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

[Nathan]

To return to the topic of the original post, we have a practice of
assuming reliability based on content categorization. We've never
examined Fox News and determined "Fox News has substantial quality
control at the editorial level, including fact checking and high
journalistic standards." Similarly, our presumptive stance against
citing blogs is not based on the evaluation of any particular blog.
What Greg points out is that our generalizations fail, sometimes
spectacularly, at the level of the individual source.

Obviously it would be an impossible task to study all potential
sources and make a proactive determination of reliability. We hope to
some extent that folks citing academic sources have vetted them in
some way as to their credibility, but with mainstream news sources
even that expectation is set aside. So instead, perhaps we could have
a reactive policy of reassessing the assumption of reliability for
specific sources based on a history of errors. When Fox News articles
are shown to be riddled with errors of basic fact, indicating that no
effort was made to verify claims, we should stop granting it the same
deference we extend to other institutions with more integrity.

If I had any technical ability at all, I'd run some sort of query that
would tell me how many times Fox News is cited inside reference tags.
Perhaps evaluating a random sample of cited articles could tell us if
their Wikimedia articles (citing a banned editor as the only
non-public source quoted?) are representative or anomalous.

Nathan