[WikiEN-l] Koch brothers articles doctored says Think Progress

[David Goodman]

It is possible to provide arguments against the reliability of any
source whatever. (And in the other direction, it is possible to take
most sources and selectively quote them to provide evidence for
support for any position whatever.) It is possible to destroy the
integrity of any article by concentrating on finding weaknesses in the
sourcing combined with careful use of sources that appear reliable,
but are not really to the point. Even a single person doing this can
work havoc, and if this is done in a concerted way, it provides ample
scope for the expression of bias.   The cruder forms of this technique
are of course widespread in politics--they tend not to work well in
Wikipedia, but slightly more sophisticated use of the method can be
quite successful unless the opposition is equally determined.

Conventional advice that we can can deal with this by applying NPOV do
not solve practical problems, for the question of what is neutral and
what is balanced and what is fringe are always to a considerable
extent matters of opinion. Neither do comments that we can deal with
everything by applying BLP strictly, for not only do most articles on
contemporary topics to some measure involve BLP, but in any case this
simply shifts the argument to what falls within the BLP rules. If you
move the goalposts, the arguments will follow. Wikipedia is written by
humans, & the assumption that the  individual prejudices will always
cancel each other is easily falsifiable.

This has been seen outside of politics. The two currently pending
requests for arbitration both deal with this type of sourcing problem
as the underlying issue.  In my own view, they are both tending
towards   inequitable resolutions.

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 10/03/2011 18:16, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> On 10 March 2011 13:11, Fred Bauder<fredbaud at fairpoint.net>  wrote:
>>>> What is an "airbush"? I think we should be told.
>>> Our article "Airbrush" does not include information on the use of
>>> "airbrush" as a metaphor
>> Charles' point was that the article says "airbush" not "airbrush" in
>> the headline.
> There's a more serious kind of point that goes like this: the article in
> question being a BLP, we should very much judge the content in the light
> of BLP policy rather than who inserted it or edited it. What to an
> activist intensely interested in the subject of a BLP may seem like a
> whitewash may, in the light of the way we handle BLPs, be simply a
> scrupulous application of our criteria on referencing, due weight,
> salience and so on. In fact if that doesn't happen in such a contested
> area as US politics, something is probably wrong: we're writing an
> encyclopedia, after all, not operating a political seismograph tracking
> every little uptick of comment. That is not to excuse the activities of
> those who'd wish to put spin-doctor content onto the site.
>
> In short,  the way COI applies to BLPs ought to be even-handed, because
> the coverage we want is neutral.
>
> Charles
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

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