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https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Jacobin is approved on the Wikipedia list of sources. Why are people saying I cannot use it to edit Russo-Ukrainian War when it is reliable? [1] Chances last a finite time (talk) 14:24, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Becasue you want to use it to Change "the Euromaidan protests" to "the far-right U.S.-backed Euromaidan protests", we are not saying its not reliable for its claim, we are saying the claim violates wp:undue. Slatersteven (talk) 14:30, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

For context, the discussion being referred to is here. Mr rnddude (talk) 14:32, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

You said it was "commentary" and not "news reporting", but [2] says that it "meets the normal requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control, a reputation for fact-checking, and the level of independence from the topic the source is covering". Chances last a finite time (talk) 14:34, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

[3] says this too. "the far right Svoboda party was the most active collective agent in conventional and confrontational Maidan protest events, while the Right Sector was the most active collective agent in violent protest events". Chances last a finite time (talk) 14:46, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Although all content must be reliably sourced, but just because something is reliably sourced doesn't mean it has to be included (see WP:ONUS). You will need to find consensus on the articles talk page for your changes. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:57, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

RfC: Is Jacobin generally reliable?

Many people are saying that Jacobin is not reliable when I try to use it, but it is on the approved list of sources. Fellow editors: is Jacobin generally reliable? Chances last a finite time (talk) 20:58, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Discussion: Is Jacobin generally reliable?

• Absolutely reliable. There was a conversation [4] where an arbitrator ruled that Jacobin "meets the normal requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control, a reputation for fact-checking, and the level of independence from the topic the source is covering". It is one of the best news sources in the English language: it has incredible integrity, and it publishes important facts-first journalism, and it holds power and capital accountable. Jacobin is fiercely independent and does not share the biases of western mainstream media. We need to use it so our articles can be comprehensive and factual because it is reliable. Chances last a finite time (talk) 20:58, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

  I removed the pointy RFC tag. Above it appears that people are trying to explain WP:DUEWEIGHT, not saying the source isn't reliable. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:10, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

  The tag is there because I want to request comments from the community of Wikipedia editors about this. Chances last a finite time (talk) 21:41, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

  There is already a consensus on this source editor time is the most valuable commodity, and you're wasting it because you're unwilling to listen to what other editors are saying. As a new editor editing a contentious topic you should be listening to the other editors. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:46, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I think you need to take a step back and look again, what people are telling you appears to be much more nuanced than that (for example the title being treated differently from the body). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:24, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

@HandThatFeeds says that Jacobin does not fit RS with regards to September 11 attacks. I do not like that this generally reliable source is excluded in so many places. Chances last a finite time (talk) 21:38, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Wow, that's just a blatant, naked lie. What I said was that this particular Jacobin article did not constitute a RS for the 9/11 article, as it was entirely about a conspiracy theory. I specifically pointed out that we were not claiming Jacobin itself was inherently unreliable. I'll thank you to strike the above accusation. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 21:58, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

• Unreliable for this at minimum and this article series is so dreadful that I'd question whether we can consider the Jacobin to be generally reliable. Generally reliable publications don't publish crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories. Toa Nidhiki05 22:03, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Depreciate. This is very bad source, full of lies and propaganda. Editor is propagandist. The CIA did not do 9/11 This is opinion and hyperbole source. Euromaidan was a popular revolution of dignity, not a nazi plot Euromaidan: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia. This is not reliable and it is not news. The decision was bad. Ghost of Kiev (talk) 22:05, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I do not like quick ending [5]. I want to depreciate Jacobin. Ghost of Kiev (talk) 22:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

• Oh great, a Russia-Ukraine bunfight at RSN, just what we've all been waiting for! Jacobin was discussed and found to be reliable. It's not getting relitigated now. Of course, being mentioned in a reliable source does not guarantee inclusion. If you want to argue about what goes into the article, please do it at the talk page. --Boynamedsue (talk) 22:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

  Discussion was split equally. It was not good decision to be generally reliable. Too much opinion and propaganda, too little news. Ghost of Kiev (talk) 22:22, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

• Note: ScottishFinnishRadish and I have previously closed this RFC but were reverted by Chances last a finite time and Ghost of Kiev, respectively. Both the users have been made aware of WP:CTOP and warned for their disruptive editing. I won't close it again myself but stand by my closing note that had said, Re-closing this disruptive/malformed RFC started based on misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what others are saying. The topic of Jacobin's general reliability has been discussed at length relatively recently and is not central to the dispute here. Editors are free to continue discussing whether the particular article of interest is WP:RS and/or WP:DUE. Abecedare (talk) 22:38, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

This should be speedy closed. The preceding discussion shows it's unwarranted. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 23:20, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Over a year ago is not “recent” and the recent publication of crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories (or, as presented above, actual pro-Russian propaganda) is a substantial enough problem to throw its reliability into doubt. This is worth discussing. Toa Nidhiki05 23:33, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

It’s more than recent enough. If we rehash everything every year or two nothing would ever be concluded. Lukewarmbeer (talk) 06:37, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

The final !vote in that discussion is from August of 2021, so it seems more than ripe for re-discussion. The 9/11 conspiracy theories are not a good sign, but I have to look more deeply before committing a !vote. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:30, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

On a separate note, it might be better to add the standard four options at the top, just for convenience sake. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:31, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

All of the contentious Jacobin articles added by the OP seem to be coming from the same author: [6], [7], [8], [9] (Branko Marcetic). Are there such articles by other authors on the site? –Vipz (talk) 01:42, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Whether we continue to consider the publication as a whole as generally reliable source, we should assess Jacobin articles on a case by case basis, taking in the author's credibility. I'd say that articles by Marcetic (a Jacobin staff writer who rarely publishes elsewhere) would almost be filed in the not-reliable category. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:06, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I would not object to revisiting Jacobin with a new RfC, especially given the previous one was not terribly conclusive (and that this is apparently a source that dabbles in conspiracy theories?). But this is definitely not the right way to do it. It's either an issue of WP:POINT or WP:CIR on behalf of the user that opened the RfC. And given that several users have already explained this to them and asked them to stop before this RfC was opened, I think the behavioral element needs to be addressed before an RfC is formed under more reasonable circumstances. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:00, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. This RfC should be closed as unnecessary, since Jacobin's reliability is not at issue in the present instance. OP has demonstrated a WP:CIR / WP:LISTEN problem which is behavioral in nature. The content they are seeking to add is obviously, wildly WP:UNDUE, as has been explained to them by numerous experienced editors. Generalrelative (talk) 02:46, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd concur with that close. XOR'easter (talk) 02:59, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I would as well. I do think the 2021 RfC asked the wrong question and mixed up reliability and dueness, and a new RfC should confront that squarely (e.g. should Jacobin only be used as attributed opinion, or some such). Mackensen (talk) 03:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

This seems to be an issue (so far) with one particular author on board of Jacobin, what's the correct approach? –Vipz (talk) 03:09, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

It should also be careful to distinguish Jacobin magazine from its peer-reviewed offshoot Catalyst, which publishes some decent scholarship and scholarly reviews, albeit of course always from an anti-capitalist perspective. Generalrelative (talk) 03:18, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Exactly Lukewarmbeer (talk) 06:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: It's not that long since the last RfC. If we are considering it again, (a) was there an issue with the closing? (I note about 15 of 35 participants last time !voted for generally reliable, and I would have closed it as "No consensus, unclear, or additional considerations apply" but with similar text) or (b) has anything changed, e.g. new revelations of bad editorial practice? (I don't think so, although possibly the war in Ukraine might have brought into focus some of the more fringe positions it publishes on Russia-related geopolitics). In short, I think we should probably keep with the old consensus unless there is some pressing reason to reconsider. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:00, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
• Flawed RFC No one has challenged its reliably until this thread. As such the original question is meaningless and smacks of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT. Slatersteven (talk) 11:40, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Seconded. Let's get a speedy redo of Abecedare's close here, and throw this mess out. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:18, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Thirded. Selfstudier (talk) 13:24, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• Not reliable While I can understand the opinion that this particular discussion is pointy, I'm surprised anyone could consider an extremist propaganda piece like Jacobin reliable. It is the equivalent of Breitbart, just with a different political point of view. Both Breitbart and Jacobin regularly publish lies and distortions when it suits their respective political agendas, and would never publish anything not in line with those agendas. Jeppiz (talk) 13:56, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Can you show they have a reputation for knowingly telling lies? Slatersteven (talk) 14:00, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Can you show anything at all other than your own opinion? Selfstudier (talk) 14:30, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Jacobin is hardly comparable to Breitbart IMO. If I were to make a comparison to another publication with a political slant, It would be something like National Review or Reason Magazine.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 15:38, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• Generally reliable. The magazine publishes fact-based articles and does not promote conspiracy theories, although it is indeed a biased source, so proper attribution should be recommended.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 14:54, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
• A good point was made above that all of these problematic articles are by the same author, that to me would indicate that the issue isn't widespread enough to impact our assessment of Jacobin and we should instead rule that the author Branko Marcetic should be ruled unreliable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Broadly agree but need to be a little careful. He occasionally publishes in outlets a little more reliable than Jacobin (e.g. The Nation, In These Times) and those sources might be usable if due. Of course, he also occasionally publishes in less reliable sources, and those we should remove on sight. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:46, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  If an author is unreliable they're unreliable in every publication they write for, outlet has no bearing on it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:58, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  Don't think we are determining here if the author is unreliable, I have no opinion on that atm, but this RFC really needs to be shut down, it's all over the place, so I am going to take off the tag and turn it into a discussion instead if that's OK. Selfstudier (talk) 16:09, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  And please refrain from purging his content from the encyclopedia as you have been doing in the last hour. No consensus has been reached on the reliability of Marcetic's work. I have already reverted one of these instances.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 15:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  No thank you, don't forget to open a talk page discussion to get consensus for your desired additions! Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:57, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• Generally UNreliable - once it was (for some info) but it has gone way down hill and these days its content regularly strays into WP:FRINGE territory, with it becoming comparable to garbage like Mint Press News Volunteer Marek 16:18, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is warheroes.ru a reliable source?

A previous banned user, user:PlanespotterA320 has imported a lot of photos, descriptions and other information from this site. However, after checking a little bit, this is a user-generated content site.
Related discussion on WP:ANI is Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#user:PlanespotterA320 and aftermath. -Lemonaka‎ 01:11, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

For more information, please read about this site. -Lemonaka‎ 01:14, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

What makes you think it's user-generated? I didn't find a way to edit or add information there, and they have a team of editors [10]. This is not to say it's necessarily reliable, the best indication of that would be other RS using their data. Alaexis_¿question? 19:54, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Last two paragraphs of about pages (although translated by machine) indicating that they are based on one hand sources. -Lemonaka‎ 20:02, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Yeah they do ask people to send them information but my understanding is that they exercise the editorial control over what they publish. They also list the sources for any given page (e.g., [11]). Alaexis_¿question? 06:42, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

As can be seen from the team page the people running this site are hobbyists, so it shouldn't be considered a reliable source. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 12:53, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Not a reliable source, its an amateur military history group blog of the kind we've addressed many times. This is however I believe the first such foreign language source we've dealt with at RSN. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:15, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, I remember I had a discussion with user:PlanespotterA320 about this source on the talk page of Alexander Prokhorenko. Difool (talk) 06:08, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

This source is a typical secondary source: they took information from other sources, study, summarize and contribute it to the site.

It is even better for wiki.

