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Notes -
Wikipedia is deciding whether to discourage use of Fox News as a source in articles specifically for politics and science. As usual, please do not comment there unless you know your way around a Wikipedia discussion and can participate while following community standards.
In context: Wikipedia periodically holds discussions about the reliability of sources. It has a five-level ranking system for sources:
generally reliable
no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
deprecated (= "never use")
blacklisted (= "never use", enforced in the wiki software)
The current discussion is about Fox News when it talks about the two topics of politics and science - for those topics, it is currently listed as "no consensus". For other topics, it is "generally reliable", and that status is not up for discussion here. Fox's talk shows are also listed separately as "deprecated" (= "never use"), and that status is also not up for discussion. There are 23 prior discussions listed about the reliability of Fox News for politics and science, starting in 2009 (although there may be more). This is the latest one.
Why this is relevant here: Wikipedia is a widely-used reference on the Internet (top ten websites globally, by number of visits) and Fox News is a well-known news source. The debate on whether Fox News is a reliable source for science and politics is thus likely to be of interest on this website.
Moving to the discussion itself: many points were raised of varying quality. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth and it's certainly not one-sided.
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point. It can still be used for research while writing articles, like every other website on the Internet. As for the incorrect claims, various editors compiled lists of these; here's an 18-item list. I checked a few. Some were weak; some were worrying. For example, item 10 quotes from this Fox article: "PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration". Here's the PolitiFact page. It shows that "expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration" is a misleading construction: Biden and Harris repeatedly emphasize that they would take a vaccine approved by public health professionals, but would not trust the sole word of Trump. Fox phrases it as during the administration, they expressed distrust in the vaccine, in general, but this is simply not what they did. Why that's bad: one could write a sentence in an article with that claim, and cite it to the Fox article, and that would be incorrect. The Fox article was published July 2021 and has not been corrected.
My take, part 2: The optics might not be great, but at least Fox still counts as reliable for everything but politics and science. I don't think they're managing the optics enough. Of course, it's a decentralized and anti-hierarchical community, so the odds they'd organically do something like that are low.
Where we go from here: Editors are requesting that the discussion be "closed" by a neutral third-party editor (or panel of such editors), and that may happen sometime soon. Editors are still adding comments to the main discussion in the meantime. The "close" can be appealed to the community, but if the closer does a decent job this is unlikely.
My credentials: I've edited Wikipedia for a while. I usually don't touch the politics side much.
I'm replying separately, so this doesn't get buried in our other thread - I really appreciate that you posted this here. It's very different from what we usually get here, it's very refreshing to see. Please stick around and do this more often.
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to stick around and post about "non-CW CW" topics here more in the future.
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Most mainstream sources can be trusted to report certain types of basic facts accurately: If CNN, Fox, or any other source says that Biden gave a speech on the White House lawn on September 16th, 2022, you can reasonably assume it to be true. If they report a quote from a named source, you can reasonably assume that the source made the statement (thought it may certainly be taken out of context).
On the other hand, all such sources are extremely unreliable in terms of interpretation. If Fox reported that Biden gave an "authoritarian" speech on the White House lawn on September 16th, 2022, you can be reasonably sure that he gave the speech, but the "authoritarian" claim should be regarded with suspicion. Similarly if CNN called the speech "unifying."
The quote you included, ""PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration," is clearly interpretation and therefore unreliable. Every mainstream new source is unreliable on this sort of "fact." That doesn't mean Fox invents fake speeches on the White House lawn, or lies about quotes from named sources, etc.
This is really important nuance which I wish Wikipedia editors would be more appreciative of. A lot of editors are addicted to the simplicity of a red light/yellow light/green light system, and will therefore wholesale eradicate any citations to sources marked "generally unreliable", even if they're being used to cite basic pieces of info like the date of a speech or a direct quote, which no-one would seriously consider it plausible for that source to falsify.
Normally you can just find the same information cited in a "green" source, but it becomes a real problem when dealing with topics that are mostly being covered by right-wing outlets.
"How to use this list":
Like you, I wish the average Wikipedia editor cared more about those rules.
Even the existence of the list itself is controversial in the community, precisely for the reason you articulate: that it tempts people towards a simpler system that does damage when applied in the real world.
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Let's be honest, most mainstream news sources are unreliable when talking about their opposition. So Fox is unreliable regarding the left, and everything else is unreliable regarding the right, or whoever it is they dislike.
