[WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly

[Gregory Maxwell]

[ simulcasted to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Identifying_reliable_sources#Reliable_sources.E2.80.94_some_of_these_babies_are_ugly
]

"Though he remains the president of the Wikimedia Foundation," ...
"'He had the highest level of control, he was our leader,' a source
told FoxNews.com. When asked who was in charge now, the source said,
'No one. It’s chaos.'"

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive-shake-wikipedia-porn-pressure/

In the classic tradition of WP:POINT violation I very much want to go
around to the "Wikimedia", "Wikipedia", and "Jimmy Wales" articles
editing them to reflect these surrealist "facts" as reported by this
"Reliable Source"... but that would be needlessly disruptive. (And I
fear similarly inspired people would continue that initiative,
grotesquely smearing Erik to reflect the repeated libel from prior
articles.) So, for the purpose of discussion, imagine that I did.

Many of us have long been aware that the reporting in some
professional media frequently has very little connection to reality.
Many of us know that they usually perform little to no fact checking,
and seldom even run their final drafts past someone with any
experience in the relevant area for a sniff test. Since they
apparently no longer suffer even the most minor harm from publishing
some of the most outrageous errors, why should they? In particular,
the online editions from many of these organizations appear to be
fairly comparable to randomly selected blogs. Presumably they feel
that they are just matching the qualities of their competition. So why
do we treat them differently?

I don't believe that this is, by any means, only a problem with Fox
although they might be the most obvious and frequent example.

Wikipedia reports what people say, not the truth of it— but we could
report the words of a random blog in context exactly as we do
Foxnews.com.  We have an ethical obligation to not further
misunderstanding when we know better, which is what I always saw as
the most important justification for treating some sources as lesser
than others.

We know high-profile groups with a reputation to lose are going to
take more care to get it right, and that their errors are more likely
to trigger others to publish corrections. We could reasonably
speculate that their journalists' affiliation is primarily to the
truth, and this might not be as true of other information sources.  We
can also argue that the views, even false ones, from a major news
provider are obviously more notable.

But I can't say that these points really apply in many cases that we
appear to be applying them: We would reject as reliable sources many
hobbyist blogs (or even webcomics) with a stronger reputation to
preserve, less obviously-compromised motivations, and _significantly_
greater circulation than some obscure corner of Fox News's online
product.  What can be the explanation for this discrepancy?

Can we really continue in denial when these so-called 'reliable
sources' make such obvious and egregious errors about our own
projects?

If nothing else, is it possible to write a circulation based criteria
which reflects the reality that not all parts of a source have equal
exposure?