[ 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? _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l