I mean, remember "Joe Rogan takes horse paste"? I do. I guess CNN is out.
How about The Guardian reporting about a terror attack in Tel Aviv, and subsequent shooting of the terrorist, as "Israeli forces kill Palestinian after Tel Aviv shooting leaves two dead"? I remember that (actually, I remembered a different time that happened, but got a more recent one).
BBC reporting on the stabbing of an Israeli border patrol agent, and subsequent shooting of her assailants, as "Three Palestinians killed after deadly stabbing in Jerusalem"? Well, I didn't remember that, I just found it when looking for the Guardian piece.
Is there any news source that you couldn't compile a 20-point gish-gallop on and paint it as unreliable? I doubt it.
I would be happy to specifically nix CNN talk shows in the same way that we already nix Fox talk shows and all opinion content in any medium (see WP:NEWSOPED, WP:NOROPED - parse, respectively as "NEWS section on OP-EDs" and "No Original Research section on OP-EDs").
For the other two, headlines have been banned for a while (WP:HEADLINE), and I'd imagine the bodies are more careful with their claims.
I would, in fact, love to see a list of claims for your preferred left-wing source (assuming the left-wing source is marked "generally reliable" on the big list). I'm sure one has been compiled somewhere already, but not in any of the few discussions on left-wing sources I spot-checked.
OK, how about the website? I quote from the top result: "Joe Rogan announced he has tested positive for Covid-19 and that he took numerous medications to combat the virus, including the livestock drug ivermectin" and then it's basically a link to a video. You can find CNN calling Ivermectin "an anti-parasitic drug used for livestock" here, in an article not about Rogan. The thing here, is, of course, that it's technically correct - you can use Ivermectin on livestock! There are products just like that! It's exactly the sort of half-truth that news media uses to lie without "lying". It's also what Fox is being accused of in the list brought against it - e.g. items 2, 3, 4.
Looking at the discussion, every item is just a motte and bailey. Bailey: "Fox is lying". Motte: "Fox is saying something sorta misleading, I guess, if you squint hard enough" - like item 2, where Fox uses "dismissed" as in "didn't use". It's not actually wrong, is it? Fauci didn't use data from some non-peer-reviewed working paper to recommend on blah blah blah. Whatever, I wouldn't either... but it's not a lie, just like "ivermectin is used on livestock".
May I quote from the anti-fox Gish-gallop then? From point 6: "[...] yes this is a headline, but it goes toward their sloppy journalism practices". In this case it's actually not sloppy journalism, it's intentionally deceptive. The point is to lie by omission and then move on. What the body even contains is actually irrelevant, since the point is what the headline doesn't say - and whether or not you can use that specific article on Wikipedia is also not the point, the point is that the Guardian is willing to lie. I don't keep a list of all the lies and half-truths I ever saw, it's just one that I distinctly remember that recently happened.
I'd like that too.
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Yeah, my problem is not with considering Fox unreliable. It's with not subjecting every other major news outlet to the same level of scrutiny. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, etc. are all full of partisan nonsense.
Exactly. It's the ol' isolated demand for rigor.
And the knee-jerk claim of whataboutism to cover the isolated demand for rigor. Also 'just open your own attempt to downgrade CNN, MSNBC etc, but we aren't talking about that here."
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While I generally agree with the viewpoint that "Fox is an unreliable and untrustworthy source of information," I think any organization that does not reach the same conclusion about CNN or MSNBC is showing an strong selection bias.
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They've been trying to do this for a while as you've noted. Fox News is essentially the last non-left source allowed on Wikipedia so the usual suspects continue to try to remove it. Glad to see Masem is still around as a sane voice. Don't think I could continue talking to brick walls as much as he has to. Thankfully it seems this time again they've tried to scrape the bottom of the barrel and been refuted multiple times throughout the RFC. Hopefully a decently neutral editor/admin comes in and shuts it down as no consensus.
See the full list of sources. Not only are all right-wing sources not listed fair game (even politically biased sources are explicitly allowed, see WP:PARTISAN), non-left-wing sources on that list listed as "generally reliable" include Reason, the WSJ, Deseret News, Financial Times, and Religion News Service. Non-left-wing sources listed as "no consensus", meaning they're usable based on context, include The Washington Times, The American Conservative, Washington Examiner, the Cato Institute, and National Review.
