[WikiEN-l] Good thing newspapers are reliable sources!

[geni]

2008/10/12 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:54 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/oct/12/robots-japan
>
> Lets be real: The only reason we accept newspapers in general as
> reliable sources is because they are often the only readily available
> source of higher quality than "some dude on the internet said so".  In
> many of Wikipedia's popular "popular culture" articles newspapers may
> often be the only third party sources available at all.

In many cases specialist magazines exist. But they are not so
available online. I can search pretty much every British newspaper
published in the last 20 years but searching say canal boat magazine
is somewhat harder.


> Even people working in the industry agree with statement like:
> "newspapers run a lot of stories without checking them just because
> other papers have published them, not because they know they're true,"
> [http://www.asne.org/kiosk/reports/99reports/1999examiningourcredibility/p7->10_Accuracy.html]

They will also tend to publish anything that gets on the AP wire. Side
effect of shrinking budgets.


> Most of the time newspapers do not perform "fact checking" of the sort
> that the general public expects:  Like Wikipedia, the fact checking by
> newspapers leans far more towards verifiability than truth. "This may
> include confirming with an individual or organisation that they posted
> material and that it is accurate."
> [http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/accuracy/factchecking.shtml].
>  "I see you claim to be a theology scholar." "Yes I posted that and it
> is accurate." "Okay." So long as the paper's staff didn't make up the
> lies themselves any blame can be shifted onto the original speakers.

British law however shifts the situation slightly. The legal
responsibility stays with the paper unless it is a government
statement. This is only of interest in cases where libel is a
potential issues however.


> I think the reason we often hear journalists making so much noise
> about lofty journalistic ethics is simply because they've been so
> historically bad about it. More trustworthy groups don't feel a need
> to constantly tell everyone how trustworthy they are. (See the first
> link, the public doesn't /think/ journalists are good at presenting
> the truth.)

Depends how far you go back. A lot of things changed when the media
moved towards profit as the primary motive.

> In my own experience many reporters will, when presented with multiple
> conflicting versions of the truth, often report only on the most
> "interesting" versions. In many cases this reduces the accuracy of the
> reporting below that which you'd expect from a straight up random
> sample of the public, because the truth is so often rather boring.

In the majority of cases however there are no multiple versions any
more. The number of foreign corespondents has fallen significantly.
Local journalism is little better which much of it reduced to
recycling press releases and government statements (heh local
government in the UK has zero dedicated coverage outside a single
section of private eye these days).


> I say these things not to judge the popular media as something bad,
> but to just point out the reality that we can not afford to forget if
> we are to not constantly suffer embarrassment from trusting these
> sources.  Along these lines "Reliable sources" on Wikipedia should be
> renamed to "acceptable sources" since necessity often results in
> Wikipedians depending on sources which are merely the best available
> without regard to the sources actually being any good in absolute
> terms.

Probably. We also need to get better at highlighting area specialist
sources. while wikipedians are generally competent enough to go to
nature rather than the press release this breaks down outside the
sciences.

-- 
geni