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Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Wikipedia editors have voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group "generally unreliable." The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin backed news organization Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors. The editors described the arguments for a ban as "centered on the Daily Mail's reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication." The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia but does not control its editing processes, said in a statement that volunteer editors on English Wikipedia had discussed the reliability of the Mail since at least early 2015. It said: "Based on the requests for comments section [on the reliable sources noticeboard], volunteer editors on English Wikipedia have come to a consensus that the Daily Mail is 'generally unreliable and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist. This means that the Daily Mail will generally not be referenced as a 'reliable source' on English Wikipedia, and volunteer editors are encouraged to change existing citations to the Daily Mail to another source deemed reliable by the community. This is consistent with how Wikipedia editors evaluate and use media outlets in general -- with common sense and caution."
The Daily Mail has always been an absolute dreadful comic, calling it a newspaper is just wrong as it is nothing more than sensationalized fiction.
I would agree with you if wikipedia held other news outlets to the same standard.
Wait... it has been used as a source EVER?! This is shocking news to me.
And Wikipedia is a reliable source?
Only when compared against the Daily Mail.
They're like all media outlets in that they pander to their viewers' prejudices. Everybody loves the news when it confirms their already strongly held opinions. Wikipedia's editors are no different it seems. If they were genuinely impartial they would hold all outlets to the same standard.
Wikipedia doesn't claim to be a reliable source for these purposes; you can't use Wikipedia pages as references on other Wikipedia pages.
Here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I don't recognise the website, but I leave you to investigate
http://www.stopfake.org/en/rus...
Not RT accused directly but
http://www.businessinsider.com...
A reminder about the lies at the time of the invasion of the Crimea
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
And finally
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
Oh come on. Have you even looked at the Daily Mail? It's frequently sensationalistic in its coverage to the point where some of its headlines and stories more resemble The National Enquirer than a serious newspaper. Often times I don't think it even takes itself that seriously. The headlines are often extremely hyperbolic.
Quite frankly, I can't imagine anyone taking the Mail that seriously. PApers like the Guardian and Telegraph have their flaws, and their obvious ideological leanings that at times leak on to the front page, but the Daily mail is just one big absurd mess, a sort of TMZ with news stories.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's a delightful exchange from Yes Minister that, while reflecting the major British papers as they were in the late 70s and early 80s, is still relatively true today:
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Daily Mail actually has some very competent, very tenacious, not to mention ruthless, investigative journalists. It's not uncommon for them to break stories of real consequence.
The editorial spin that gets put on them, that's another matter. And their choice of subject matter is often open to question. But the journalism itself is some of the best you'll find, and I find it a sad comment on the state of Wikipedia that its politburo doesn't recognise that.
I'm not sure spinning is less powerful "lying" than outright invention (fabrication). In fact, spinning is arguably worse than outright invention because spun facts often have an element of truth to them, making them harder to debunk or dismiss. And you cannot outright dismiss the spinning source because they may not technically be lying.
Propaganda seems to last longer and goes further if it's based on partial truths.
For example, a common propaganda trick is to interview many members of the other side's group (such as at conventions or protests), edit out the normal interviews and play only the "stupid" interviews on TV. The cherry-picking makes the group members seem like idiots.
It's not outright made-up because they are real answers, but they have been filtered to present the entire group in a bad light: it's essentially a statistical trick of only showing the bad samples as if they are representative (random).
Compare that with hiring actors to act like the other side's group and say stupid things on camera. If the producers are caught, they are outright discredited for fabrication. The first approach involves no fabrication and the evidence can be deleted or hidden, such as deleting the "normal" interviews. If investigators cannot find the (excluded) normal interviews, they have no evidence of manipulation to present to the world.
The first approach (filtering) is almost just as powerful as outright fabrication, YET is not fabrication: it's all real, and the filtering trick can be buried.
Table-ized A.I.
The writing is better but the content is not. Don't confuse the two. Good language skills are just as helpful for convincing lies as they are for truth telling.
There's a delightful exchange from Yes Minister that, while reflecting the major British papers as they were in the late 70s and early 80s, is still relatively true today:
I'm going through the Netflix DVD's of this right now.
I've watched it in it's entirety once before.
I've never seen more brilliantly written political satire!
He asked us, "What do you have to lose?" Well, he has provided an answer. He has attacked the following constitutionally protected groups:
1) The Press (all of them).
2) Judges (all of them. He just called them all political).
3) Lawmakers (Yah, it was pretty much everyone versus trump the last election. Had he stuck to truth I might have had some sympathy here.)
4) disabled/women/religions.
The only attacks I've seen are the Berkeley protestors beating people with clubs. What I've seen from Trump are mean tweets. And no one is immune to criticism just because they're a member of any of those groups. There are fuckups in all walks of life (especially politicians)
And did a lefty just tell me that it's bad to criticize a religion? Really? I'm not even Christian, but after watching 40 years of non-stop, relentless criticism of Christians, Christianity, Christian values, and anything remotely religious, by the left, the hypocrisy of that statement is amazing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The Daily Mail is about as reliable as Wikipedia is these days.
