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Wikipedia's 'Ban' of 'The Daily Mail' Didn't Really Happen (theoutline.com)
Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that editors at Wikipedia had "voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website," calling the publication "generally unreliable." Two months later, not only previous Daily Mail citations on Wikipedia pages are still alive, several new ones have also appeared since. So what's going on? The Outline has the story: There are no rules on Wikipedia, just guidelines. Of Wikipedia's five "pillars," the fifth is that there are no firm rules. There is no formal hierarchy either, though the most dedicated volunteers can apply to become administrators with extra powers after being approved by existing admins. But even they don't say what goes on the site. If there's a dispute or a debate, editors post a "request for comment," asking whoever is interested to have their say. The various points are tallied up by an editor and co-signed by four more after a month, but it's not a vote as in a democracy. Instead, the aim is to reach consensus of opinion, and if that's not possible, to weigh the arguments and pick the side that's most compelling. There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote. (emphasis ours.) So what happened? The article adds: In this case, an editor submitted a broader request for comment about its [the Daily Mail's] general reliability. Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source, with one editor and four co-signing editors (more than usual) chosen among administrators declaring that a consensus, though further discussion continued on a separate noticeboard, alongside complaints that the debate should have been better advertised. Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited. An editor I met at a recent London "Wikimeet" said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about.
An editor I met at a recent London "Wikimeet" said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about.
According to Wikipedia's notability guideline, if no reliable sources can be found about a subject, any article about it would fail Wikipedia's verifiability policy. For this reason, the subject shouldn't have an article in the first place. That's what Wikipedia means by "non-notable": there is no way to make a verifiable article about the subject.
It's fake turtles all the way down.
"Not a Reliable Source" as a consensus on the Daily Mail seems reasonable to me. However, Wikipedia policy doesn't say, "No citations to unreliable sources allowed anywhere" It's more "mark it as unreliable if you really need to use it".
Neither The Guardian, nor The Outline really understand the Reliable Sources policies on Wikipedia. Also, finding one WP editor who did "X" doesn't mean "X" is following the consensus or not.
Also, theoutline sucks down bandwidth with rather large (almost full page) ads in the middle of the story, so... no thanks.
It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news. Actually, it'd be fairly hypocritical for any news media outlet to accuse another these days, except maybe Reuters, who still seems fairly neutral.
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Wish I had mod points, you would get them.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Wikipedia is a group endeavour, people on the left are more likely to seek community solutions, people on the right are more likely to work alone.
Once you've largely written your encyclopaedia, there's nothing for talented individuals to do, they don't want to spend all day arguing over conjunctions and which picture is best, so the only people left are the ones with bizarre ideas about consensus.
Why do you assume the "subject" mentioned in TFS was the subject of an entire article? It could also be the only source for a "subject" of a paragraph or even a sentence within an article that has multiple sources. There are other guidelines dealing with material within an article, but notability only applies if the "subject" is an entire article. (BTW -- what you just did there? Wikilawyering. That is one of the primary reasons people hate contributing to Wikipedia. And if you're one of the deletionists -- who tend to quote notability guides most often -- you're one of the main problems with Wikipedia.)
In other words, truth be damned. The truth is achieved by a vote in Wikipedia land.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Tell us what else leans to the left from your perspective. The horizon, maybe?
I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists", but I'm willing to concede that putting one dictator in charge is an effective way to get rid of bureaucracy. We'll probably differ on whether that's a good thing.
Slashdot has the same issue, of course.
Wikipedia has things which by pretty much anyone else's definition are rules, but Wikipedia officially calls some of them "guidelines". Wikipedia does things which by pretty much everyone else's definition are votes, but Wikipedia doesn't officially call them votes because they are not followed 100% of the time (even though they are followed often enough that other people would call them votes).
Claiming that the story is wrong because they weren't really rules or votes is just privileging Wikipedia-terminology over real-world terminology. It's like claiming that a story about small and large drinks at Starbucks is wrong because they're really Short and Grande drinks, not small and large at all.
From my understanding of politics, the left wants government to control everything and everyone, government to them is beneficial to a society, if you're fully to the left, you end up with communist and socialist ideals - the government takes a proportional amount of resources and provides free food, free housing, free healthcare and a number of other resources for everyone, ultimately having rules and regulations that covers every single entity and interaction is most important to make society a better place for everyone.
