More on reliable sources Options

[It's the blimp, Frank]

.http://www.truthout.org/072509Z?n

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos blog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding "conservative" media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to "subscribers" to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole "think tanks" like Heritage and Cato?

The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there.

It certainly gets their con job on Wikipedia

[Kelly Martin]

The "reliable source" policy has been gamed so many times that it has to roll a 19 or higher on a d20 in order to go to the bathroom. No, seriously. "Reliable Source" is one of the key policies used in wikigaming whenever an ideological editor is trying to include or exclude some particular talking point from an article.

It's long been said that bad cases make bad law, and the reliable sources policy on Wikipedia is the crystallization of an endless stream of bad cases. It should be dumped entirely and started anew, but that would be pointless without also dumping the people responsible for turning it into such a bloody mess.