[Foundation-l] Wiki Scanner & wikinew

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/21/07, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> I have to ask why people are going to such great lengths to excuse the
> actions of News Corp.

Your bias is showing.

I never excused news corp, I complained that Wikinews was
misrepresenting the facts.

No matter how much I might personally dislike Fox, I still believe we
should not tell lies to make them look bad.  This is called having
integrity.

And it's not specific to news corp at all, the Wikinews article
contains the same incorrect assumptions about other parties. It's only
more relevant in the news corp case because the incorrect information
is used to cast fault on news corp.

Except in cases where there is additional data, the only thing we know
for sure from Wikiscanner data is that those edits were made from
addresses now listed as being assigned to Fox.

Even if you take a little leap and say that those edits were probably
performed by employees, ignoring dozens of other possibilities, in the
absence of additional information there is *nothing* to suggest that
the actions were endorsed by their companies. To do so would be a
grievous inattention to the truth.

...and thats exactly what Wikinews has done.  I don't know exactly
what mixture of incompetence and lacking ethics underlie this result,
but I find it somewhat ironic that Wikinews is now as guilty of "spin
over substance, to hell with the truth" as Fox is widely understood to
be.

Wikinews was, at one time, intended to be NPOV.   What happened?
Today I'm accused of "whitewashing" for toning down the obvious POV in
Wikinews attack piece.

I think a project like this has no business inside Wikimedia.