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I'm struggling to make sense of this. Parent is saying news media has a financial incentive to grab attention, Wikipedia does not. Best I can make out, you've m
by greggoB 10mo ago
I'm struggling to make sense of this. Parent is saying news media has a financial incentive to grab attention, Wikipedia does not. Best I can make out, you've moved the target by suggesting it's not about how the content of the article itself is written, but rather about the sources it supposedly has to use.
- charcircuit 10mo agoMy original comment is about cases where only biased secondary sources exist due to the story not being notable enough to be picked up by other authors. What appears to you as moving the target is clarifying that the situation the replies commented won't happen in the situation I am referring to.
- greggoB 10mo agoThanks for clarifying. So one can surely imagine cases where the only references are sensationalised/biased new media reporting. However: 1) Isn't this confined to a pretty small proportion of articles, given the breadth of topics Wikipdia covers expands well outside the purview of news media? E.g. any basic physics or math articles, like Electromagnetism or Linear Algebra - a lot of the sources for these seem to be textbooks. 2) Can we not assume any editorial leeway on the part of contributors to try and contextualise such sensationalism/bias? No examples are coming to mind now, but I'm pretty sure I've seen qualifiers in articles at least hinting that the cited source could be potentially problematic.