Wikipedia’s Fox News Problem | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia’s Fox News Problem

slate.com

38 pointsokasaki16 comments

Here is a list of perennial resources and reliability as assessed by the wikipaedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

Interestingly they rely on politifact which is a somewhat opinion-based fact checker.

They also consider WikiLeaks "unreliable". It's dumps from companies and govt's, so the lying and unreliability should not be a reflection of their reliability but the gov'ts and companies whose leaks reach them.

I love how they lob accusations of clickbait at some orgs but not others, when almost all news orgs engage in clickbait.

How wonderfully convenient

It has this to say about WikiLeaks:

"WikiLeaks is a repository of primary source documents leaked by anonymous sources. No consensus exists on its reliability. Some editors questioned the applicability of reliability ratings to Wikileaks. Some editors believe that documents from WikiLeaks fail the verifiability policy, because WikiLeaks does not adequately authenticate them, and there are concerns regarding whether the documents are genuine or tampered. It may be appropriate to cite a document from WikiLeaks as a primary source, but only if it is discussed by a reliable source. However, linking to material that violates copyright is prohibited by WP:COPYLINK."

Which seems reasonable to me.

That's fine... but when has their material proven false in practice any more than what WP deem reliable sources?

Misleading headline. Wikipedia doesn’t have a Fox News problem. The process of establishing reliability is working exactly as intended and in this case seems to have produced a perfectly reasonable result.

There are a lot of people who will disagree that this is a reasonable result -- especially given that there are other permitted news sources that Fox News viewers consider to be categorically unreliable. (And are encouraged to do so by Fox News itself.)

The process may well be working as intended and producing a result that most people would consider reasonable, but a lot of very prominent and influential people disagree. (That is, not just the fringes who usually object to Wikipedia's sourcing decisions.) That makes a problem for Wikipedia whether they want it or not.

As always, ignore the headline: This article is a very good look at how Wikipedia works in practice; I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see such detailed and factual reporting about Wikipedia in the media.

Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and outcomes. On the other hand, this seems like increased politicization

I note that there was no reference to testing anything. Has anyone tried taking large numbers of Fox citations, counting whether they are good or bad, and comparing that to baselines? Instead, per this article, it seems like the decision is based on volume of editor complaints.

I'm looking at the removed article[1] Slate references on Seth Rich. It doesn't seem so bad. It cites a private investigator and an anonymous FBI officer for evidence saying that Seth had been emailing with WikiLeaks at about the time of the DNC leaks and observes (correctly) that Assange refused to say if Seth Rich was involved or not.

If Fox made up the private investigator and the anonymous FBI source then I agree that would be bad. But if they are just citing people who turned out to be wrong, or those people were lying, then I can think of quite a few organizations guilty of that failing.

1 - https://archive.ph/TZWuE

> Has anyone tried taking large numbers of Fox citations, counting whether they are good or bad, and comparing that to baselines?

Not necessarily a bad idea, but it suffers from some amount of bias in that "bad stories" are less likely to be used as references, so it doesn't necessarily say all that much about "when should or shouldn't you use Fox News as a reference" in general. It might be better to use a random sample of Fox News stories from the last few years.

My intuition would be to test the sample that wikipedia editors do reference rather than the sample they might reference - but I think either methodology is an improvement over "argue about it and then summarize the argument".

> Reading this article I feel torn. On the one hand, I think Wikipedia is an excellent product and that inclines me to trust their decision making methods and outcomes. On the other hand, this seems like increased politicization...it seems like the decision is based on volume of editor complaints.

Yeah, I read some of the discussion, and the person who proposed the deprecation was also extremely active in the discussion (it helped that he had a very visually distinctive username). It was almost like he was acting like a prosecutor. I wouldn't be surprised if 10-20% of the whole discussion was that one guy.

Next time they beg for donations, I will remmeber this and NOT TO CONTRIBUTE! F wikipedia liberal ninnies.

As discussed here in the past, Wikipedia is notoriously left-leaning in content that has a political or social-cultural aspect. This is presumably (?) down to the type of people generally drawn to editing wiki pages, and the academic resources they also often draw on as "authoritative".

Fox news (and similar) as a source might be a problem, but it's not representative of the bias issues with Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is popular because people will almost always choose cheap, readily available crap over better quality things that have even a small barrier to access. For a nonprofit to build something as cheap and expansive as Wikipedia, they really have to rely on people with very unusual psychology or people with agendas, and their first batch really set the tone.

>This is presumably (?) down to the type of people generally drawn to editing wiki pages

Well maybe, but also the bulk of the funding to the Wikimedia Foundation comes from The Tides Foundation who is extremely biased[0].

"The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which manages Wikipedia, is closely tied to the Tides Foundation. The general counsel of Wikimedia, Amanda Keton, is the former general counsel of the Tides Network, the former head of Tides Foundation, and the former CEO of Tides Advocacy. The multimillion-dollar Wikimedia Endowment, created in 2016, is managed by the Tides Foundation and has an advisory board appointed by Tides. In 2020, Wikimedia established the multimillion-dollar Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Fund to be run by Tides Advocacy" [1]

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation

Imagine you wanted to produce an unbiased encyclopedia. You have to have sources for information which have to come from all major viewpoints, whether you like it or not.

You have to also actively prevent activists whose agenda does not align. The problem with wikipedia is they didn't do that. We have reached a point where wikipedia doesn't accept anything but left-leaning sources. Effectively excluding a significant worldview.

To what end exactly? This doesn't change minds or benefit the activist's agenda at all. It just damages wikipedia's reputation.

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