You are correct. I should have looked more closely. I'm probably focusing too hard on the edit wars that kept material from decent sources out of stuff in GG/Trump articles back when I paid more attention to the wiki stuff.
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That does sound like it's just delaying the inevitable, though, because this sounds like it's one of those gambler's-ruin/"vote until you vote right"/"you have to be lucky every time..." situations, where the choice is between "some irrevocable change to the status quo" and "keep the status quo [for now, until the next time we try to change it,]" and there's no penalty to the "wants irrevocable change" side for losing any given round. Statistically, the gambler will inevitably lose against the infinite-money house and that'll be the end of the game.
Such contests always seem unfair to me, but I don't see a clear, obvious, favorite alternative.
As with elections, a simple option is that once the matter is decided, it cannot be re-litigated for some fixed amount of time, like 4 years.
I imagine there would be community support for such a proposal because those discussions are exhausting for everyone.
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Wikipedia is a nakedly political organisation and has been for some time. "Made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected" is not the criteria being used by Wikipedia - if it was, then you'd be unable to rely on any mainstream/"reliable" source of information. I have a long enough memory that I can recall discussions during the gamergate period where wikipedia editors made it clear that even if there was direct proof that a reliable source was lying, the reliable source was to be the viewpoint presented in the article no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. Wikipedia has already been politicised, and has been for a long time - I would prefer it if they were just honest and flat out said that Fox was being banned for political reasons.
While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
How long do you think it is going to take? How many rounds of edits? If they keep on holding me off for a month and I get tired, do you win?
What if the source got cito-genesised?
One thing I would like fixed is their article about Kiwi Farms. The article has this:
Follow those three citations.
[10]: Gizmodo article. The full sum of their Terryberry coverage is this:
"ended her life" is a hyperlink to some rando's Wordpress site, which doxxes Josh's mother, and has this:
That is it. That is the entire chain of [10].
[11] is in Fucking French.
[13] is to Business Insider, and just links to [10] and [11]. BECAUSE THEY JUST SOURCED IT FROM WIKIPEDIA.
Those are their own sources. But even if I tried fixing them now and we got Business Insider kicked out as trash, this "fact" from the Wikipedia article has been cite-washed through the Washington Post https://archive.ph/ExKi4 "At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community." Will you help stop that article from being cited?
Time and effort estimate: not gonna sugarcoat it, probably high. Kiwi Farms is probably the single worst possible article to do this sort of experiment on, because it's on perhaps the single most poisoned and low-trust topic area on the website. Every Kiwi Farms user (dunno the demonym, don't care) from here to Sunday has probably had a go at the article at some point. I'm gonna say the best time to work on this article is not now. Maybe in a year. Happy to stick to the relatively calm (ha, ha) waters of American politics.
"You can fix things yourself as long as the other side does not notice and put up a fight" is kind of what my starting position was.
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
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I don't think that "do it yourself or convince someone to" is actually going to be possible - if I tried to make an earnest, good faith effort to fix the inaccuracies and politically slanted representation of the articles that concern me, I would just be banned within short order. And while I appreciate the offer, I do not believe you can actually meaningfully do anything to correct the "political lean" of the sort that I'm alluding to. Are you going to single-handedly remove a bunch of admins and institute sweeping reforms to the culture of Wikipedia? I don't see any other way to make articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting present a balanced and accurate picture of events as opposed to what they show now.
Have you actually tried editing Wikipedia before? Because this does not match with my experience. If you're actually operating in good faith and within Wikipedia's policies, you're not going to get banned. Bans are for people who are clearly "not there to build an encyclopedia" (e.g. spammers), or editors who chronically or egregiously disregard Wikipedia's policies. You might get reverted a lot, which can be very annoying, but I think you'd be surprised how much progress you can make in getting changes through if you politely argue your case on the talk page with reference to relevant policies.
the_last_pigeon is right - if you're patient and competent, you could absolutely single-handedly ameliorate some of the bias in an article on a culture-war topic if you sat down and tried. I say this as someone who has actually done this. (Granted, it wasn't fun having to patiently deal with what clearly seemed to me to be ideologically motivated bad faith arguments and isolated demands for rigor, which is why, for my own sanity, I mostly edit non-CW articles.)