Also anyone who is not lazy and can search through "Google books" can easily find sources verifying all claims made there. Kursant504 (talk) 12:46, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

How is this even a question? The very URL and name of this website (unless it was sarcastically intended, which it clearly isn't) is a violation of WP:NPOV. The About Us page confirms the site's purpose as WP:PROMO ("popularisation") of certain people as "war heroes" of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation: ...we pay tribute to the memory of many of those who selflessly built and strengthened our country, and those who heroically defended it. Ye, nah mate. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 23:16, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

We have a ton of articles on Medal of Honor award recipients based mainly on US government promotion of those people as war heroes. The fact that this site is writing these articles because they feel patriotic isn't a reason to ignore them. If we are ignoring the sources, it would because it's a hobbyist website. That being said, Andrey Simonov is (according to an article written by PlanespotterA320) a published author in this field, works on the mentioned blog, and is also a Wikipedia editor. He links his account on the website, [12] and is an active editor over at the Russian Wikipedia as User:Андрей Симонов. Maybe the best solution to this issue would be to just ask him to contribute to User:Lemonaka/Factcheck? He is likely familiar with his own website and would have access to the original sources. If there are articles cited entirely to this website, it may be simpler to just ask the website for sourcing details than it would be for us to try to refactor every article on our own. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 00:21, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Medal of Honor award recipients based mainly on US government promotion of those people as war heroes. That is an official designation, so that is a different case. Indeed, the hobbyist nature of this website (a group of like-minded enthusiasts in order to popularise the history of the peoples of the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, using the example of the military exploits of the defenders of the Fatherland, as well as the glorious deeds of the working people.), where regular citizens start unofficially promoting certain people as "war heroes", is the problem. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:27, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

We also have a ton of articles on the winners of Russia's highest award for bravery. Slatersteven (talk) 12:07, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

If these are official rewards, reported by a reliable source, that is fine. What is not okay is random sources randomly assigning random praises, heroisations and glorifications to random people according to their own random personal POV. This goes for any country or nationality, of course; such random websites exist across the planet. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 13:55, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

PS: See also the section about #saints.ru below about saints websites, which usually engage in hagiography, the religious equivalent of military heroisation. Certain purported "saints" have been officially canonised as such by certain ecclesiastical authorities or religious organisations. Official ecclesiastical sources confirming such basic details as the date and stated reason(s) for their beatification/canonisation, feast days, and perhaps birth and death dates, birth and death places etc. may be relied upon. Otherwise, such devotional sources typically contain many WP:RS/WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:UNDUE issues; they are to be avoided in favour of more reliable sources critically treating the subject's life, and any memory culture that may have been developed around their legacy. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 14:06, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

That is an excellent point, with both the Soviet military heroes and the saints we face the problem that the primary contemporary historians (that would be Church and Party) are unreliable because they were regularly passing off fictional events as real for political and social reasons. Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen are a good example. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:48, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Of course, this doesn't just apply to Soviet or Russian history, but all human history. And what I was trying to say: even if the sentence On 21 July 1942, the Guardsmen were all posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. is only supported by some Soviet propaganda book from the 1960s, we do not necessarily have to doubt it (except the word posthumously, perhaps, which is part of the refuted claim, so we might add " " to "posthumously"). It is a factual claim about an official designation by a relevant governmental authority. Bestowing the title Hero of Foo on Bar doesn't necessarily make Bar a "hero" in a real sense (that's just something Wikipedia cannot say per WP:NPOV); it just means Bar has been granted the title Hero of Foo by the government of Foo.

Similarly, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use saints.ru to support the basic claim [Yaropolk Iziaslavich] is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, with his feast day falling on the reported day of his death, November 22. But otherwise I wouldn't trust either source on Wikipedia for factual claims of these people's supposed "achievements" in order to assign them some heroic or saintly status. Wikipedia is not in that sort of business. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:01, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

That is kind of my point, Some bloke on the internet saying Ivan Scvainsky Scavar was a hero is not the same as the Soviet government awarding him a decoration for bravery. Slatersteven (talk) 18:31, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Exactly. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:01, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

• Template:HSU lists I'd like to draw attention to the fact that the same now-permanently-globally-banned user:PlanespotterA320 seems to have creates all the "ethnicity"-based lists in this Template:HSU lists. Each of them cites the same general sources without inline citations, and I have different levels of concerns over WP:OR/WP:SYNTH in all of them. I've already nominated List of Heroes of the Soviet Union of repressed ethnicities for deletion and raised serious concerns about List of Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union, but there may be more. It's unlikely that the sources provided, written in the 1980s so still Soviet times, would group people within the Soviet Union by "ethnicity"; that would very much be counter to Soviet ideology if I'm not mistaken. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:23, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

  @Nederlandse Leeuw I've created a list for this, User:Lemonaka/Factcheck. These are articles created by this banned user. -Lemonaka‎ 01:26, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

  The award documents for Heroes of the Soviet Union actually did list their ethnicities, and there have been post-Soviet academic publications on Heroes of the Soviet Union from specific ethnicities, such as this about Crimean Tatars.Kges1901 (talk) 14:10, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

off-topic, something disruptive caused by planespotterA320

The case of Crimean Tatars ia actually rather unusual because as an unrecognized ethnic group at the time the encyclopedias were compiled, their entries in the encyclopedias say "Tatar" and not Crimean Tatar. However, the fact that the Crimean Heroes are Crimean Tatar and not Kazan Tatars is ireffutable since they were born in Crimea and have all been since officially recognized as Crimean Tatar (with books like Крымские татары во Второй мировой войне / А. Велиев; пер. c крымскотат. Э. Велиева. — Симферополь : Крымучпедгиз, 2009 specifically dedicated to them) and specifically indentified personally as Crimean Tatar in their activities with the National Movemenet if they survived the war, plus Crimean Tatar newspapers regularly accouncing the anniversaries of the births with articles and do interviews with their surviving family in the Crimean Tatar not Kazan Tatar language.--74.215.211.214 (talk) 10:29, 30 May 2023 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:47, 1 June 2023 (UTC) WTH are you talking about? BTW, this is another IP sock of PlanespotterA320 and I will submit a SRG for this. -Lemonaka‎ 12:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC) @Lemonaka Thanks! On an entirely unrelated note, I've been sent a message to my talk page on Uzbek Wikipedia (where I have never been active) uz:Foydalanuvchi munozarasi:Nederlandse Leeuw by 195.146.2.115 (Special:Contributions/195.146.2.115 is account creation blocked). 195.146.2.115, whom I've never seen before, goes on a lengthy rant that The two-volume Soviet encyclopedias about heroes of the Soviet Union compiled by Ivan Shkadov DO list the ethnicity of all people. I think it's not entirely to be ruled out that this IP address might just be connected to now-permanently-globally-banned User:PlanespotterA320. Just a guess. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 09:33, 28 May 2023 (UTC) PS: You might wanna update the link in your OP to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1128#user:PlanespotterA320 and aftermath because it has been archived. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 09:46, 28 May 2023 (UTC) TB: before banned, planespotterA320 was a trusted sysop on Uzbek Wikipedia and had lots of trust there. However due to checkuser evidence, this user is doing disruptive editing and vandalizing pages by sockpuppets, outing wikipedian on private reddit group, sending threatening emails to other users and cooperate with Russian government to press other users. Then they got banned, first by community, then by wmf. -Lemonaka‎ 21:07, 28 May 2023 (UTC) Blimey! That's not funny at all. :O I've rarely seen abusive people go that far. Thanks for explaining this, I missed this part of planespotterA320's past behaviour. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:22, 28 May 2023 (UTC) I highly doubt someone working for the Russian government would write about things that enrage the Russian government the way planespotter did. You yourself tagged articles by Planespotter with maintenence tags about Crimean history that Russia doesn't like. Some were just really really odd like a BLP tag on a dead guy. Sorry but it makes no sense that someone who clearly really, really, really pissed off the Russian government and is despate to get mercy was working for Russia. There is a big difference between being terrified of the Russians and working for the Russians. The only people I know of who deny discrimination against Crimeans are hardline Russian nationalists, and even then most Russian hardliners don't deny it happened but just claim that they deserved it or worse. Never once have I ever heard of or met a Ukranian who denies that there was repression of Crimean Tatars. So it's clear that you are not Ukrainian but an agent trying to entrap people into accidentally saying something politically wrong, and it's also very clear that Planespotter deeply regrest writing about Crimean issues, but that doesn't mean that they are hoaxes, both the Russian and Ukranian governments recognized that the exile happened. I am also very certain that Planespotter was just really naive and didn't realize that Radio Liberty was funded by the US government until they already used it as a source nor did they know that Avdet was run by the <ejlis. While it's a large Crimean newspaper, very few Crimeans know that it is from the Mejlis and it is better to just tell them so they know who runs it than to assume that they are Mejlis collaborator. Planespotter is very obviously not Mejlis or Radio Liberty, but rather very naive and too emotional person who wrote without thinking of the political implications of the content and clearly tried to compensate for it a lot by writing lots of articles that make slavs look good like about the best Russian and Ukranian pilots. We also need to remember that just because something is politically dangerous to say or that there is no mention of it in one particular language doesn't mean that it is false or said with bad intentions.--74.215.211.214 (talk) 02:06, 30 May 2023 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:47, 1 June 2023 (UTC) Yeah, this is obvious planespotterA320, I got something more harsh on Uzbek Wikipedia. You can just report these mess to wmf as ban-evasion or to stewards since they are open proxy. -Lemonaka‎ 21:09, 28 May 2023 (UTC) Thanks for doing this already on my behalf, I appreciate it. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:19, 28 May 2023 (UTC) Glad I can help. -Lemonaka‎ 22:17, 28 May 2023 (UTC) @Lemonaka and the saga continues... uz:Foydalanuvchi munozarasi:Nederlandse Leeuw#Regarding the claims by Lemonaka. planespotterA320 is now using my Uzbek talk page as a battleground against you. Can or should I do anything to help you, or are you already on top of this? Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 05:34, 29 May 2023 (UTC) Funny how Lemonaka never actually denied being a Russian agent. I think we should be very careful what we say with them watching and make sure he knows that we are not conspiring against Russia.--74.215.211.214 (talk) 02:06, 30 May 2023 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:47, 1 June 2023 (UTC) Yep, Can you help me make another report to the sysops there? Thank you. -Lemonaka‎ 07:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC) @Lemonaka something like this? I've tried to put it in simple English sentences in case someone needs to autotranslate it. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 07:47, 29 May 2023 (UTC) Oh, cool. BTW, you may want to turn off your email notification if they starts email-spamming. -Lemonaka‎ 10:55, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• Warheroes.ru is not user generated content because it has an editorial team. The biographical profiles on the site are of people who were awarded the Soviet state title Hero of the Soviet Union and the Russian state title Hero of Russia, the highest government award in these states. It is not a subjective database of people considered "heroes" but of people who received the highest state award. Warheroes is a valuable source because it compiles data from numerous out-of-print books published about Heroes of the Soviet Union that otherwise would be hard to obtain outside of Russia. Site author Andrey Simonov is a published author of books that include a biographical dictionary of pilots awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union that used newly available Soviet military documents to provide a less hagiographic account. Finally, Warheroes.ru is cited by numerous books, as can be seen from a google search, including several English language academic publications [13], [14], [15]. Any comparison to websites about religious saints is spurious because warheroes is about real people who actually existed and have documented information about them, just like Medal of Honor recipients. Kges1901 (talk) 14:05, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you, @Kges1901. I'm totally blank about Russian or Soviet topics. Now here's the problem, is this site documented all the official details or mixed with their researches? -Lemonaka‎ 00:49, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  I have cross-checked the profiles on the site with primary source documents and the cited sources when I could access them and can confirm that the profiles match the sources. Kges1901 (talk) 01:18, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

  @Kges1901 For good measure, do you think it's okay that List of twice Heroes of the Soviet Union only links to warheroes.ru, and no other source? Or should we at least try to verify these claims through other sources? Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:41, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

  It's perfectly okay because the information that these specific people received the award multiple times and the dates they received the awards, are the most uncontroversial aspect. The dates on warheroes.ru match with those in the biographical dictionary of Heroes of the Soviet Union and the original award documents. There's no need for an unnecessary make-work project here at all. Kges1901 (talk) 13:32, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Oryx, random twitter accounts, Zvezda

The sources in question are:

• Oryx (website) - the blog version (not the twitter account) here
• Various twitter accounts cited in this talk page section [16]
• Zvezda (TV channel)

The article in question is:

• 2023 Belgorod Oblast attack

The information in question is:

• The tables in section on Losses cited at the moment to Oryx.