To be fair you're not allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source in Wikipedia articles either. ;-)
The Daily Mail is garbage - but so is The Guardian.
The difference is that Wikipedia has been taken over by the social justice loons who agree with The Guardian.
Wrap it up. Wikipedia really is done.
The Daily Mail is the exactly opposite of what you describe. A typical story starts with several paragraphs of reaction and outrage, before right at the end on page 7 mentioning the facts.
Here's a classic example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/hea...
Note how even in the byline they manage to sneak a lie in (the straight banana law was debunked when it first surfaced in the 90s). If you can wade through all the ranting you will find a perfectly sensible, rational explanation for the ruling.
That's why the Daily Fail has been banned. It's not a serious source of news, it's a source of outrage and vitriol. Almost entirely fact free, virtually pure opinion (so long as it's the opinion of people who are angry, or who you should be angry about not being angry).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Other media outlets make mistakes, and they are quickly found and covered by other outlets. The Daily Mail rarely prints anything that is accurate, because it's editorial goal is to mislead. The entire point of the thing is to make you angry, not to inform.
It's one thing to try and occasionally fail to deliver news, it's another to consciously try to distort news for profit and to influence the government.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Daily Mail is the exactly opposite of what you describe. A typical story starts with several paragraphs of reaction and outrage, before right at the end on page 7 mentioning the facts.
I came here to post this. This is exactly my experience with Daily Mail. The articles (and I am using the word loosely) start with pure distilled lying shit, and IF you happen to read the end, there is (if they lied enough) their 'get out of jail' card where they briefly state what actually happened (quite contrary to what they wrote above), so they can't be sued.
It is what it is.
The difference is that RT reporting is often selective, biased, opinionated - painting facts in certain light, keeping silent about some facts and emphasizing others thus painting incomplete image and with misleading implications. The facts they present are just facts though, even if they may mislead you into drawing wrong conclusions through clever wording. If you're careful though, and use multiple sources, confronting them, you are able to extract objective truth; take what the article *says*, not what it *implies* and you're good. If RT says "Kremlin announced plans of X..." you're not getting information that X is or will be true, but you're getting an absolutely true, objective information that announcement of plans of X by Kremlin occurred - regardless of what opinion the article expresses about X.
Meanwhile, Daily Mail fabricates facts. "Russia begins X!" - Nope. It does not. The announcement doesn't make it a fact. The chance Kremlin follows up with actual actions is indeterminate, the time scale was not announced, and there's not even a trace of X in Russia as of now. The news is fake.
Biased reporting is still a valid source, even if you need to proceed with caution because the wording is not conductive to impartial conclusions. Fake reporting is not a valid source, period. The only actual fact we can draw from a link to such an article was that Daily Mail announced that Russia begins X.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Articles are usually a combination of facts and narrative, some opinion or agenda.
As long as facts check out, that's okay for Wikipedia source. The narrative does get in the way, reducing value of the source, but doesn't invalidate the facts. The source confirms article author didn't make it up, but it's the wikipedia article that must present the facts impartially, stripping the narrative and opinions. If it manages to do it, all is well.
The problem begins when facts are fabricated. This is where Wikipedia must draw a line.
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I'd hardly blame CNN for making the peeing thing public domain, as you point out Buzzfeed already published it. If you think Buzzfeed is obscure and it wasn't going around like crazy as soon as it hit Buzzfeed's website, then I have this thing called "The Internet" I need to tell you about. It's entirely reasonable for CNN to cover something that everyone is talking about anyway.
Another problem with your complaint is your assumption that the peeing thing was false. The paper itself was a genuine report put together by a respected ex-MI6 officer. It was unlikely to be 100% true - and contained caveats explaining that - but it is more likely than not that most of the facts reported are true. The odd thing is that the only statement of fact debunked so far, that a Trump aide went to another country to conspire with Russia, was actually the only statement of fact in the entire report that the report itself said it wasn't certain about. The others, including the peeing thing, had no such disclaimer attached.
And meanwhile, in Russia, people matching the description of the various sources in the paper have been arrested, suggesting that Putin himself does actually take it seriously and believed the report was mostly correct.
What's interesting is that you and everyone else focus on the peeing thing. This is a fact that to most people would be embarrassing rather than disqualifying. Nobody wants their sexual fetishes or their temperament (the incident was a unique demonstration of both) discussed in public. But that shouldn't disqualify anyone for the presidency. It was the rest of the report that should have concerned you.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Interesting example of how a bit of fake news and a willingness to believe any old shit that confirms you view that the mainstream media is unreliable.
For example, this claim that CNN interviewed their own cameraman. It originated from Stormfront. When you check the Stormfront story, it actually gives away the deception. The guy is a professional cameraman, he has done some kind of contract work with a CNN reporter once. That doesn't make him a "CNN cameraman" or suggest any kind of conflict of interest with regards to the interview. In fact, it actually lends credibility to what the guy is saying, because the claim that he had been to Rwanda was somewhat extraordinary and is now corroborated.
This is typical of the extremely simplistic take on journalism ethics that also affected Gamergate. People knowing each other is not a conflict of interest. In fact, it's how journalism works, because people are more willing to speak openly and at length with people they know. But the purpose here is not to check for ethical problems, it's to throw shit at CNN.
