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

[Ken Arromdee]

On Sun, 16 May 2010, Nathan wrote:
> 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 "riddled with errors" means "has more (frequent) errors than other
sources", then this makes some sense.

If "riddled with errors" means "has errors that we have recently had our
attention called to" or "has errors that happen to be about some subject we
are personally pissed off about", then it's a very bad idea.