Past discussions regarding these sources (Oryx in particular):

• Archive 273
• Archive 322

While Oryx is a great and interesting twitter account/blog, the fact that it is WP:SPS means that it is potentially not reliable for this information. Of course, in cases where the blog is cited by OTHER outlets, like BBC or Reuters, that info would be RS. But that is not the case here.

While Oryx is being used in the article itself, on the talk page users are posting links to videos on twitter to justify the inclusion of the information. Additionally it appears that the photos in question (according to one user) originally originated with the Russian fake news/disinformation TV channel Zvezda, run by the Russian Ministry of Defense (originally posted to their Telegram channel). The argument on talk is that that somehow bolsters the reliability of the information but... personally I think it's actually the opposite. If nothing else, then the info should be attributed as coming from a Russian Ministry of Defense disinformation source.

I did add a "unreliable source" tag to the section but it was removed [17] by User:RadioactiveBoulevardier, with a revert incorrectly marked as "minor edit". RadioactiveBoulevardier has not responded on talk or explained their revert.

On top of all that, WP:NOTNEWS applies. Volunteer Marek 16:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• None of those twitter accounts appear to match the criteria at WP:RS. The twitter videos are at best WP:PRIMARY sources which are at best published by accounts managed by unreliable Russian state media. As primary sources, we need reliable secondary sources to interpret what they show. The "just watch the video" type assertions by the editor at the article talk page is not good enough. I have no way of knowing what I am watching or what it pertains to unless a reliable, secondary source tells me. And we have none of that. Zvezda is the among the worst of Russian state-owned sources, which is really saying something. None of it is reliable, and no content sourced to any of those twitter accounts, TV channels, etc. Oryx is probably good stuff, it appears to be endorsed by numerous other scrupulously reliable sources, so anything which comes from Oryx is probably good, but needs to stick to exactly what Oryx says, and not introduce information that can only be sourced to the twitter videos or to Russian state media. --Jayron32 16:27, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  You're looking at destroyed Ukrainian equipment abandoned at the border checkpoint in the belgorod region which they previously took control of. This is confirmed by geolocalization of the area. I can list the equipment in question. Andrea e luca (talk) 16:52, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  furthermore you have the secondary source telling you what you're looking at: Oryx. Andrea e luca (talk) 16:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  You are not a reliable source. So I don't really care what you have to say about what I am looking at. Oryx, as I said, is probably reliable enough for this information, but narrowly only for what it directly says. The rest of it has to go. --Jayron32 18:06, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  The facts speak. I am simply relaying the facts. Andrea e luca (talk) 18:20, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  If you ever were so gracious to at least look at the evidence, which is also republished by Oryx as factual, you would do us all a favour. Andrea e luca (talk) 18:22, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

  If oryx is writing the information, cite Oryx. There is no need to cite videos of unknown provenance and unverifiable content. --Jayron32 15:02, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

  @Jayron32 Excellent explanation, can only agree. Uwdwadafsainainawinfi (talk) 17:15, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Zveza and the anon Twitter should go immediately. Oryx it's possible to argue its SPS by subject-matter experts. We should always be careful with breaking news sources, which I believe we consider by definition primary. BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:14, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I think we should add a caveat that Zvezda reflects the official position of the Russian MoD which may or may not be due in this case. Alaexis_¿question? 20:02, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

• Oryx may qualify as an WP:SPS or perhaps WP:PRIMARY. If I were to use it, I would use it with caution, and always say "According to Oryx" or something. It is certainly more reliable when it comes to loss statistics than any other source I've seen, including the Russian and Ukrainian MoDs, because of overclaiming problems. It is likely that the real losses are higher than reported by Oryx (because there isn't always visual evidence collected, submitted, checked and published), but the ones they do report are probably accurate. Many reliable sources refer to Oryx. If they do, I would cite those sources instead of Oryx itself, which should be used with caution. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:30, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

As I said on the article talk, it was unintentional and most likely something to do with the visual editor.

You seem to expect that Wikipedians be active, and respond to notifications, 24 hours a day. I was asleep for most of the period since that edit. You’re lucky I checked my phone before eating breakfast, which I’m currently trying to stop doing.

I don’t in the least object to putting that tag back. RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 19:43, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Hah, I know the feeling. Hope your sleep and breakfast were nice. :) Happy editing! Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 20:49, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Oryx is a group blog with two principles: Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans. Both are arguably subject matter experts so usable but this is one of those cases where editorial discretion is key because they publish a lot of different content and we have to keep in mind that for our purposes a feature length report on a years long weapons project and a breaking news blog post about a photo that appeared on twitter carry different weights. Attribute when used. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:22, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Well said. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 20:58, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

• I never heard about this source, however the specific claim (the table with losses) is not consistent with other sources, and in any case would required multiple secondary RS to be included on the page. My very best wishes (talk) 20:49, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

  Why should "consistency with other sources" be a criterion? If lots of tabloids report the same figure, but it is false, what does consistency matter? I think reliability matters. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:44, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

• I find Oryx excellent and trustworthy as a reader, but I have all the above qualms about using it on Wikipedia. It's an excellent blog, but it's a blog. It's also far too fresh as news for us, I think - David Gerard (talk) 13:33, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

BR Bullpen

Baseball Reference has its own mini-wiki called BR Bullpen. It gives basic information on people who have contributed to baseball in any way: written books on subjects, were prominent journalists, etc., etc..

BR Bullpen Wiki is written in collaberation with the Society for American Baseball Research and Baseball-Reference. I use it to get basic information on lesser known people in baseball - birth and death dates, place of birth, where a person was educated. This is especially useful in stub articles or for sportswriters. I used it on a draft I wrote (Draft:Ed Linn) and for Jane Leavy to verify their birth dates AND on Chuck Sheerin to verify his minor league statistics. For some reason, a user has decided to remove this source every time I have used it.

Here is a link to BR Bullpen and its purpose. It does a great service for baseball and collecting its history and I want permission to use it for BASIC INFORMATION such as birth and death dates. While it may not be accurate about obscure people (and, I should remind you, neither is Wikipedia), it does its best, just like we here do. -- All The Knowledge in the World (talk) 10:55, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

The wiki can be edited by anyone, see WP:UGC, this is not a reliable source. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 12:22, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi. I've cleared it up with the user in question. They explained this to me and gave me the links to previous discussions on the topic. -- All The Knowledge in the World (talk) 15:03, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a wiki clone and user edited, it's non-usable. I've edited there in the past. Oaktree b (talk) 17:42, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I understand. Like I mentioned above, the user in question cleared it up with me. I was under the impression BR Bullpen, too, used sources. Clearly, they don't. I won't be using it from now on. Thanks though. -- All The Knowledge in the World (talk) 17:48, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Healthline: deprecate or blacklist?

A May 2023 RSN discussion about Healthline raises the question about whether Healthline should be deprecated as generally unreliable or blacklisted as fabrication and spam on many of its health-related article pages.

Healthline: [18]

Healthline is frequently used by novice editors to source medical, nutrition, and lifestyle content. Its name implies health expertise, and its author(s) or editors are identified as having "medically reviewed" articles, despite most having no medical expertise (BS or MS degrees in non-medical fields). Healthline commonly cites individual primary studies to extrapolate to an anti-disease effect or "health benefit", a term used in many of its articles on foods, phytochemicals, and supplements.

Previous RSN discussion: Feb 2022 goji berries

Examples of spam health misinformation are Healthline articles on coffee antioxidants ("Many of coffee’s positive health effects may be due to its impressive content of powerful antioxidants"), anti-disease effects of black tea, "proven health benefits" of ashwagandha, and "proven health benefits" of blueberries, among dozens of others. Search "antioxidant" on Healthline and browse any retrieved article for the extent of misinformation (where only vitamins A-C-E apply as antioxidants for the human diet).

Diffs on goji - this talk discussion on goji nutrition and health benefits; continued further here.

Numerous others under my history, here.

It may be justified to blacklist Healthline as a perpetual source of fabrication and spam. Similar to reputations in scientific publishing generally, blatant misinformation destroys confidence permanently in the rest of the source.

Seeing an edit containing a Healthline source is WP:REDFLAG for revising or reverting the edit. There are no circumstances where a Healthline source could not be MEDRS-sourced.

Healthline should be blacklisted. Zefr (talk) 19:26, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

What's the evidence that Healthline is actually spam ("the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user", according to our article on the same subject), or even WP:REFSPAM ("a form of search engine optimization or promotion that typically involves the repeated insertion of a particular citation or reference in multiple articles by a single contributor. Often these are added not to verify article content, but rather to populate numerous articles with a particular citation")?

It sounds like the only thing happening here is that editors use a source that they believe is reliable, but that better informed editors disagree with them, not to mention the few especially strict MEDRS supporters such as yourself. That doesn't actually make it spam. It's a health news website. It shouldn't be used for any purpose that we wouldn't use a newspaper article for, but I've seen no evidence of it being eligible for inclusion in the MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. You could ask admins like Kuru or Ohnoitsjamie, but we don't normally add things just to keep people from complying with WP:SAYWHEREYOUREADIT.

P.S. Of course blueberries have "proven health benefits". One might wish for a Wikipedia editor to write something staid and obvious like "Blueberries, like basically all fruits and vegetables, contain Vitamin C, which is essential to human health" rather than something breathless about blueberries being uniquely near-magical, but it's still true that they have "proven health benefits", especially for anyone who doesn't fancy a case of scurvy. (Mmm, blueberry season is just starting here...). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I always go to the medical topics I know best to check the source. For Tourette syndrome (FA Tourette syndrome), the following healthline statements are utterly wrong (not just subtly wrong) -- samples only:

• It is a syndrome that involves recurrent involuntary tics, which are repeated, involuntary physical movements and vocal outbursts. Vocal tics need not be outbursts at all; gulping is an example of a vocal tic. This information furthers a stereotype about TS.
• The symptoms include uncontrollable tics and spontaneous vocal outbursts. Ditto, plus see Tourette syndrome for how wrong the "uncontrollable" is.
• People diagnosed with Tourette syndrome often have both a motor tic and a vocal tic. No, they must have both for a TS diagnosis.
• Symptoms are generally most severe during your early teen years. Concocted from I don't know where ...

Stopped there. Moving on to Lewy bodies (FA dementia with Lewy bodies):

• Dementia with Lewy bodies, also known as Lewy body dementia, is caused by protein deposits in nerve cells. 1. Lewy body dementia and dementia with lewy bodies are not the same thing. 2. The cause of DLB is unknown.

So, again stopped there. Adding this to Zefr's examples, yes, this site is rubbish and should be blacklisted. We shouldn't have to run around removing potential rubbish added by unsuspecting or new editors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:06, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

While I agree that it's not spam per se, there is a precedent for blacklisting poor sources that are frequently misued as references, NaturalNews being the first example to come to mind. Now NaturalNews is in a category of its own in terms of being complete rubbish. Healthline's own article suggests that there is mixed opinion as to it being a "good" source. I'm OK with blacklisting a link on the grounds of it being a frequently misused poor source, but on the conditions that (1) we have a strong consensus that it has no use in Wikipedia as a references and (2) the existing 500+ links are cleaned up prior to blacklisting. Neither of those conditions are currently met as far as I can see. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 22:23, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the Natural News discussion (not an RfC) resulted in adding to the spam blacklist. And Beetstra changed the spam-blacklist guideline to add "some sites which are persistently abused for shock effects, and some sites which have been added after independent consensus" after I had objected about adding ancient-origins.net. A more recent example is that my request to remove Breitbart from the spam blacklist (since spamming if it ever existed was stopped) was archived. Thus there are indeed precedents, and I regard them all as bad. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 15:19, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

John's right about it being a big jump from nothing to deprecation or blacklisting, but another option is an AbuseFilter that says something like "Healthline.com is generally not a reliable source for medical information".

