As one member of the BAG explained, a bot that removed all Daily Mail links would be unlikely to be approved. According to the site’s bot policy, bots must be approved by actual humans, specifically the Wikipedians who sit on the bot approvals group or BAG. “Instead we carefully evaluate it.” Furthermore, it’s not as if anybody can simply let a bot loose on English Wikipedia. “It would be easy to just fire up a bot that removes all citations to the Daily Mail, but we don’t remove material just because it came from the Daily Mail,” Macon explained. When I spoke to editors about the bot idea, they made the distinction between the encyclopedia’s sources, which should be reliable as a matter of policy, and the content of the articles, which might be accurate regardless of the source.
There are bots for other basic tasks on Wikipedia, like ClueBot NG, which flags edits containing markers of vandalism such as common swear words.
I wondered whether the Wikipedia community had considered programming a bot to remove the Daily Mail links. The Broadband Turf Wars Are Hurting Rural Communities “Dark Humor Is One of the Superpowers You Get With PTSD”
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Slater told me that removing Daily Mail links requires a lot of human work, in the form of finding these links on Wikipedia pages, analyzing the context, and removing them or finding other sources as appropriate.Ĭould the Internet Archive Go Out Like Napster? Outside of the opinion shows, Fox News can be used as a reliable source for most news coverage, with one big caveat: When it comes to politics and scientific subjects, Wikipedians note that Fox News should be used with caution.Īs ronsmith7’s Reddit post mentioned, the number of citations to the Daily Mail on Wikipedia has decreased dramatically in the three years since the publication was deprecated. At present, Fox News opinion talk shows like Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight are considered generally unreliable for statements of fact and not to be used as sources on Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia editors have distinguished the inconsistent editorial quality of BuzzFeed-which is open to user-generated blogs and listicles-as opposed to BuzzFeed News, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner that is considered a reliable source. On the other hand, the Wikipedia consensus on certain publications is a lot more complicated. Traditional newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post have also received Wikipedia’s greenlight. According to Wikipedia, Slate is considered generally reliable, which has us feeling chuffed.
The Wikipedia verdict on sources like the Daily Mail can be found by searching Wikipedia for “WP:RSP,” which leads to a list of so-called Perennial Sources. Going forward, any user who attempted to cite the tabloid on a Wikipedia page would receive a warning and a request to cite a more reliable publication. After an extended discussion process, the Wikipedia editing community decided that the Daily Mail was a “generally unreliable” source that should not be used on Wikipedia.
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Volunteer Wikipedia editors argued that the Daily Mail had made a habit of spreading misinformation, referencing the paper’s then-recent sanctions from the International Press Standards Organisation for violating professional norms for accuracy. That same month, the English Wikipedia user Hillbillyholiday launched a “ Request for comment” about the Daily Mail, a top-selling British tabloid newspaper. In January 2017, the United Kingdom House of Commons launched a parliamentary inquiry into the “growing phenomenon of fake news.” The chairman behind the inquiry expressed concern about the effect of fabricated news stories on democracy, particularly the influence on voters in the recent United States election. Sometimes (a lot of times?) the internal politics of Wikipedia mirrors its real-world counterparts. Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internet’s information ecosystem.