The right wants government to be as small as possible or non-existent, fully to the right you'll find anarchists and libertarians. They don't want anyone to interfere with their personal wealth or personhood, belief systems, guns etc and won't interfere with others' matters, even if a particular policy isn't beneficial to society as a whole, ultimately freedom is most important to make society a better place for everyone.
When you form a meta-society like Wikipedia, you end up with both people at the table, people that don't want any interference and people that want to regulate the 'society' to make it a better place. The left, per definition, steps up to do this job to make said rules and regulations unless there is sufficient interference from people that per definition do not want to interfere.
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Wikipedia "banning" the Daily Mail was analogous to when Google announced they were going to pull h.264 support out of Chrome. A tale... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
#DeleteChrome
There are other guidelines dealing with material within an article
Very true. But each paragraph of an article also has to be verifiable. Otherwise, a paragraph supported solely by unreliable sources should be removed. This goes double if the subject is a living person. As Wikipedia:Verifiability puts it: "Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed. Please immediately remove contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced."
It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news.
Only if you live in a black-and-white world where everything is absolutely wrong all the time or absolutely right all the time. Back in the real world, certain news media outlets, which not perfect are a lot more reliable than certain other news media outlets.
To equate them all is as wrong as the news stories you are decrying.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Nothing of the sort.
The terms "left wing" and "right wing" come from the times of the French revolution, and had to do with the seating arrangements in the parliament.
To the left of the president, sat the "revolutionaries" that opposed monarchy (the establishment), and to the right sat those those that supported the monarchy.
The terms came to mean:
- Left wing: strongly promotes social equality and is willing to eschew tradition and cultural values;
- Right wing: very conservative and their policies lean more on traditional values and national and cultural identity and perceived "natural order" of things.
Remember that the terms have to be understood in the historic context: the French revolution. Basically, the left supported the Republic, while the right supported the Monarchy.
These are, however, very coarse generalizations and not very useful in a "real" discussion of politics, outside the history context. The political spectrum is much more complex for these basic labels: for example, Nazis are generally called an "extreme right wing" movement, when in reality, some of their policies - like social welfare policies - were very obviously what you would call "left wing". Of course none of them would be caught dead admitting this.
Unfortunately, the terms were so misused that they just became a short-hand for anything people don't like. If you don't like someone, just call them [left|right] wing nutter, and you shut down the dialogue right quick. You can also add some qualifiers such as "alt" or "radical" or "far" to emphasize your point.
It's just a polite way of saying "go f*" yourself, really.
So then the previous article was fake news about a ban on citing a fake news source?
Worse, the Slashdot article isn't even internally consistent:
There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote.
Or...
Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source
Which is true? Seems like there is hair splitting going on here. Especially since the original Guardian article included the following that is entirely consistent:
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’.
"It could also be the only source for a "subject" of a paragraph or even a sentence within an article that has multiple sources."
But that in itself can be deeply problematic, as one of the biggest problems with The Daily Mail is not that it outright fabricates stories (though it has done that too) but that it over-exagerates the impact of things, makes up numbers, and so on and so forth.
So if the paragraph their quoting has no secondary source other than The Daily Mail, due to The Daily Mail's history there is every chance that that paragraph in itself is singularly sourced from The Daily Mail because it is a fabricated part of the story.
So I'd agree with the GP, that's not really a sufficient excuse to cite it because it's possible it's the only source because what it's saying simply is not true.
"Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited."
Which is entirely consistent with the original:
“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.”
Yup. Locked in a little room with madmen and shills, the "conflict resolution process" is a fancy name for "the runaround", and if you do get some sort of moderator intervention they do the most shallow reading of the situation possible, and display all the even-handed wisdom of an old irc-moderator defending territory...
Oh, and you're supposed to pretend that you're treating everyone with respect, consequently you're typically surrounded by people making a great show of being politely reasonable though their sincerity is, shall we say, suspect.
What was that Jimmie Wales used to say? Working on wikipedia is supposed to be fun?
I see rules that keep it from turning into a useless cess pool.
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Why's it curious? Right-wing thinkers almost by definition lean toward strong centralized control by authority figures. The left is constantly looking at more distributed systems with more bottom-up control, in the hope of empowering individuals (you know, democracy and freedom and all that).