This whole sentence is a perfect example of how it works:
They told us it was 'illegal' to read Wikileaks, which revealed that they leaked debate questions. They've interviewed their own cameraman. They had fake interviews where they pretended to be places they weren't.
Genuine mistake, since corrected. Fake news story based on twisting some facts. Outright falsehood. Start with something true, move on to a partial and dependable lie, and then end up something vague and general to poison the reader's mind. Textbook stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Blanket bans of sources considered poor news sources is a slippery slope, a slippery slope I say!
FD:I just posted a link to the Daily Mail in the last /. article.
And for that you should be ashamed.
Also you should be ashamed for calling this censorship. Its not, it's a private organisation setting their own rules in their own house. You haven't been censored, you've been told that they think the Daily Mail is unreliable and full of falsehoods... which if you've read any decent news source is blindingly obvious.
If the Daily Mail were to accidentally print something true and accurate, they would not be the only news source to do so. So in that regard, absolutely nothing is being hidden from you.
Wikipedia wants to be considered a reliable reference site, this means they need to be mindful of their sources. The DM is known for deliberately printing lies, slander and well, crap. 90% of their stories are celebrity trash that would make E! blush, the other 9.99999999999999% are exaggerations or outright fabrications to suit the homophobic and racist tendencies of the owner.
I consider the Daily Mail to be an unreliable and often, utterly incorrect source of information. I'll happily and openly state that I think anyone using it as a reference source is a complete Muppet who struggles to know which end of a spoon to hold... but I wont stop you from reading it, I'll just point out you're an idiot for doing so. That isn't censorship, if you're offended by it, thats your problem.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
They are, if you actually consider what the standard is: a consensus view among editors that the articles are unreliable and not representing accurate facts.
That doesn't happen lightly - the debate took weeks before the vote, and the vote requirement to actually ban a source is extremely high - you need over 80% of editors to agree. That's some ten-thousand people from around the world, with different biases, ideas, philosophies and beliefs - and you need to get 80% of them to agree before any publication can be banned. It requires a CONSENSUS view - not just a majority view.
The D.M. ban came after years and years of having article based on DM sources that had to be rewritten, replaced and even deleted entirely as they turned out to be pure fabrications. That's a crapload of extra work for editors - who are, remember, volunteers.
It is not censorship - they can't stop anybody reading the dailymail, but they ahve every right to decide that the frequency with which dailymail reports force them to have to do extra work due to blatantly false claims makes it not worth the effort of allowing as a source, since after all, the mission of the organisation is dependent on reliable sources.
There are different ideas on how an encyclopaedia should strive for accuracy. The traditional view is by hiring a host of experts, one on every topic you have an entry on, and have them write the topics for you. Then edit and prettify and have them fact-check the result. This is how things like Encyclopaedia Britanica for example is done.
That, however, is not viable for a crowd-sourced one... so how do you fact check ? They had to find a new way, that way is to demand reliable, outside, expert sources that agree with the statements of fact made on the pages. This reduces the workload from an unmangeable "find a verified expert on every topic and resolve disputes whenever a topic has two experts who don't agree" to a much more manageable "select which sources we trust". A process which, in another contradiction of typical encyclopaedic standards actually is based on "benefit of the doubt" - any published source starts out as "acceptable". Even your personal blog can be a source - though if you fail fact-checking (consistently) you will eventually cease to be one. If it can be backed up by multiple sources this is deemed even better. A scientists' blog about his current research is a fantastic thing to have as a source - it means wikipedia can have up to date information (far moreso than the competition), but having a link to the published paper when it comes out is even more important - because that will include the corrections made over the course of the research and not reflected in the earlier running-commentary posts.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
This is fake news. There was a completely unsubstantiated claim by an NY Times reporter, which seems like a bizarre false flag op:
That's not a bizarre false flag op, that's cognitive dissonance on your part.
So at best we have a rumour
No, an eyewitness account from a reporter that matches other violence at the event that's been caught on film, such as this flag pole attack, or this woman being pepper sprayed while giving an interview, or this college Republican being attacked wearing a suit and Trump hat the morning after.
based on a story that clearly makes no sense (why would an anti-hate, anti-discrimination protester identify as Syrian as a Nazi?)
Probably because the left has been throwing around the term "Nazi" like it was confetti, and he was wearing a suit, as the reporter mentioned, something you'd associate with the right, establishment, and conservatism at a lefty protest where hate-filled thugs are violently attacking people and property to shut down another person's free speech. Also, maybe he was wearing a Trump hat that was knocked off before the reporter saw the attack.
If anything it suggests that the protest was sabotaged by Milo supporters.
You truly have your head up your ass. And I suppose the 200+ people arrested and charged as part of a gang committing violence during Trump's inauguration were Trump supporters?
What you don't want to admit is that the left has become the party of violence, openly condoning it in many cases.
This somehow became a factual report when repeated on alt-right websites. And you either didn't bother to investigate it, or didn't want to, or are too incompetent to make a sensible judgement.
*snort* Yes, because you've done such a good job investigating it yourself with your baseless claims of false flag attacks and "fake news".