This is the rub. Most people don't have the time or the patience to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia's byzantine network of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices, all of which are referred to exclusively in jargon and wielded as weapons to revert or block even good-faith edits. Editors especially on influential articles are basically lawyers in all but name, and the result of trying to work against their interests is the same as someone with no legal training trying to out-lawyer a lawyer. With enough self-education and persistence, you might have a chance. Otherwise, it's hopeless. But of course, to those on the inside, with the arcane knowledge and the community recognition, it seems so easy! Practically effortless!
Most people inclined to contribute would have no idea what to do if their change was reverted, and either give up at that point or just change it back.
There's some truth to this, but I don't think the community is as uniformly nasty as you're making it out to be. There are plenty of editors who will patiently try to point you toward relevant policy or help you through a point of misunderstanding. (See, for example, the saintly editors who answer newbie questions at "The Teahouse".)
Also, while I would never admit to holding this opinion in an on-wiki discussion, I secretly think that the relatively high barrier for entry to making non-trivial contributions to Wikipedia is actually a crucial ingredient to its success, in that it filters out would-be editors who are insufficiently smart or diligent. This is why I cringe a little every time Wikimedia developers try to roll out more glossy, simplified, WYSIWYG interfaces. I'm not sure I want more people coming in to the project who aren't smart enough to use wikitext (the markup language that constitutes the "source code" of all articles and discussion pages).
As it is, Wikipedia kind of does feel like a community of scholars. But the more accessible it becomes, the more it's going to come to resemble the YouTube comments section of yore. Case in point, a while back the WMF did an experiment where they actively solicited feedback from readers of Wikipedia articles. Their theory was that Wikipedia needs more voices (and this continues to be an overarching theme of their work), and that a) this user feedback would help existing editors identify areas for improvement for articles, and b) users who are induced to leave feedback can also be induced to go fix the problems they identified, and thus graduate from reader to editor. The experiment was a failure, because the signal to noise ratio of the reader comments was pretty abysmal. You can actually still download a dataset of some of this feedback and it's pretty funny to read. Here's a random sample of comments on the article "Apple Inc.":
(Reminder that there are a lot of sub-100 IQ people out in the world, but you probably don't have much interaction with them because you exist in a bubble of above-average intelligence friends, family members, and coworkers.)
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There's also the sneaking suspicion that the layers of policies, pseudo-policies, and unofficial-but-not-really best practices are just window-dressing disguising outright bias. If for any given issue a wiki-lawyer can use the policies (etc) in different ways to come to opposite conclusions, that's exactly what's going on.
I used to see a lot of this 'rules lawyering' back when I played Dungeons & Dragons as a teen, and from reading the discussion page it seems that the exact same personality types are still at it.
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This reminds me of debates I've had in the past with religious (Jewish) people, after they found out I was a non-believer. I used to try to show them some contradiction within the bible, or how something in it is just factually incorrect, and the reply would be some reference to the Talmud or whatever that supposedly resolves the issue. I've learned not to try to beat people at their own games - it's their lives, I will never beat them at it. They're still wrong, but surrendering frame is not the right way to go about it.
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Would you like to work together to improve that article? I would enjoy seeing a "bunch of admins" get in the way. Let's start a new post for it, though. I hope our overlords would be OK with that, as it is sort of culture-war.
I wonder if it would be possible to engineer some sort of bot solution. I certainly don't want to dedicate my life to an online wiki, but if there's a hack that makes things easier then I'm all for it. Wikipedia is basically the universal source of truth online.
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I am absolutely not interested in registering an account on wikipedia or providing my IP address to that site - but I can tell you about the missing context and inaccurate, deceptive framing of the events presented in that article. However you're going to have your work cut out for you, as this article and the events in question are also linked and referenced in multiple other pages on the site.
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I haven't read the linked discussion, but I don't see how this is an argument against what he said?
Is his characterization of the conclusion, that reliable sources are reliable even when lying, accurate?
I wasn't around for GamerGate, so while I find that assertion highly plausible, I'd prefer to see an example linked here.
Here's a non-GG example that I remember from previous discussions on TheMotte:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gab_(social_network)/Archive_10#Gab_never_refers_to_Breitbart_and_Infowars_as_competitors
To summarize: WaPo reports something, and vaguely cites a primary source - an SEC filing. What they're reporting is not in the source. There is no way to disprove their report with a secondary source, because no other secondary source will state the non-existence of something unprompted. Citing the primary source on Wikipedia isn't allowed. So WaPo must be taken as reliable in their lie.
