Reliable Sources redux Options

[Herschelkrustofsky]

[Herschelkrustofsky]

[Herschelkrustofsky]

This is a passage from a work of fiction, The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré, an author who has always impressed me with his political acumen. For the fictional name of "Hatry" you could substitute any number of real-life names, like, say, "Rupert Murdoch."

It was Cavendish... who made us aware, as he called it: which is to say turned rumour into received certainty by the ingenious use of arm's-length columnists operating outside the Hatry empire and therefore notionally untainted by its frightful reputation; Cavendish who planted follow-up articles in learned shoestring journals with promises to keep, such articles in turn being puffed out of all proportion by bigger journals, and so on up the ladder or down it to the inside pages of the tabloids, to editorials in the degraded so-called qualities and late-night public debate on television, not only on the Hatry-owned channels but on rival channels too-- since nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because quite frankly, dears, in the news game these days, we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

I'd like to start a discussion of the WP:RS policy, because the question of sourcing seems to me to be a conundrum (particularly for inclusionists.) Under present WP practice, it seems that the most unimpeachable of sources is an article in a major Anglo-American press organ. Yet, I think it can be demonstrated that such organs have been historically unreliable. Is there a way that the RS policy could be revised so that newspaper and magazine articles will not be ipso facto taken as gospel?

[Milton Roe]

I'd like to start a discussion of the WP:RS policy, because the question of sourcing seems to me to be a conundrum (particularly for inclusionists.) Under present WP practice, it seems that the most unimpeachable of sources is an article in a major Anglo-American press organ. Yet, I think it can be demonstrated that such organs have been historically unreliable. Is there a way that the RS policy could be revised so that newspaper and magazine articles will not be ipso facto taken as gospel?

Because the people who first wrote the first versions of WP:RS decided that info from "mainstream news organizations" of "high quality" are like unto a conversation with the Burning Bush on Sinai. Just drop those tablets right here, while they're still glowing....

This causes many lulzy moments, when some larger print paper says something about WP itself that it doesn't like. But dealing with hypocrisy is well within WMF's comfort zone, fortunately. Quite often, the fact that the paper got something about WP wrong is taken as evidence that the story is NOT high quality. Because WMF knows the truth, and therefore has the upper hand on knowledge. You see, they just put out a press release and cite themselves. And failing that, they just change the article.

Meanwhile, WP editors who realize that newspaper articles are written by lazy people with deadlines and other stuff on their minds (and often with the most cursory of editorial and fact checking), have a problem. As does anybody who has firsthand knowledge of the events of ANY news story, since without fail they always get something wrong, and it's impossible to prove it (since they don't get the same privileges as the WMF foundation, nor the the people who run it). This has been the source of a good deal of fighting and banning on WP, among people who don't really actually believe everything they read in the newspapers.

[EricBarbour]

The Tom Tomorrow cartoon just reminds me of all the years that people
have accused the NY Times of pro-Jewish and/or pro-Israel bias.
And nowadays, they're accused of being anti-Jewish almost as much.

And now, for my next magical trick, I'm gonna quote....
the Wikipedia article about the NY Times.
Because although verbose and not very detailed, it's a decent summary.

According to a 2007 survey by Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% believe the Times has a liberal slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant.[84] In December 2004 a University of California, Los Angeles study gave the Times a score of 73.7 on a 100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal.[85] The validity of the study has been questioned by various organizations, including the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.[86] In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece in which he concluded that the Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issues such as gay marriage. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City. Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news," such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties, but did state that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration.[87] Recently, The New York Times has been accused of adopting a distinctly pro-Israel position in its reporting on the Israeli invasion of Gaza.[88][89] In past years, however, the Times has also been accused of having a persistent anti-Israel bias.[90]

SO......anyone wanna count up all the NY Times citations in Wikipedia, and
delete 40% (or 73.7%, or whatever) of them for being "biased"?

[Herschelkrustofsky]

SO......anyone wanna count up all the NY Times citations in Wikipedia, and
delete 40% (or 73.7%, or whatever) of them for being "biased"?

Not me. What I want to do, if it is possible, is to establish criteria for evaluating media citations on a case-by-case basis, rather than assuming every media cite to be reliable.

[dogbiscuit]

I'd like to start a discussion of the WP:RS policy, because the question of sourcing seems to me to be a conundrum (particularly for inclusionists.) Under present WP practice, it seems that the most unimpeachable of sources is an article in a major Anglo-American press organ. Yet, I think it can be demonstrated that such organs have been historically unreliable. Is there a way that the RS policy could be revised so that newspaper and magazine articles will not be ipso facto taken as gospel?