Another option would be to have a bot post individual messages ("I see you added <badsite> to [[Possibly medical article]]. This is generally considered a poor source for health-related content. Could you please replace it with a better source?") WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:47, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

it seems like overkill to jump immediately to deprecation or blacklisting. Why not start by clarifying on RSP that it is unreliable? I think we now have the necessary discussions and consensus for that. John M Baker (talk) 23:22, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it technically qualifies until this RFC closes, but I've boldly added it as GUNREL for now. If anyone wants to amend or remove, feel free. As for an edit filter... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm not really sure. Alpha3031 (t • c) 13:48, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, get rid of it.

Their articles are written almost entirely by random freelance writers with zero qualifications, and then "medically reviewed" by "medical advisors" who are very frequently quacks:

• This reiki [19] was written by a yoga teacher and "medically reviewed" by "doctor" with a PhD in psychology from for-profit online Walden University (their psych PhD program is unaccredited!). Her bio asserts she's a holistic nurse, professor (at Walden), reiki master, clinical hypnotherapist, and expert in "complementary and alternative therapies, autoimmune disease, stress and coping, and obstetrics". She was also the advisor for this pro-homeopathy article and this throat chakra article that starts out "Chakras play a role in the flow of energy in your body. Running from the base of your spine to the top of your head, the seven main chakras each correspond to specific nerve bundles and organs in your body."
• This pro-chiropractic article reviewed by a DPT (with degree from for-profit University of St Augustine) who has no publications and whose professional qualifications list is so weak he included CPR certification. The article cites case studies, Frontiers junk, and weak reviews in weak journals.
• This credulous piece on homeopathic arnica spends a lot of text uncritically summarizing its health claims and mechanism while minimizing the fact that there's no evidence it works ("however, more research is needed"). It was written by a dietitian and personal trainer and underwent expert review by another dietitian.
• What Are the 7 Chakras and How Can You Unblock Them?, written by someone with a master's in counseling and medically reviewed by a yoga instructor. JoelleJay (talk) 23:57, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Based on your post, I went back to look at the Tourette syndrome healthline author, and what I found is really weird. She appears to be a legit neurologist, but that doesn't mean she knows anything about TS. But as an indication that there are deeper problems at healthline.com, here she wrote a mostly accurate article for healthgrades.com. At about the same time (2022). If she's capable of writing (generally) acceptable content about TS, what went wrong at healthline? Are they just paid to rubberstamp rubbish without really checking, or what the heck? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:12, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

The TS healthline author is actually a nurse practitioner; the article was just "reviewed" by a legit neurologist. JoelleJay (talk) 06:16, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I was just coming to correct that, and you beat me to it ... correct ... I was referring to the reviewer. In other words, she didn't even review. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes I would agree Healthline should be deprecated, or at least considered generally unreliable. I think I've probably been duped by the "medically reviewed articles" bit in the past, I bet I've added it somewhere I shouldn't have as a result, thinking it was high quality as an RS. But these examples and the general evidence above has convinced me we should not consider it reliable, as what they consider "medical expert" is clearly not what Wikipedia considers expertise. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 15:25, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• I think Healthline suffers from a problem with many health websites that see their audience wanting health-enhancing advice and not just health-fixing advice (compare with NHS). So they overstate the benefits and are overly credulous in much the same way as newspapers tend to be. Outside of that area, are they terrible? I know Sandy has VERY high standards for the topics she is concerned about, and many sources (including authors of reviews in professional journals) don't meet them. I had a look at their article on tuberous sclerosis and it is IMO absolutely fine. I had a look at epilepsy and didn't finish reading it but what I read seemed absolutely fine too. The language and style of the articles is heavily dumbed down. This has advantages (the general reader, wanting to add some sourced info on a disease, can at least understand the source) compared to what MEDRS might recommend (an -- often paywalled -- review using jargon and aimed at other neurologists). But when you start with dumbed-down source, it is difficult to raise the language level back up to more formal writing. But then that's not much different to the NHS website, and I wouldn't want to blacklist that.

Perhaps the best thing is to warn about its use for "wellness" topics. For general medical issues, it probably is ok, not ideal but not terrible. If someone wrote about "First aid for seizures" and cited Healthline, I don't think Wikipedia would be improved by an editor removing the source, removing the content or tagging the content as unreliably sourced. It would be fine, and a whole lot better than most people know about how to do first aid for seizures.

Btw, I get that blueberries are over sold as a superfood. But it isn't like someone is selling something harmful or just water or placebos. The claim above that they have "have meagre nutrient content" just just bunk. Of course fruit is mostly water, but these berries are packed with more of certain nutrients than other common berries and fruit that people eat as snacks or sides. We certainly want people/readers to eat them as part of a fruit & veg rich diet. Telling people their nutrient content is "meagre" is just as false as claiming they are "super" and more dangerous because the risk then is people think eat fruit-flavoured sweets or chocolate bars for their snack instead, telling themselves that blueberries are no better.

Another complaint. A "dietician" is a proper medical professional. Zefr's comment might make one think a GP or a cardiologist or a neurologist, being "properly medically qualified", might be better placed to talk about health effects of food. A dietician is absolutely the qualification one would want, and anyone who's dealt with a hospital dietician will know how professional and knowlegable they are. But like with anything, especially perhaps in the US, qualifications and learning can be put aside if one gets paid to write gushing articles about super foods. But I've been burnt by so called doctors writing on Wikipedia way beyond their area of expertise, to the point where what they write is nonsense and unintellible and they clearly don't understand the source text at all. So a "medical qualification" isn't a guarantee that someone is competent to write about all areas of medical knowledge. A cardiologist who once took a few lectures on epilepsy medications, aged nineteen and thirty years ago, is not imo an expert on epilepsy.

Lastly, wrt Healthline "cites individual primary studies". The rule against citing primary studies is a Wikipedia quirk because our editors are not assumed to have medical knowledge themselves. Applying that rule to other publications is wrong. The Lancet review that we might prefer to be used as a source also "cites individual primary studies", it just, hopefully, isn't so credulous and gushing. -- Colin°^Talk 09:44, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Colin - addressing the nutrient content of blueberries, 1) compare the analysis of our blueberry article where the Daily Values (for a 100 gram amount) only of vitamin C, vitamin K, and manganese are at moderate levels vs. a more nutrient-rich plant food like spinach. The blueberry nutrient contents are meager.

2) Then read again the sensationalism of unproven anti-disease benefits for blueberries in the Healthline article, "medically reviewed" by a dietitian (not a medical expert). One needs no better example of fabrication and misinformation than this for deprecating/blacklisting Healthline, and there are dozens of Healthline articles with similarly deceitful anti-disease claims.

3) Note also that anti-disease effects of the Healthline article derive from primary research and leaps of interpretation from preliminary unconfirmed findings to a headline on disease prevention. That is WP:SYNTH.

4) on your comment, "For general medical issues, it probably is ok": find one WP medical article or statement where a Healthline source exists now, and where a better MEDRS source isn't readily available. This is where WP:MEDASSESS and WP:MEDORG sources are needed; reviewing them proves that Healthline has no place in any of these guidelines. Zefr (talk) 14:37, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I hear you, Colin, but by allowing hosting of these marginal and sensationalized and inaccurate sources, we allow them to continue to exist (and in this case, they are doing nothing but paying professionals to rubberstamp rubbish). Wikipedia is big enough and important enough that we can be the factor that keeps them in business. If the student editors don't find these sources, they'll have to move on to real sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:33, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, readers would have no idea that we only consider Healthline "good enough" to cite for basic non-wellness things; what they would glean from a Healthline source being used in a medical article is that Healthline is an acceptable website for all medical information.

I also maintain there is a huge difference between a "medical professional" and a "medical expert", and another gulf between "expert" and "expert in the relevant field". A member of the American Society for Nutrition is what I would expect for the expert adviser on a medical nutrition article, not someone with a bachelor's in nutrition + internship (all that's required for an RD) or a master's. And I definitely would not want a dietitian who went anywhere near the Integrative and Functional Medicine scam. The blueberry article makes some egregious extrapolations from primary studies--like claiming a 4-week blueberry/apple juice regimen led to a 20% reduction in oxidative DNA damage when actually the study tested single-strand breaks induced by H2O2 tx in ex vivo lymphocytes collected after avoiding all antioxidant foods for 5 days and then again after the diet regimen (there was no separate control group), and the study itself states within the whole study population effects were modest and strongly biased by large inter-individual differences. Despite this, we did find a significant protection against H2O2-induced oxidative DNA damage. However, we also observed a significant increase in BPDE-DNA adducts induced ex vivo upon intervention.

Likewise, someone with a PsyD/PhD in psych is not qualified to be reviewing articles on TS written by a freelance writer, health reporter, and author with zero credentials. Predictably, there are several issues with the TS Healthline article, including the claim that There’s no known cure for TS, but most people can expect to have a normal lifespan. There is not enough longitudinal data to assert that "most" TSC patients will have a normal lifespan (certainly not without medical treatment! This source states Furthermore, although TSC patients are known to experience higher mortality than the general population, there are few reports on the death rate, standardized mortality ratio (SMR), and estimated life expectancy), and the article operates under the assumption that the patient is a child and will receive all necessary early interventions (as if universal healthcare is available everywhere). The writing suffers from the lack of sophistication expected of people with no training in biology, delivering such clumsy and ambiguous lines as Scientists have identified two genes called TSC1 and TSC2. These genes can cause TS, but having only one of these can result in the disease. Is this trying to say that a mutation in only one of the genes is needed for disease, or is it alluding to the fact that only one mutant allele of either gene is needed (autosomal dominant)?

There is legitimately no reason for Healthline to be used as a source anywhere when there are far better non-scammy sources available for every imaginable use-case. JoelleJay (talk) 23:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Zefr compares blueberries with spinach and cites USDA raw data. The reason we don't allow editors to conduct original research is that they come up with misleading falsehoods based on their interpretation of primary sources, like "meagre" for the nutrient content of a healthy berry or do wrongheaded things like comparing a berry you eat as a snack with a leaf you typically eat in a cooked meal (compare instead with raspberry, strawberry or grapes if you want to consider an alternative). You cherry pick three nutrients out of dozens and compare 100g of each, when one might typically eat different weights of such things. If a source you wanted to attack did that, you'd use those mistakes against them. Later you accuse them of WP:SYNTH. Em, SYNTH is a Wikipedia only thing. Nobody outside of Wikipedia can ever commit that crime. They are allowed to do it. They might not be any good at it, but we let our sources do it, and if we didn't nobody would ever be able to draw conclusions.

You ask "find one WP medical article or statement where a Healthline source exists now, and where a better MEDRS source isn't readily available". That isn't how "reliable sources" or WP:V or even WP:MEDRS works. We have no rule anywhere on Wikipedia that editors can only ever use the best sources. Your opinion of "readily available" likely differs from most people and most potential editors. You might know to to use PubMed to find recent reviews that are freely available and to recognise decent journals from the predatory and dubious. Do you think many people using Pubmed to search for blueberry nutrition are going to pick the good stuff? Most people use Google, and that's what "readily available" means to them. And even assuming they find a good medical source, it may use jargon. Often it might just contain low-level information (like those USDA tables) that we absolutely can't just glance at and write things like "meagre" in our own words. In other words, those "MEDRS" sources are hard to find, hard to use and very easy to misuse. A source that tells it at a level our readers understand can have advantages for many editors wishing to write but as I said above, there can be problems with sources that lack depth.

Wrt picking holes in the TS article. These are minor flaws. Anyone here want me to review one of their Wikipedia articles and I can guarantee to find similar and write a whole paragraph about the flaws in one sentence. Again, that's not how we judge sources. For the record, I agree the two quoted sentences about the genes are wrong. It should say "A fault in one of these two genes can cause TS". (Essentially, you need both of these genes to be working to avoid TSC).

