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

[stevertigo]

There is no centralized place here for ruling on the reliability of
particular sources. Competitors and sites like FactCheck.org suffice
in most cases, and people deal with sources as they come up.

To my knowledge the particular news source you cite is generally not
regarded as reliable on matters which have not been corroborated by
other news sources beforehand. Do we give it an air of reputability to
be cited here as a secondary source? Perhaps. But putting a label of
"yellow journalism" on particular news outlets can only be done
informally at the water-cooler.

-SC


Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.