In my pre-disillusioned days, that was one of the bees in my bonnet. SlimVirgin was one of the main protagonists who had an apparently unshakeable belief in the inherent reliability of newspaper articles, apparently because newspapers always check their facts with many eyes and many sources. The ID Cabal also mistakenly got involved as they assumed, as they do, that any attempt to change policy must be a de facto attempt to subvert reporting of scientific issues so any rational discussion of the issues would be derailed. Eventually attempts to fix were undermined when it was declared that RS was not policy and the right place to change was WP:Verifiability. I always assumed Slim was biased because she saw herself as part of the press and had her own beliefs as to how the press worked - any suggestion that the press were not entirely reliable was a personal attack.

Also rejected was the principle that newspapers are not simply organs of factual news dissemination, but they are gossip columns, magazines, editorials and platforms for political grandstanding. Despite this obvious problem that exists even within the more reliable publications, there was a determination to hold them as being of a similar or greater standard than other sources.

The trouble is that also newspapers tell of the story as it is known at the time. Often they do not revisit old stories when the facts become known. So for example, the great airline crash into the Hudson has many column inches of speculation dressed as fact, but when the official report comes out, it will be rejected, under SlimVirgin logic, as a primary source, and we are supposed to look to further newspaper reports on that report to ensure the reporting is from an appropriate secondary source. Of course, the newspaper reports will focus on what they deem will interest the public, rather than a dispassionate summary of the issues.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Of course, the newspaper reports will focus on what they deem will interest the public, rather than a dispassionate summary of the issues.

Or, they will focus on the line that is desired by the cartels that own them. The recent cartoon in the Murdoch-owned New York Post, with its depiction of Obama as a bullet-ridden chimpanzee, was probably not selected because they thought it would appeal to the interests of the American people.

Incidentally, I always thought that the WP:V approach was designed to enshrine as policy the very problems of bias that I am raising here.

[JoseClutch]

Oh, most sources are biased, terrible, and full of errors.

But you can not do any better as Wikipedia. If Wikipedia's end accuracy ends up comparable to other respectable publications, that is not so bad. Only a fool would believe you can publish anything and not have it be full of errors. At least, no one ever has, so the empiricist in me (which is ~100% of me) is satisfied.

[Guido den Broeder]

SO......anyone wanna count up all the NY Times citations in Wikipedia, and
delete 40% (or 73.7%, or whatever) of them for being "biased"?

Not me. What I want to do, if it is possible, is to establish criteria for evaluating media citations on a case-by-case basis, rather than assuming every media cite to be reliable.

Ah, but then you suppose that WP users are able to evaluate an individual case based on such criteria. Currently, most of them use this very simple and useful criterium: if the cite supports their pov, it's reliable (and if it doesn't, they may misquote to make it look like it supports their pov.)

This post has been edited by Guido den Broeder: Fri 27th February 2009, 4:04pm

[Milton Roe]

Oh, most sources are biased, terrible, and full of errors.

But you can not do any better as Wikipedia. If Wikipedia's end accuracy ends up comparable to other respectable publications, that is not so bad. Only a fool would believe you can publish anything and not have it be full of errors. At least, no one ever has, so the empiricist in me (which is ~100% of me) is satisfied.

There's quite a difference between peer-reviewed journal stuff where the article is written and sweated over from days to months, then goes through an editorial cycle of peers lasting months, then goes BACK to the original author(s) for changes, then goes BACK to the reviewers to see if they are satisfied, THEN to the journal editor who copyedits it, then the markup manuscript goes BACK to the original author to see if THEY find errors, then is published. And we still have post publication erratum to go.

After that, the community of scientists, or whomever the professional community is, has a whack at it. And they're not shy, nor are they limited to letters to the editor (though they have that, also). They write their own articles undermining the articles that go before, if they think their data is wrong, or the conclusions drawn from them are bad.

Nothing even remotely like this happens at a newspaper. The fact-check is some schlub who has a couple of hours to do it. The subject MIGHT if they are lucky have some stuff read to them over the phone (a fraction of the article) but never sees the whole article, with his contributions, in context, before publication. For many newspapers this is actually POLICY. Copyedit takes minutes and the original writer may or may not see the result. Cycle-time from article start to publication can be a fraction of a day. Post-publication eratum is limited to really embarassing things like calling a senator a representative or getting their state wrong, and is designed to save the paper's face, not get it error-free.

The only comparable thing to peer-review that happens in historical writing, is historical journal articles and books which boil down the truth of events from journals, testimony, and other evidence, in the ensuing months and years after "primary" news stories take the first swing.

But on Wikipedia, news articles are held to be on par with science publication. Yep, the papers of Nov. 23, 1963 report that the president was shot and wounded mainly in the back of the head, so it must be true.

[GlassBeadGame]

I'd like to start a discussion of the WP:RS policy, because the question of sourcing seems to me to be a conundrum (particularly for inclusionists.) Under present WP practice, it seems that the most unimpeachable of sources is an article in a major Anglo-American press organ. Yet, I think it can be demonstrated that such organs have been historically unreliable. Is there a way that the RS policy could be revised so that newspaper and magazine articles will not be ipso facto taken as gospel?