That discussion ended in your desired outcome with the contested sentence being removed. The current text of the article (can't bother to check how long it's been there, but this is the tool you would use for that):
That's nice. Looks like it came from this revision in Nov 2018, so it sat there a bit over a year. BTW, that should count against WaPo's reliability, no?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth
I'm sure I can go dig up an example for you if you want, but here's the actual official policy on this topic.
EDIT: This isn't the official policy - this is an essay on the official policy. See below for correction.
Knowingly using sources that are lying is straightforwardly stupid and I'd hope that both (1) no actual Wikipedia policy can be construed that way, and (2) no discussion has concluded that way. What you linked is an unofficial and unsanctioned interpretation of policy. From the box at the top:
I suppose that's on us, for bad signage. I'll certainly never argue that we're good at user interfaces :)
That said, a common criticism of Wikipedia is how it relies on existing sources rather than "the truth". This is an entirely valid criticism. It is a correct interpretation of policy that, as your essay says, Wikipedia would have advocated for a geocentric universe if it had existed back in the days when that was the mainstream viewpoint. In a sense, that's how it has to be. People fighting over truth itself doesn't make for a good encyclopedia, because verification of the results is many times harder.
Ah, my mistake. In that case just take it as an essay on the official policy rather than the official policy itself - I was confused due to seeing this particular course of events play out in real time, and then seeing this essay essentially explaining what had just happened.
EDIT:
This was in fact the situation in which I was made aware of this policy. If you want to see more, please go read the archived talk pages for the Gamergate article (hope you have some time on your hands).
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I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor. All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably. They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.
If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.
Anyone can start one of these discussions about a source at any time, although in practice you have to gauge community mood at least a little. The key question here is whether you can pick a sentence from an article within the given topic and be confident that it's factually correct, and that's what's being questioned for Fox's politics articles.
If someone managed to put together a big list for, say, the NYT, I'd like to see it and I'm sure the community would like to see it. I agree without reservations that all major news sources should be subject to the same level of scrutiny.
For what it's worth: BuzzFeed currently has the same "no consensus" rating as Fox, although honestly on the strength of far less well-attended discussions.
For what it's worth, part 2: A discussion on MSNBC was launched after the last big Fox News discussion, but nobody put in the same amount of effort to find instances of inaccuracies (only one person posted, and they posted a mistake in a headline, and it is known that headlines aren't written by the article authors and are thus junk - see WP:HEADLINE). Thus the discussion reaffirmed that MSNBC is unusable for opinion pieces, as all opinion pieces are, and is generally reliable most other times, with the caveat that they don't even have written reporting on their news site so it's a bit of a strange discussion to have. (They have lots of blogs, though, which are all not suitable for use by policy.) If someone came up with a similar list for another major news outlet, I'd expect it to be taken seriously. I can't immediately find any examples of someone dropping a large list in an RfC on a "famous" left-wing source, but there's plenty to look through on the main "source reliability" list.
Incredible how downvoted this is.
It's downvoted because it's well known by this point the protests of Wikipedia's fairness are hollow. There is no more good faith -- if you ask, people will provide you long lists of documented instances of Wikipedia's entrenched biases, they will show you literal years of arguments about it, of people well-known and not discussing it. Whether it's GamerGate, or Elevatorgate, or Trump, or Russia, consistently, very, very consistently, Wikipedia slants in the same direction, fights every attempt to appeal this bias to the quick, and demands an exorbitant amount of energy to police lest an activist editor immediately launch right back into the nonsense.
I'm sure pigeon is sincere and willing to help reform Wikipedia. Of course, someone else suggested some fixes to the KiwiFarms article, and the immediate response from the pro-Wiki side was "alright, that might actually be impractical".
But sure -- utterly capture an institution and then use the fact your detractors have realized they shouldn't bother with it as evidence it's not captured, because those goofy detractors aren't even trying to exhaust themselves against you.
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Faith in these discussions has been exhausted by years of previous conversations, and that bleeds through. I'd agree that it bodes poorly for the long-term health of the forum, which is why I've been pessimistic about this place's long-term prospects for quite some time now. On the other hand, it's lasted this long, so who knows?
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Agreed. Good-faith quality comments getting downvoted like this doesn't bode well. Does it have any effect in the new site, though?
Doesn't seem like it.
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