some of the discussion, and the person who proposed the deprecation was also extremely active in the discussion (it helped that he had a very visually distinctive username). It was almost like he was acting like a prosecutor. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-20% of the whole discussion was that one guy.