It is admittedly a little peculiar that no one ever seems to learn that there are problems with "consensus decision-making" until they actually try it-- it seems like every single arts organization, activist group, and half of the teams of Silicon Valley programmers think they can use "consensus", even though anyone whose ever tried it runs screaming from the endless meetings and open-ended discussions and political wrangling-- there are breakdown modes where the process is hi-jacked by crazed passive-aggressive dictators-from-below, and you would think those would be well-known by now.
> I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists"
Liberals (aka the left) tend to think in terms of "we", that the group should do this or that. They tend SOCIAList and COMMUNist (social and community). Conservatives (aka the right) tend to think of individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Naturally people on the left side of the spectrum therefore form groups, commitees -bureaucracies- through which the whole of society is supposed to work together. Conservatives tend to be more individualistic. We don't need a committee for me to do my thing and you do your thing.
Both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses. It's too bad that rather than complementing each other, getting the best of both worlds, these two groups in the US tend to fight each other so much. They cooperate more when they face a common opponent, such as in World War I and World II.
I suppose this fact checking article is technically accurate for a very specific and narrow set of criteria... which aren't even well defined in TFA. (Technically right? That's the best kind of right!)
It reminds me of these recent fact checks: http://imgur.com/a/tSs3o
"Pants on fire" - (Number is correct, but fails to mention the cause)
"False" - (Transgender girls aren't boys)
"Mostly False" - (The numbers are valid, the comparison is questionable)
I once read a book by Linda Hill that I personally found amazingly valuable, but only because I was careful not to light any matches, because her presentation was dry, dry, dry.
Because of the Indian incompetence story here on Slashdot this morning, I went to paste a link into my files, and chanced upon a past entry concerning HCL Technologies, a topic that Linda Hill has addressed in video, and soon I found myself watching a clip of hers on YouTube I hadn't seen before.
Linda Hill on empowering young sparks at HCL — July 2016
And here we have this Wikipedia article, where the unstated premise seems to be "Surprise! Derf-derf-derf, Wikipedia doesn't actually practice zero-deviation culture, despite their publicly assigned role as the plastic–pocket-protector paragon of geek dysfunction.
No, instead what we have is this: if a source is broadly flagged as tainted, it becomes open season to replace this source with a better citation wherever and whenever, without expecting significant blow back.
Isn't that leadership enough?
Is the underlying zero-deviation fixation that motivates this story just a tired strawman? Or is this derf-derf strawman meme playing to a real audience?
Well, I personally would run, run, run if I found myself in that audience, because anyone who doesn't is doomed to be soon be looking up at India as the management enlightenment movement that just passed you by with a big whoosh.
It's not that wrong. While not all stories are fake, there's far too many of them, and all the media outlets have a clear cut bias which colors their reporting commensurately (many of them are owned by the same parent company). This does not lead to cool heads and objective analysis.
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I'll grant you I conflated fake news with bias, but I believe them to be related. By reporting with a bias, they can lead readers or viewers to draw conclusions "between the lines" so to speak, which may not have any basis in fact, only innuendo.
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It's ironic that the Guardian is pointing the finger at someone else as unreliable or fake news.
Only if you live in a black-and-white world where everything is absolutely wrong all the time or absolutely right all the time. Back in the real world, certain news media outlets, which not perfect are a lot more reliable than certain other news media outlets.
To equate them all is as wrong as the news stories you are decrying.
This.
There are levels of trust. Whilst I find the Guardian as guilty as the Daily Mail in exagerating and outright fabricating the facts there are two important distinctions,
1. The Daily Mail is far worse at it. This does not excuse the Guardian, but it means I'll trust the DM far less.
2. The Guardian is far more eloquently written. This means that there is a minimum intelligence level required tor read it. Intelligent people are less likely to fall for propaganda and dont like to feel like their back is being urinated on.
So in a straight up fight between the Guardian and the Daily Mail, I'll trust the Guardian to be more accurate until corroborating information is available. This isn't to say that I trust the Guardian, as I said, they often exaggerate, but not to the point of repeatedly printing well proven lies. This is one of the Guardians bigger failures, however were this were reversed, we'd consider this kind of fabrication to be just another day at the Daily Mail.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You should definitely re-evaluate your understanding of politics.
Anarchists are generally left-wing (except anarcho-capitalists, maybe), communism specifically requires the complete withering of the state, there have been plenty of authoritorian right-wing regimes.
It's not a left/right one-dimensional axis. It isn't even two-dimensional, it has a hell of a lot of dimensions.
Personally, I lean towards libertarian socialism. Think on that for a while, it's a real thing.
Eat the rich.