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Notes -
Wikipedia is deciding whether to discourage use of Fox News as a source in articles specifically for politics and science. As usual, please do not comment there unless you know your way around a Wikipedia discussion and can participate while following community standards.
In context: Wikipedia periodically holds discussions about the reliability of sources. It has a five-level ranking system for sources:
generally reliable
no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
deprecated (= "never use")
blacklisted (= "never use", enforced in the wiki software)
The current discussion is about Fox News when it talks about the two topics of politics and science - for those topics, it is currently listed as "no consensus". For other topics, it is "generally reliable", and that status is not up for discussion here. Fox's talk shows are also listed separately as "deprecated" (= "never use"), and that status is also not up for discussion. There are 23 prior discussions listed about the reliability of Fox News for politics and science, starting in 2009 (although there may be more). This is the latest one.
Why this is relevant here: Wikipedia is a widely-used reference on the Internet (top ten websites globally, by number of visits) and Fox News is a well-known news source. The debate on whether Fox News is a reliable source for science and politics is thus likely to be of interest on this website.
Moving to the discussion itself: many points were raised of varying quality. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth and it's certainly not one-sided.
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point. It can still be used for research while writing articles, like every other website on the Internet. As for the incorrect claims, various editors compiled lists of these; here's an 18-item list. I checked a few. Some were weak; some were worrying. For example, item 10 quotes from this Fox article: "PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration". Here's the PolitiFact page. It shows that "expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration" is a misleading construction: Biden and Harris repeatedly emphasize that they would take a vaccine approved by public health professionals, but would not trust the sole word of Trump. Fox phrases it as during the administration, they expressed distrust in the vaccine, in general, but this is simply not what they did. Why that's bad: one could write a sentence in an article with that claim, and cite it to the Fox article, and that would be incorrect. The Fox article was published July 2021 and has not been corrected.
My take, part 2: The optics might not be great, but at least Fox still counts as reliable for everything but politics and science. I don't think they're managing the optics enough. Of course, it's a decentralized and anti-hierarchical community, so the odds they'd organically do something like that are low.
Where we go from here: Editors are requesting that the discussion be "closed" by a neutral third-party editor (or panel of such editors), and that may happen sometime soon. Editors are still adding comments to the main discussion in the meantime. The "close" can be appealed to the community, but if the closer does a decent job this is unlikely.
My credentials: I've edited Wikipedia for a while. I usually don't touch the politics side much.
Wikipedia is a nakedly political organisation and has been for some time. "Made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected" is not the criteria being used by Wikipedia - if it was, then you'd be unable to rely on any mainstream/"reliable" source of information. I have a long enough memory that I can recall discussions during the gamergate period where wikipedia editors made it clear that even if there was direct proof that a reliable source was lying, the reliable source was to be the viewpoint presented in the article no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. Wikipedia has already been politicised, and has been for a long time - I would prefer it if they were just honest and flat out said that Fox was being banned for political reasons.
While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
How long do you think it is going to take? How many rounds of edits? If they keep on holding me off for a month and I get tired, do you win?
What if the source got cito-genesised?
One thing I would like fixed is their article about Kiwi Farms. The article has this:
Follow those three citations.
[10]: Gizmodo article. The full sum of their Terryberry coverage is this:
"ended her life" is a hyperlink to some rando's Wordpress site, which doxxes Josh's mother, and has this:
That is it. That is the entire chain of [10].
[11] is in Fucking French.
[13] is to Business Insider, and just links to [10] and [11]. BECAUSE THEY JUST SOURCED IT FROM WIKIPEDIA.
Those are their own sources. But even if I tried fixing them now and we got Business Insider kicked out as trash, this "fact" from the Wikipedia article has been cite-washed through the Washington Post https://archive.ph/ExKi4 "At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community." Will you help stop that article from being cited?
Time and effort estimate: not gonna sugarcoat it, probably high. Kiwi Farms is probably the single worst possible article to do this sort of experiment on, because it's on perhaps the single most poisoned and low-trust topic area on the website. Every Kiwi Farms user (dunno the demonym, don't care) from here to Sunday has probably had a go at the article at some point. I'm gonna say the best time to work on this article is not now. Maybe in a year. Happy to stick to the relatively calm (ha, ha) waters of American politics.
"You can fix things yourself as long as the other side does not notice and put up a fight" is kind of what my starting position was.
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
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