Wrt lifespan, its complex. The sentence you quote is essentially ok, and widely repeated in the literature (The NHS says the same thing). It used to be thought everyone with TSC was badly affected and all had learning disability, epilepsy and skin manifestations. But that was only picking up people in hospital or institutions. Population studies show more have it and don't know until they have a child who gets it worse. The whole question of what percentage of people with TSC (in a population) have X, Y or Z symptoms is difficult to ascertain if you only really get studied if you present in hospital. So the extreme variability of the condition makes it hard to write one sentence about lifespan. This paper attempts to estimate and comes up with a lifespan from birth of 70 years. I don't know their statistical methods enough to know if they attempt to include people with TSC who didn't end up as TSC patients in their hospital. I don't know how they work that out for people dying age 70 then (2019) who would have been born in 1949 and faced a remarkably different medical outlook (no MRI, limited brain surgery capability, few epilepsy drugs, life in an institution). My mind boggles really about how you might work out how long someone diagnosed age 1, say, with TSC might live? You'd have to, for a start, assume there no more medical advances, which based on recent advances, seems both unlikely and unfairly pessimistic. They compare this to the US average of 79 using this source and it was indeed correct in 2019 but has fallen since to 76. This UK source shows how going back even to the 1980s shows a big drop, particularly for men. But what is "normal". You could put your statistical pedant's hat on, or you could say well I guess it means I will likely grow old. And, em, 70 is old.

But would a MEDRS sourced claim "The lifespan for people born with TSC in the US in 2019 is 70 years" be any more educationally helpful or better than what Healthline say in their whole section. Our reader thinks, "Wow, my child with TSC is going to live to be 70. That's not bad." But that's just not true though. If their heart tumour is too big, they'll die shortly after birth. They may develop a blockage in their brain ventricle that requires a shunt, and then that gets infected and they die. In early teenage they may get a tumour growing in the brain that needs removed and they die on the table. In their twenties, they might get sudden death in epilepsy. In their thirties, their blood-rich tumour on their kidney might suddenly burst and they bleed to death on the way to hospital. If female, in middle age they may well get LAM and may die horribly or get a lung transplant, with all the risks of that. Or they may be lucky and rich enough to get one of the newer $$$$ TSC-specific drugs like everolimus. And even if medically physically healthy, they are prone to neurological and psychological issues, with all the risks to health and self harm that involves. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another condition that comes with more "ways you might die, but might not".

Yes, Healthline is aimed at a US/Western audience who are encouraged to get the best healthcare and with that they might live a long life. The Healthline article has a section "What Is the Long-Term Outlook for People with Tuberous Sclerosis?" and does say "Because symptoms vary so greatly in each person, so does long-term outlook" but you didn't quote that bit, because it doesn't help the case against them. It doesn't differ, fundamentally, from the "Outlook" section in the NHS page.

So, apart from missing "A fault in one of " when they mention the genes, what's the problem. You claim the "The writing suffers from the lack of sophistication expected of people with no training in biology". Well, for a start it is aimed at a general audience. Please read some of the NHS pages and you'll find extremely unsophisticated writing, and deliberately so. But do you really think "training in biology" comes with a "writing medical/scientific articles for a lay audience" module? I've reviewed and read enough Wikipedia articles written by doctors to know that is no guarantee of quality writing (or even, seeming to understand what they are writing about, and not getting basic stuff like prevalence and incidence confused). Look, any one of us can rant and pick faults, and their Wellness material is definitely to be avoided, but I think in terms of Wikipedia's requirements for sources, for standard medical content, I'm not seeing a general problem that is sufficient for a blacklist. -- Colin°^Talk 09:44, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I would appreciate it if you would address more specifically whichever editors you're calling "you" since I did not say many of the things you claim "I" (or any one person) said.

Drawing clinical generalizations from single studies is discouraged for all tertiary health information providers, not just wikipedia. Healthline purports to be a tertiary source, not a secondary review article or medical journalism outlet (but medical reporters guidelines also strongly emphasize citing secondary evidence-based reviews over primary case control studies), so it should be held to higher standards in how it justifies an intervention. Wikipedia editors who do not know how to find and recognize high-quality readily-available biomedical sources should not be editing biomedical information in the first place, but when they do then having a filter to flag bad sources of info prevents us from unintentionally endorsing those sources.

Wrt picking holes in the TS article. These are minor flaws. Anyone here want me to review one of their Wikipedia articles and I can guarantee to find similar and write a whole paragraph about the flaws in one sentence. Again, that's not how we judge sources. For the record, I agree the two quoted sentences about the genes are wrong. It should say "A fault in one of these two genes can cause TS". (Essentially, you need both of these genes to be working to avoid TSC).

Stating in the first paragraph of a tertiary health information source aimed at laypeople that "people with TSC can expect to have a normal lifespan" is bad. The NHS source is orders of magnitude better because it faithfully reflects the heterogeneity in lifespan and morbidity and presents a realistic picture of potential treatment burden all in the same section:

The outlook for people with tuberous sclerosis can vary considerably.
Some people have few symptoms and the condition has little effect on their life, while others – particularly those with a faulty TSC2 gene or obvious problems from an early age – can have severe and potentially life-threatening problems that require lifelong care.
Many people will have a normal lifespan, although a number of life-threatening complications can develop. These include a loss of kidney function, a serious lung infection called bronchopneumonia and a severe type of epileptic seizure called status epilepticus.
People with tuberous sclerosis may also have an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer, such as kidney cancer, but this is rare.

This is in contrast to the outlook section on HL which is the last section. And the study that found a lifespan of 70 wouldn't be a MEDRS source anyway as it's primary (and focused on LAM), so how a hypothetical editor would use it on wikipedia is irrelevant. (Oh, and please do review my contributions to stable theory ;)).

If the extent of the problems with Healthline was just the tendency to dumb down material on disease overview articles to the point of ambiguity I wouldn't advocate for its deprecation. Of course I don't believe training in biology corresponds to effective lay medical writing; what I do believe is that a source that claims to provide "medically reviewed" medical information should be held to a higher standard than "psychologist/nurse with zero research background/expertise in anything relevant to the topic reviewing the output of an unqualified freelance health writer". The big issue is wikipedia implicitly endorsing the site as a whole by citing it for mundane statements that could easily be sourced from higher-quality MEDRS by any competent editor. Even if it has some accurate unobjectionable content, HL still contains thousands of articles directly platforming, promoting, or at least failing to criticize CAM nonsense (like natural treatments for Lyme disease, this What are the bet homeopathic treatments for tinnitus? article with the summary Homeopathy for tinnitus is not considered the first line of treatment, and research is mixed on its effectiveness (no, research is NOT "mixed"), or this mind-bogglingly uncritical and falsely-balanced article that presents debates over the safety and efficacy of administering diluted rabid dog saliva to a child (or as its blindingly disinformative search result summary states A homeopathic physician in Canada used saliva from a dog with rabies to treat a boy who was having behavioral problems after contracting rabies himself) as merely a difference in opinion among experts (quoting homeopaths (of course referred to as doctors) and a virologist as if they're on equal footing)). If a news site was spouting this type of shit it would be blacklisted immediately, we should not have a lower standard for MEDRS. JoelleJay (talk) 19:55, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I thought it was fairly obvious who I was talking to about blueberries and who about TSC. But sorry if it was confusing. You say "Healthline purports to be a tertiary source". Does it? I can't see that term anywhere on the site or on our Wikipedia article about them. WhatamIdoing can probably comment better on this matter, but in my understanding the PST source categorisation is down to what exactly the writer is doing in those sentences we might cite and not in what JoelleJay or any editor thinks they are. Our examples of what each of these three source categories tend to include are just examples and a given source may be primary for some things and secondary for others. That HealthLine is taking primary research science papers and writing about them when extolling the virtues of blueberries, say, makes them a secondary source for that particular set of facts (dubious or otherwise) and there's nothing you and I can do to say "No, you can't do that, because I say you are a tertiary source".

The "Hierarchy of Evidence" that the guidelines you link don't correspond with Wikipedia's WP:SYNTH or WP:OR or guidelines about generally avoiding primary sources. That there is a hierarchy of evidence quality should of course be considered by any health writer, but their concern is not PST but the accumulation of weight of evidence in a statistically valid way using a scientific method of analysis.

At the top of the pyramid are "Systematic reviews and meta-analyses". These only cover, I don't know, a small percent of medical knowledge. Essentially, does it work, what harm does it do, and maybe when should I use it or avoid it. A meta-analysis might tell you that everolimus shrinks kidney tumours in TSC but won't tell you what percentage of people with TSC get them, why they get them, what they look like on a path slide or ultrasound or MRI scan, what the guidelines are for monitoring them, what the surgical approach is for handling a bleed... A systematic review won't tell you, other than as an aside perhaps, about the two genes involved and how TSC2 is contiguous with PKD1 so some people have faults affecting both. For that kind of information, we need literature reviews, fact sheets, advanced textbooks, etc. And those aren't mentioned in your journalism guidance because they aren't sources of news for a journalist to write about.

In medical writing outside of Wikipedia, there are no banned sources. Nobody wagging WP:SYNTH at you. There is indeed a hierarchy of evidence just as I suppose journalists have their views on whether they are being told political porky pies or reliable facts by their sources. But the point is whether someone is any good at it. The difference between the BMJ's news features covering the latest research findings and HealthLine's news features covering the latest research findings is down to how good their are, their degree of professionalism, and whether and how their readers respond to that quality or lack. They might both cite the same studies/sources. -- Colin°^Talk 09:20, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

So far, what I've learned from this discussion is that our articles on foods are missing information about serving sizes. A typical serving of blueberries weighs about three times as much as a typical serving of spinach. The 100-gram standardization lets you quickly compare berries against berries, but not berries against leafy greens. One serving of spinach has approximately the same amount of protein and many vitamins (but more fiber, some vitamins, and most minerals, except for Zinc and Phosphorus) as one serving of blueberries. For a healthy person (e.g., not on Coumarin, no iron-deficiency anemia), the real-world effect of eating some blueberries and eating some spinach is not very different. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:53, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed someone had replaced a Healthline source with a ClevelandClinic source. So I followed that and found them pushing a story What You Should Know About Sugar Alcohols. That article cited several research studies of quite varying quality and size. For example "But a recent study shows that one sugar alcohol, erythritol, may be much worse for your health than anyone realized. It found that erythritol is closely associated with an increased risk for “major adverse cardiovascular events,” including heart attack and stroke." I can't read the whole paper, but just the abstract made me nervous. The Science Media Centre tears it apart. Another Are Spray Tans Safe at the bottom cites this study. Guess where that study sits at the hierarchy of evidence pyramid? I assume some medical editors think that source is fine as it is a big non profit health organisation, rather than just some money making website.

Wrt the Tuberous Sclerosis claim about "most people can expect to have a normal lifespan" your arguments now seem to boil down to a complaint that the section that fully covers the "outlook", mentioning that the disease "vary so greatly in each person, so does long-term outlook", is the "last section" as though putting "outlook" last in the order of sections is a crime worthy of blacklist. And you complain about the one sentence summary of that section being in the lead section (or as you put it "first paragraph of" -- it isn't the first paragraph, but actually the sixth, the very end of the lead). I'm not quite sure how the practice of summarising the body in the lead is also a crime worthy of blacklist.

The point of the 70-year-lifespan source wasn't that I thought a wikipedian should directly cite it, just that there is some evidence that 70-years might be an average. I'll leave citing a secondary source for that fact as an exercise for the reader, not important to our argument. I'm merely saying that we could describe the lifespan of TS in many ways and doing so in one short sentence is unlikely to give a full picture, and could be criticised. But then that's why it pays to read down to the end of the article.