I think it is possible to argue that building an article of newspaper accounts, or other vehicles of journalism for immediate consumption, is in fact original research. This would pass the burden on to sources that use authors who research the journalistic accounts, vet them and the convince a publisher of the value of the work they have done. Much different than the "if it bleeds it leads" type of thing often relied upon now. Of course this would trim back what articles deserve inclusion, which would be a very good thing indeed.

I remember a hilarious exchange on Wikipedia. It might have been our old friend Fred Bauder, in the role of guy talking some sense, but I'm not certain. Anyway some fancruft editors where slaving away on articles about every Star Trak episode. They used the episodes themselves as sources. As in Star Trek, First Folio, Episode XXII, The One About the Trebels. Fred or whoever just couldn't get them to see why this wasn't appropriate. This is really not that different than using newspaper accounts when you think about it.

[LessHorrid vanU]

SO......anyone wanna count up all the NY Times citations in Wikipedia, and
delete 40% (or 73.7%, or whatever) of them for being "biased"?

Not me. What I want to do, if it is possible, is to establish criteria for evaluating media citations on a case-by-case basis, rather than assuming every media cite to be reliable.

Ah, but then you suppose that WP users are able to evaluate an individual case based on such criteria. Currently, most of them use this very simple and useful criterium: if the cite supports their pov, it's reliable (and if it doesn't, they may misquote to make it look like it supports their pov.)

Ain't that the truth?! In my largely forgotten (by me, mainly) days of attempting to resolve disputes I used to say that having X reference in the article was fine as long as Z was also included, but the disputant parties would have none of it - they wanted only their reference, and the other lot BANNED for wanting the other one. I doubt things have changed in my absence.

[Firsfron of Ronchester]

Ain't that the truth?! In my largely forgotten (by me, mainly) days of attempting to resolve disputes I used to say that having X reference in the article was fine as long as Z was also included, but the disputant parties would have none of it - they wanted only their reference, and the other lot BANNED for wanting the other one. I doubt things have changed in my absence.

Not that I can tell. One of the worst things about Wikipedia is what you've just outlined above... and being able to tell which side is "right" when you're not even familiar with the subject.


Regarding newspapers as reliable sources, for dates of events, I prefer contemporary (from the same period) newspaper sources over later-day recollections written in books. A microfiche search can pull up a lot of botched history retold. But a peer-reviewed paper is always better than a newspaper article. It's all about context; I'm not sure a blanket WP:RS policy will ever succeed in explaining those nuances to many Wikipedia editors. I've seen highly-recommended sources rejected by Wikipedia editors based on WP:RS policy.

[Guido den Broeder]

Something has changed. Nowadays, more often than not the other lot actually DOES get banned.

[Ottre]

SO......anyone wanna count up all the NY Times citations in Wikipedia, and
delete 40% (or 73.7%, or whatever) of them for being "biased"?

Not me. What I want to do, if it is possible, is to establish criteria for evaluating media citations on a case-by-case basis, rather than assuming every media cite to be reliable.

An example of a recently featured, controversial, article where the best newspaper articles haven't been discussed adequately.

[Luís Henrique]

Oh, most sources are biased, terrible, and full of errors.

They are. But, as in Orwell's tale, some are more equal than others.

In fact, the whole issue of sources is the discussion on which of them are more reliable on each particular issue. But, under WP:Crazyness, this would be WP:OR, wouldn't it?

Or "do we have a source" for the idea that the Washington Post is more reliable than the Washington Times?

Luís Henrique

[Milton Roe]

Or "do we have a source" for the idea that the Washington Post is more reliable than the Washington Times?

Luís Henrique

Why, yes. SlimVirgin says that kind of thing, when writing ex cathedra in WP:RS. And you see, the cool part of it is that WP policy doesn't have to be sourced, because it's policy. So the epistemological trail as to the reliability of knowledge on WP sort of gets narrower and narrower, and finally winds up disappearing down a rabbit hole. And there's the rabbit hole. In case you were wondering.

[Luís Henrique]

Why, yes. SlimVirgin says that kind of thing, when writing ex cathedra in WP:RS. And you see, the cool part of it is that WP policy doesn't have to be sourced, because it's policy. So the epistemological trail as to the reliability of knowledge on WP sort of gets narrower and narrower, and finally winds up disappearing down a rabbit hole. And there's the rabbit hole. In case you were wondering.

So, let me see if I understand it correctly. Is there a policy according to which the Times is more reliable than the Sun?

My impression is that either all sources are equal, in which case there would be no reason to prefer the Encyclopedia Britannica to the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook, or that the hierarchy should be sourced - because discussing it case by case in the Talk Pages would be original research...

... and, of course, imposing the hierarchy top-down from the admin clergy upon the common mortals would mean that "anyone can edit Wikipedia", but some can edit it more than others.

Gee, second time I quote Orwell today. Ominous.

Luís Henrique