Heathline sure has a lot of problems. But I think editors commenting here need to be very careful that their complaints stack up (e.g. there really wasn't anything wrong with the "normal lifespan" claim, and that's repeated by reliable sources) or that they are being used fairly (e.g. Cleveland Clinic is doing exactly the same thing as Healthline and while it likely isn't as credulous about the latest wellness rubbish, it makes exactly the same journalistic mistakes when citing weak studies and making bold claims). The Cleveland Clinic doesn't even name the "medical professional" who wrote/reviewed the work, so you can't go google them to trash their credentials. -- Colin°^Talk 13:36, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

The Cleveland Clinic is well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic and shouldn't be cited for these claims either. JoelleJay (talk) 17:59, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic, as evidenced by the fact that they fired the guy? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

The comment above that banning a source prevents us from unintentionally endorsing those sources makes me think the community might have a difference in fundamental values – a different concept of the point behind citing sources.

Given the way that citation metrics are used in career advancement decisions, I understand that some academics are trying to cite only papers that they think are "deserving" (e.g., you cite the paper that already cited the hoax, instead of the hoax paper itself, to avoid boosting the citation impact for the hoax), and in some fields, to promote what's sometimes called citation equity by choosing papers, when you have a choice between reasonably equal options, that aren't from people who are already well up the existing structures of power and privilege (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing/Events/April&May23#Citation equity & justice and https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/ask-dr-editor/diversity-in-citation-practices-auditing-your-list-of-references-contributes-to-better-science/ for a little more on this). This has some tangible academic benefits (e.g., if you're writing about fertility, why wouldn't you mention the existence of single mothers, or poor people, or gay people, or teenagers, or child marriage, or religious minorities, or racial minorities, or immigrants, or prisoners, or all the other subgroups? Could it be that you didn't think about that subgroup because that's not part of your own personal background? Maybe if you took an hour to deliberate look for, e.g., what the women of color in your field are writing, you might discover something that would enhance your own work) but also has some non-academic effects (e.g., the authors of the paper you cite might have a slightly higher chance of getting tenure).

In this sense, I think there may be, among scholars, a sense that to cite a paper is, at some level, to endorse it.

On wiki, though, I think that we have traditionally cited sources just because they're convenient. Citing any plausible source (assuming it says the same thing that you put in the article) proves that your contribution is not original research, because even if the source is wrong or unsuitable, you didn't make it up yourself. Our significant bias towards open access sources is driven by practical forces: those are the sources that most editors can actually read. Citing a source isn't endorsing the source; it's just completing a relatively unimportant item on a basic checklist and moving on. After all, "smoking cigarettes raises your risk of lung cancer" is 100% true and WP:Glossary#verifiable regardless of whether the sentence is followed by a good source, a bad source, or no source at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:42, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

What does any of this have to do with the reliability of Healthline.

Wikipedia deprecates use of publications that routinely provide false or misleading material, even if not every article they put out suffers those issues. HL has a clear history of promoting harmful medical quackery, which is about as bad as you can get source-wise, and offers zero unique coverage that would warrant a whitelist since its articles are written by unqualified freelancers whose subjective interpretations we definitely DON'T want. JoelleJay (talk) 22:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I support a blacklist of Healthline. Healthline (which as a Red Ventures company has sister sites Medical News Today, PsychCentral, and Healthgrades) is not reliable. First, many of their articles will reference articles from PubMed Central with the annotation "Highly respected database from the National Institutes of Health". This is misleading because a listing in PubMed or PubMed Central does not indicate that a paper is reliable.

Second, many articles are low quality and "teach the controversy" about pseudoscientific topics. For example, Healthline has a "medically reviewed article "What Is Qi Deficiency, and How Is It Treated?" about a condition that does not exist. There are other articles legitimizing the pseudoscientific concept of Qi like this one "5 Acupressure Points for Gas and Bloating"

Third, Healthline has commercial ties to a number of dubious companies, and refers people to buy their products, sometimes contrary to mainstream medical recommendations. See this one: The 10 Best Vitamin B Complex Supplements, A Dietitian's Picks or their prominent supplement section. Worse, they have run sponsored content like this one: 5 Reasons To Love Integrative Therapeutics or this Here’s How This Next-Generation Probiotic Strain Can Transform Your Gut. There are also commercial links to some dubious at-home testing companies like Everlywell. Some tests, even if technically valid, should not be run without a doctor recommendation and high pre-test probability.

Fourth, many articles seem to have been created for SEO and social media sharing purposes rather than for any legitimate purpose. See examples by searching the site for the word banana.

ScienceFlyer (talk) 17:23, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

More on Red Ventures and its priorities: Healthline was purchased by Red Ventures in 2019. To the extent that Healthline may have been reliable prior to the change of management, it is clearly not reliable now. Red Ventures also owns Bankrate, The Points Guy, CNET, Medical News Today, PsychCentral, Lonely Planet, and Healthgrades. After Red Ventures purchased CNET, it was reported that CNET was creating AI-generated content and content that was favorable toward advertisers and affiliates. In a 2021 NY Times article, a former Red Ventures employee said the company is “all about profit maximization.” Further:

The company [Red Ventures] found itself in the publishing business almost by accident, and is now leading a shift in that industry toward what is sometimes called “intent-based media” — a term for specialist sites that attract people who are already looking to spend money in a particular area (travel, tech, health) and guide them to their purchases, while taking a cut.

It’s a step away from the traditional advertising business toward directly selling you stuff. Red Ventures, for instance, plans to steer readers of Healthline to doctors or drugs found on another site it recently acquired, HealthGrades, which rates and refers doctors. Red Ventures will take a healthy commission on each referral.
— New York Times, 2021

ScienceFlyer (talk) 22:31, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Compelling information that speaks to how we evaluate reliability. CNET is already red-listed at WP:RSP; it sounds like we should be looking at all of Red Ventures rather than just Healthline. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:26, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support blacklist. Healthline have been cranking out articles and videos supportive of cholesterol denialism and also publishing dangerous misinformation that saturated fat consumption is not a risk factor for heart disease. They have also published articles supporting alleged benefits of coconut oil which are based on weak evidence [20], the ketogenic diet [21], [22] etc. Not a reliable source for medical claims about health. Psychologist Guy (talk) 21:51, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support blacklist. Another Red Ventures-acquired content mill. Like CNET and so many other Red Ventures properties, chances are quite a lot of this is actually being created by AI now. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:43, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support deprecation and blacklist The risk from allowing this source that I see is that it easily hoodwinks unknowing people into trusting its "medical review" and believing it's a reliable source, when it clearly isn't. (t · c) buidhe 00:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. During the discussion, I noticed User:Zefr, who proposed the blacklist, had replaced a HealthLine source with one from ClevelandClinic. When I accused the latter source of some of the editing approach that voters here had criticised HealthLine for, User:JoelleJay appeared to suggest that one should be binned too for being " well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic". Maybe we should ban the Lancet as well for being a well known promoter of fraudulent MMR research. I think the statement above "Wikipedia editors who do not know how to find and recognize high-quality readily-available biomedical sources should not be editing biomedical information in the first place" indicates what's going on here. Elitism. Well Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia anyone can edit. What we've got here is a willy waving game by experienced Wikipedians with access to the finest sources who would rather that the great unwashed weren't allowed to edit here and pollute their articles with citations to publications they wouldn't be seen dead reading. I mean, HealthLine and Cleveland are clearly aimed at the general reader, not "experts like us". Finding flaws in others writing is an easy game and but this forum isn't here to boost our egos that we are better than that lot over there. They're the competition and so it seems we mustn't be seen to endorse them.

If folk want a medical encyclopaedia where only experts are allowed to edit, try MDWiki. I don't think Wikipedia should just give editors a bigger hammer with which to hit other (new) editors who haven't reached their level of expertise in policy and enjoy their privileged access to sources. This is not what Wikipedia is about. It is here for anyone to edit, and we live with that. -- Colin°^Talk 11:27, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the right analogy. Lancet and Cleveland Clinic are top-notch at what they do (or at least in other areas of what they do), and make occasional mistakes (as does the NEJM from my typical Jankovic example). Lancet corrected their mistake (the NEJM didn't, but I digress). They aren't reliant on Wikipedia or search engine optimization to push their visibility or reputation or to gain links or clients.

These sources like Red Ventures publications gain traction via links on Wikipedia.

Regarding your concerns of elitism, I don't have journal access unless I travel an hour one-way. These days, there is so much open access publishing, and so many books available at archive.org or via google book excerpts, that I'm not convinced that there is as big of a problem in finding good sources as there was ten years or so ago. Yes, several times a year, I have to ask people if they can email me a journal source, but that's usually because I'm trying to take existing content to a higher level of sourcing (as opposed to the average student or new or casual editor). If a new or casual or student editor is doing a major rewrite or content addition to sources like healthline, the sooner their efforts can be reoriented, the better for all; they learn better sourcing sooner, we don't have to clean up later. I realize (and am frequently reminded that) I'm not a "typical" editor, but then those that are apparently considered "typical" don't seem to stick around for the long haul anyway (eg, Special:Contributions/Sm999). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:51, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

help with link spam to copyvio references at worldradiohistory.com

Per WP:COPYVIO, Wikipedia does not allow links to copyvio material, and that includes when linked from a reference. In investigating such links, I've found an egregious pattern of aggressively linking to worldradiohistory.com. This site hosts PDF scans of broadcast and music industry magazines, like Billboard (magazine), Broadcasting & Cable, Broadcasting, and so on.

There were about 2000 such links in the encyclopedia. I've cleaned up a couple hundred links, most notably in WGN America and in Superstation. Through these edits, I've convinced myself that these links are deliberately placed with great frequency:

• One {{cite web}} tag per page, rather than a range of pages in one tag
• Use of links in external links for parameters like page= in order to have more links
• dense referencing patterns, suggesting superfluous references to again increase the number of links

so I've become suspicious that these are deliberately placed as link spam, maybe for SEO or ad revenue or something else.

Here are some diffs of my fixes:

• changes at WGN Sports
• changes at WGN America
• changes at Superstation

What is the best way to fix these? Editing them out is quite tedious. Can the worldradiohistory.com website be blacklisted? -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:21, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Pinging radio expert @Sammi Brie who may know more about this website. —Kusma (talk) 23:07, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

So there are a few pieces to this puzzle, Mikeblas and Kusma.

• I actually that I have a minor COI, not with the content hosted on it but with the site itself (I've contributed some non-content-related material to it). I also know the founder from being on the same discussion forums about radio. For what it's worth, the site FAQ notes, Much is used with the owner's permission but we can not sell it. Further, fulfillment would be a great burden for a non-profit site. There is also a take-down policy (which uses the site's former domain and name), and I have seen some publications removed at publisher's request. If more information is warranted, I can see about putting you in touch with the founder. I suspect some of the site's oldest US material (though probably not much-cited) could be PD, as there are some 1920s radio magazines in the catalog.
  • The take-down policy reads as follows: www.americanradiohistory.com makes digital versions of collections and publications accessible in the following situations: 1) They are in the public domain 2) In the case of periodicals, the journal ceased publication and no apparent rights holder is accessible wherefore abandonment is assumed. 3) www.americanradiohistory.com has permission to make them accessible 4) The item is out of print and the publisher can not be located for further clarification. 5) We make them accessible for education and research purposes as a legal fair use, or 6) There are no known restrictions on use.
• I know exactly the user who can be pinpointed to the referencing patterns, multi-page misuse, and dense style: User:Tvtonightokc. His page and writing style is so unbelievably dense that it has caused me concern for years—a concern I've raised on his user talk with little success (Special:Diff/1073719486). (Try reading KWTV-DT vis-a-vis KFOR-TV!) There is a reason that some of my GAs in this field actually saw a 40-percent or more decline in readable prose size when I worked on them. I also find myself fixing lots of these "individual-link" errors when I work on pages he has edited heavily.
• And I've added probably thousands of links myself in working on hundreds of such pages. I know Broadcasting and Radio & Records are also in ProQuest, but not in TWL's subscription to it, and later years of Broadcasting & Cable articles are in Gale General OneFile (which TWL has). Converting refs to use database links will be a chore galore, though it should be possible for a user even with TWL ProQuest access to search by article title of non-full-text items.

I'm hopeful there's some sort of solution where everything doesn't have to be wiped, but I obviously understand this as a site policy concern. Pinging someone I know who should also see this discussion immediately, Nathan Obral. I am also on Discord if you need further coordination. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 23:57, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't think there's any question that the site is on very weak IP territory. I don't see the FAQ you're quoting, but what you quote ("abandonment is assumed" ... "educational fair use") just isn't the way copyrights work. The disclaimer visible on the site is more of the same. If the site did have permission to redistribute complete issues of magaiznes, it would claim so clearly and unambiguously.

Not everything needs to be wiped. It's just that the links need to be removed to comply with WP:COPYVIO. You can see this in the diffs I posted -- magazine, issued date (or number and volume), and page number remain; the link goes, and the via= param goes with it. -- Mikeblas (talk) 00:09, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe 2). and 4). are valid copyright exemptions. Per WP:COPYVIOEL ..links to websites that display copyrighted works are acceptable as long as the website is manifestly run, maintained or owned by the copyright owner; the website has licensed the work from the owner; or it uses the work in a way compliant with fair use. Abandonment or being unable to contact the publisher doesn't mean copyright is no longer in effect, and isn't fair use. 6). Also seems shaky as copyright exists unless established otherwise (e.g. it has entered the public domain or the creator of the work has given up the copyright to the public). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 00:49, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Before sanitizing the links, let's get the problem pages figured out and dealt with first. Especially if the sourcing issues are coming from Tvtonightokc and his incredibly dense writing style, which has absolutely frustrated me over the years.

Sammi Brie and I entirely blew up 1994–1996 United States broadcast television realignment and rewrote the whole thing AND are in the process of merging that with Repercussions of the 1994–1996 United States broadcast TV realignment. You can see here how badly bloated and unreadable both pages were here and here. I noticed there were things poorly attributed, with one urban legend existing on MULTIPLE pages because of a long-dead website, Michiguide.com (here. here and here.)

Point being, this is an eternal cleanup job, and using WRH has helped my cause with trying to tackle all this stuff alongside Newspapers.com and NewsBank. (Sammi has access to GenealogyBank, I don't.) Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 00:51, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow. Why shouldn't the links to copyvio be removed (to promptly the WP:COPYVIO and WP:COPYVIOEL policies) before re-writing the articles? It seems straight-forward (but tedious) to relieve the links, but rewriting a couple dozen articles will take a long time. Maybe I've misunderstood something. -- Mikeblas (talk) 02:10, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

My concern is that there exists no choice but to rewrite the articles in question. When I redid the realignment articles, I made it a concerted effort to retain as little of the original text as I could, effectively working under the mindset it WAS riddled with copyvios (including redoing all of the inline refs, which were poorly set up and often didn't include things like page numbers).

I noticed the changes on WKEF and it is actually inexcusable that the local paper (the Dayton Daily News) isn't cited at all in the station's early years. There is no reason for Broadcasting magazine to even be used in an article like that unless it was for some unavoidable reason. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 03:07, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Probably a less confusing way to say this is, the articles are more the problem here and need to be addressed, no matter what. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 03:18, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I have a hard time responding to limiting statements like "no choice but to rewrite", "there is no reason", and "no matter what". I think it's quite viable to remove the offending copyvio links leaving the complete (but lin-linked) date/issue citations behind. That can be done promptly, and any overall editorial concerns about the articles themselves can proceed concurrently and takes a long as needed -- but the copyvio issue needs to be addressed. Why do you exclude that path ... and all others? -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:06, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

This merits a comprehensive technical solution than just stripping out the URLs. I’m currently brainstorming a possible method that could be tried. YES it will mean more work in the short term but will spare incredible headache in the future trying to backdate ProQuest template insertions and not knowing what pages need to be fixed. The current stripping out doesn’t do me or Sammi Brie any favors as we need a path to find a solution first.

I have to consult others more technically versed to see if my idea is even workable before I propose it here, so I please ask for the benefit of some time here. But this can be handled in a much better way that can at least help me and Sammi and others. The current proposal is more a hindrance to us than a help, moreso because Sammi is the only one right now capable of FIXING them due to WMF not having the necessary PQ libraries on hand in the Wikipedia Library, I’m terribly limited here.

And yes, I stand by my assertion that the aforementioned articles need to be rewritten wholesale anyway, as further elaborated by Wcquidditch below. The topic fields of TV and radio have numerous articles that make me and Wcquidditch and Sammi cringe to no end, even as all three of us (and numerous other editors) have been working our butts off trying to fix them all. That to me remains a core problem here regardless. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 19:44, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

The copyvio link policies exist because Wikipedia is negatively affected by such links. I don't think those policies have escapes for editor convenience. ProQuest is a subscription service, so updating links to point to it only benefits the few people who have access to ProQuest (and who have a subscription that includes access to those collections, and ...) I'm sorry, but I don't think the correction of the URLs should wait. "FIXING them" means removing the copyvio URL.

My understanding is that Sammie wants to convert the deleted links to ProQuest links. Presumably, they'd want add ProQuest links any appropriate reference (any references to Billboard or C+B, for example), not just any reference that used to have a URL pointing at copyvio material. Solving that problem isn't requisite to eliminating the copyvio issue as far as I can tell. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:48, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I strenuously and vigorously object to this insistence that only one solution can be had. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater without a fair and proper assessment of usage of links in WRH is wrong and I oppose it completely. It’s already been shown that some of the publications are in fact public domain or hosted on the website by the blessing of the publisher, so the blanket copyvio claims for every link on the site is entirely inaccurate and presents a larger array of problems in the long run for WPRS and TVS, denigrating those articles further than they are.

I simply cannot abide by such rash and harsh reasoning that we have no choice but to do something so rigid and inflexible. There has to be a much better solution to this problem. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 18:36, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Looking at Superstation... the article just needs to be redone outright. It's too burdensome and cumbersome to even be workable and I can't see how the subject matter is even remotely accessible to the lay reader who knows nothing about the intricacies of broadcasting. Same with WGN America. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 01:25, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I have removed the WorldRadioHistory links from Superstation (and a few other articles). -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:44, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• Just a note, I've started overbuilding some of the Broadcasting (& Cable) references in articles of mine with the ProQuest IDs associated with them, e.g. Special:Diff/1157508502. I am going to need an army to do this on probably thousands of pages, and the fact that WMF does not have in its ProQuest bundle the right database will make this slightly more difficult for other users to carry out. (If anyone from WMF is listening, you want Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive, collections 1 and 2, which will solve the most-used WRH publications.) Plus, that still doesn't cover annuals; books; and other sundry matter. Another courtesy ping to Wcquidditch, one of our broadcasting editors at volume who will want to see this and who has probably added another large number of these links. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 03:27, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  As it happens, I already knew of this discussion and was already preparing a response! Couldn't there be some way to automate (with a bot or other tool) the removal of the links in question? That would probably aid with the tediousness. (Bad writing styles are a problem that should be dealt with too, particularly when they are as much of a chore to read as to edit — but not necessarily with the urgency of anything related to copyright policy.) As for sunsetting WRH as a path to cite these magazines… as someone who, admittedly, has (as Sammi Brie correctly noted) often used it to help source broadcasting-related articles, I have wondered at times whether its use actually complied with policy or has been a topicwide systemic linkvio. (This topic area has often been terrible at strict adherence to policies and guidelines over the years — off the top of my head, too many station articles still have non-free former logos that need to go, many more still bold the applicable letters of a call sign meaning against the MoS, the topic area was rather lax on notability for a long time, the perennial problems with OR, synthesis, and crystal ballery (and a lot of those can bring us back to what Nathan Obral said about the articles are more the problem here) — so uncovering another policy issue might be anticlimatic to some.) I cannot say I am completely surprised someone, after all these years, finally brought this up to a noticeboard.

  One additional note: Any cleanup of these links should also take into account the 12,347 links to americanradiohistory.com, the site's previous name, and the remaining 504 (mostly dead) links to davidgleason.com, the personal site of WRH's proprietor which housed its content early on. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 03:37, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  Any link removal should be coordinated with a ProQuest ID tagging (as what Sammi Brie mentioned above). I do not have access to this because it's not a part of PQ's offerings in the Wikipedia Library. I don't know if bots are capable of things like that... Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 04:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) @Wcquidditch Removing the links is trivial if something like GreenC bot can handle this. But yes, I agree with a lot of what you have said. This field has had a years-long odyssey to anything approaching respectability and some really painful moments. For the benefit of non-topic editors, we had an RfC about adhering to MOS:ACRO and an attempt to update the SNG that was turned back with a suggestion to conform to the GNG, which may explain the state we're in. More broadly, is there a utility that can find ProQuest IDs (including some fuzzy matches) for a source given a date, possible title, and publication to search? If it exists, it would need to run on a lot of pages, but it would solve the vast majority of the issues with the most-used publications. The rest would likely be intractable annuals, books, and other material. There are also some 1920s publications, and possibly pre-1964 books, that would be PD in the US. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

  I've written a tool that removes the links (and: via= and access-date=, plus any archive-tags, and converts the reference to {{cite magazine}}). That removes all the link information and leaves the publication name, issue date, and page number information -- all still available for a viable reference, and all supporting any conversion that might be desired in the future.

  This is working pretty well, but I don't want to fully automate it because I wouldn't be able to do adequate testing. I need to review the changes it makes each time before submitting them. WRH seems to be linked dozens of times from individual articles, while ARH seems to be linked here and there -- sometimes often, but only a few times per article. That makes cleanup slower. Also, this tool only addresses {{cite web}} references; raw external links aren't parsed because they don't have a consistent structure.

  So far, I've done this for:Loring Buzzell, List of Billboard number-one singles of 1941, KFDA-TV, KTVQ (Oklahoma City), TBS (American TV channel), WGN-TV, KOCO-TV, and KOTV-DT ... and probably a few others. -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:53, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  • A note: my overbuild process for references has identified so far at least one publication so far for which no copyright renewal was ever filed that is in WRH's holdings, Radio Guide. [23] This publication probably should be exempted from link removal. There are also likely more obscure pre-1963 periodicals that are not specifically called out as non-renewed in the first renewals for periodicals listing. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 05:18, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

    An audit should be done for all of the publications in WRH and to see what legitimately falls in PD and what doesn’t. A few of my Commons uploads survived a deletion request after verifying that a WGAR promotional album hosted in WRH (which I list in the bibliography for WHKW, by the way) did not file a copyright renewal and actually WERE verified PD. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 12:34, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

    • Duncan's American Radio should also be exempt — the author has given permission for the hosting of the scanned magazines. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:36, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

David Gleason has been praised for amassing and digitizing his collection of magazines. The worldradiohistory.com website is described as trustworthy, used by scholars for research.[24] When people on Wikipedia are citing a magazine page hosted by a trustworthy online source, per WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, they do not need to cite the hosting service.

That said, if other editors want to check the cited source, the URL from worldradiohistory.com gives quick access. I would not like to see these convenient links removed. Binksternet (talk) 05:19, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm also compelled to point out, for what it's worth, that when modern-day Broadcasting+Cable marked its 90th anniversary in 2021, they linked to both the first issue of Broadcasting from 1931 as well as the 1982 obituary of co-founder Sol Taishoff… and in both cases, they linked to the copies hosted on World Radio History. Make of that what you will (even if it is little more than the periodical equivalent of a TV station embedding an unofficial YouTube upload of their own coverage of an old news story, something I've run into at least once)… WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 05:31, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Where they have the licence from the copyright holder to host the material it's not a problem, but as I said in my previous comment "the rights holder can't be found" is not a copyright exemption. Being a useful research source isn't an exemption either. I don't doubt the site is trustworthy and that the content they are hosting is being preproduced faithfully, the fact the discussion is happening at RSN and not the copyright board muddies the issue at hand. If the copyright of something they are hosting cannot be verified it must not be linked to, WP:COPYVIO is quite clear about that. The reference to the magazine can stay, again this isn't really an RS issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:46, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Broadcasting's history and lineage can be best described as convoluted. Sol Taishoff bought several publications over the years and merged them into the magazine (even Broadcasting was born out of a 1933 merger with the even older Broadcast Advertising!) which is why you see the magazine titled in the 1950s as “Broadcasting—Telecasting”. The current rights holders might be maintaining a copyright either through Taishoff or Cahners but it’s not something that I can say with 100 percent assurance. Nor do I know about the status for the merged publications. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 12:13, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

@Wcquidditch: A few days after you posted this, it kinda makes me wonder if B+C’s legal counsel is even aware that a third-party website is hosting back issues of their publication. But that B+C linked to one of these files in WRH for a recent story on their website, it unintentionally conveys endorsement on their part, does it not? This is not, NOT a clean-cut situation and B+C needs to clarify their stance as much as David (Eduardo) Gleason does. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 19:24, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Nazario Collection and use of YouTube (and the media)

This uses a YouTube video 87 times[25]. At WP:FTN#Nazario Collection the article creator User:Old School WWC Fan points out that the speaker and the institute are reliable sources, but despite that it appears from the discussion 3 and a half years ago at Talk:Nazario Collection#El Nuevo Día article written by a free lance journalist, not Ramos that the video, a conference speech made 7 years ago was meant as a placeholder and that a peer reviewed paper was being published. So far that doesn't seem to have happened. I'm also concerned about the heavy use of the media. Doug Weller talk 14:50, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

The video was published by an academic institution and the speaker is a PhD in archeology. El Nuevo Día is the main newspaper within the territory and I would understand the concerns if the pieces were simply written by a “freelance journalist”, which is not the case as was already explained in 2019. Instead, they were published following interviews with the archeologist and echo his stances, so, the reasons to question their reliability are spurious. The guidelines quoted by the assessment department of the archeology WikiProject do not mention anywhere that all references must be from academic, peer reviewed or otherwise specialized publications.

This is evident in some of the project’s Featured Articles such as Acra (fortress), which does feature some interesting sources such as “Bible History Daily” from the Pseudo-Archaeological organization “Biblical Archeology Society”. Newspaper references abound in those articles, for example, Ancient Egypt quotes the Egypt Independent and Arab News (both of which, unlike ENDI, are categorized as either “very conservative” or outright “unreliable”). And about using the same reference, well, featured pieces like Buckton Castle and Brougham Castle do so as well. Lastly, the scientific work has been partially published in the form of a preliminary catalogue, as previously noted. The COVID-19 pandemic did happen the following year. - Old School WWC Fan (talk) 23:08, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Shocking that the Creationist source was not noticed. I've removed it - in any case that section was about an academic's opinion and shouldn't have had another source unless that source was discussing the author. Examples of bad use of sources in other articles don't mean we can use them here. Ironic that you’re using Media Bias/Fact Check shows up when I read the above highlighted by a script as unreliable - which it is. Isee you've also used it to argue that another source is unreliable. Yes, those two articles rely, probably too heavily, on the same reliable sources, not a 7 year old conference presentation not followed by a paper. I don't see how Covid could have prevented publication. Doug Weller talk 07:23, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

A drop of enrollment to 48.9% of capacity led to lack of funding and for some time the campus that he works for (UPR Utuado) was on notice for potential closesure. It remains low with only ≈100 more students. I do not expect you to be familiar with archeology or academia in the island, but if you do, then you should know that funding is scarce. No money, no tests, no publishing. That is how COVID intervened.

The script is not really necessary to figure that those sources are slanted and biased. You missed the point behind the examples, it’s not ”other stuff exists”, it’s “this is the threshold of reliability used by ARCHEO” and moving goal posts. The usage of the video to source the nonsense that was theorized about the pieces for decades can be solved by replacing them with the bulletin of the PR History Academy, which is peer reviewed. But, is it really more reliable? They include everything, including Barry Fell. Sure, they would meet RS as the author and those involved in peer reviewing his article would check almost all of the arbitrary points of HISTRS. But I preferred the actual archeologist. I have tried to discuss the importance of the context with you, the issue could have been easily solved by splitting half of the article to cover the noise and kept the new studies in (in a manner similar to what Pyramidology is to the Giza pyramid complex). Old School WWC Fan (talk) 23:58, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Even if the presentation video and El Nuevo Día article are good they're overused. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 07:36, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

From FTN, remove all or most content cited to the video and news articles. Rodríguez Ramos has published on the history of the collection, that should in general be usable, but remove all the speculation which hasn't undergone peer review. fiveby(zero) 12:51, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Removing the sources for things that are facts, as in removing all, should be reconsidered. If C14 dates them to the Y to X timeframe, that is a stated fact that ENDI or any other newspaper can cite from him as an authority on the subject without the need for the expertise of the journalist. It’s a standard that even applies to expert witnesses within the legal system. I don’t mind one way or another if you remove the theoretical ruminating, as that will eventually become redundant either way. Old School WWC Fan (talk) 23:58, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Ukraine UAP Study

In the light of NASA now also looking into UAPs (https://www.youtube.com/live/bQo08JRY0iM) ...

I find the Ukrainian UAP study very interesting. But before I add sightings from the study to the List of reported UFO sightings first I would like to ask the experts here if the it qualifies as (WP) "reliable source"?

Link Part 1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.11215

Quoting: 》Conclusions

The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts a study of UAP. We used two meteor stations installed in Kyiv and in the Vinarivka village in the south of the Kyiv region. Observations were performed with colour video cameras in the daytime sky. A special observation technique had developed for detecting and evaluating UAP characteristics. There are two types of UAP, conventionally called Cosmics, and Phantoms. Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 per cent. We observed a broad range of UAPs everywhere. We state a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second. Some bright objects exhibit regular brightness variability in the range of 10 -20 Hz. Two-site observations of UAPs at a base of 120 km with two synchronised cameras allowed the detection of a variable object, at an altitude of 1170 km. It flashes for one hundredth of a second at an average of 20 Hz. Phantom shows the colur characteristics inherent in an object with zero albedos. We see an object because it shields radiation due to Rayleigh scattering. An object contrast made it possible to estimate the distance using colorimetric methods. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s.《

Link Part 2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.17085

》Conclusions

The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts a study of UAP. We used two meteor stations installed in Kyiv and in the Vinarivka village in the south of the Kyiv region. Observations were performed with color video cameras in the daytime sky. A special observation technique had developed for detecting and evaluating UAP characteristics. There are two types of UAP, conventionally called Cosmics, and Phantoms. Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 per cent. Two-site observations of UAPs at a base of 120 km with two synchronized cameras allowed the detection of two variable objects, at an altitude of 620 and 1130 km, moving at a speed of 256 and 78 km/s. Light curves of objects show a variability of about 10 Hz. Colorimetric analysis showed that the objects are dark: B -V = 1.35, V -R = 0.23. We demonstrate the properties of several phantoms that were observed in Kyiv and the Kyiv region in 2018-2022. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -14 km. We estimate their size from 20 to about of 100 meters and speeds up to 30 km/s. Color properties of bright flying objects indicate that objects are perceived as very dark. Albedo less than 0.01 would seem to make them practically black bodies, not reflecting electromagnetic radiation. We can assume that a bright flying object, once in the troposphere, will be visible as a phantom. All we can say about phantoms is to repeat the famous quote: "Coming from the part of space, that lies outside Earth and its atmosphere. Means belonging or relating to the Universe".《

wikt:ELI5:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZSlLH0TzE

Foerdi (talk) 17:44, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Its a bit of a nitpick, but do they say UAPs are UFOs? Slatersteven (talk) 17:53, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

They don't. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

According to WP itself an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon is an UFO (redirects there). Are we seriously discussing the fact that UAP is synonymous to UFO now? Foerdi (talk) 19:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Nothing in the study would validate adding anything to List of reported UFO sightings. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I am really interested in your train of thought. Can you please elaborate / give examples as what you would see as "validates adding"? Foerdi (talk) 19:04, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Any source which talks about a reported UFO sighting. This one does not. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:08, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

See my reply above. UAP = UFO Foerdi (talk) 19:10, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

And is there any independent reliable source which talks about a reported UFO sighting or is it just the primary source? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:18, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I did not know the concept of reliable source is based on web of trust, where you must be invited to the club by existing reliable sources? Is there some documentation regarding this rule somewhere in WP? I can accept if this is one of the mandatory criteria, but honestly it is hard for me to understand the sense of it (thinking of the scenario where one malicious existing so called "reliable" source could introduce many fake reliable sources if it is really that easy) Foerdi (talk) 19:26, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

A source which did that wouldn't be reliable. The message you should be getting is this: even if the source is reliable you shouldn't be adding anything to List of reported UFO sightings based on a single source. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:36, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

perhaps we could say their multi-site and multi-sensors approach (more than one meteor observations stations located in different cities, with each using multiple cameras) qualifies as "secondary source(s) (LightTM)"? Probably not in your eyes... Foerdi (talk) 19:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Thats just not what the terms mean, a secondary source would be another article which talked about the findings in this article or an article in the popular press about it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:36, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Quick Google Search results:

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkg3nb/ukraines-astronomers-say-there-are-tons-of-ufos-over-kyiv
• https://www.jpost.com/science/article-717346
• https://www.livescience.com/ukraine-ufo-uap-report

... and so on Foerdi (talk) 19:42, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Then what are we doing here? Use those instead of the pre-print. Its more a WP:DUEWEIGHT than reliability question. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:51, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Like I said, I had the naive mindset that also the upstream source (the study / PDFs) to all the media articles must itself qualify as reliable in the eyes of WP. Not only the media which talk about the study. But I get it, the media is reliable, they vetted their upstream sources in the eyes of WP. OK, great, then I can go ahead ... Foerdi (talk) 19:55, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I think you still aren't understanding what WP:RS means and how it differs from WP:DUEWEIGHT. Perhaps I am not the on who will be able to make this educational breakthrough with you. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:11, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

As it's a pre-print I would suggest it shouldn't be used for anything contentious unless other reliable sources treat it as reliable. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 19:38, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Please note wp:rsp, Wikipedia is not an RS. Slatersteven (talk) 08:15, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone

Can a TV review published in The Mail on Sunday be used as a reliable source for the views of the author (in this case, Peter Hitchens) with regard to the TV series reviewed? Can this edit be restored? A discussion has begun on the talk page of the article in question (Talk:Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone). I started an RfC, but it was deleted by Redrose64, who recommended that I raise the matter here. Khiikiat (talk) 23:08, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

The edit can't be restored, as it isn't supported by a reliable source. Every time there has been a discussion about some kind of exemption for particular content from WP:DAILYMAIL it has failed to get community support. Another RFC for TV reviews is as unlikely to come to any consensus. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 10:08, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

note: I'm the editor who originally removed it as almost certainly UNDUE - it's in a deprecated source, and Hitchens isn't a noted expert on Russian history or something of that sort of relevance (even as he was apparently in Russia at the time), it's just a TV review. Nor would the cite pass ABOUTSELF, which I'm pretty sure is strictly when it's the DM or MoS talking about the DM or MoS, and not the fact that a reviewer wrote something - David Gerard (talk) 11:03, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

(copy of my response to the now-deleted RFC at the talk page.) (Invited by the bot to the now-deleted RFC) First a disclaimer, I'm against all such over generalizations regarding sources and am also quick to point out that the linked overgeneralization page is neither a policy or a guideline. A better criteria is expertise and objectivity with respect to the text which cited it. So, regarding the source, it's clearly suitable to support that Peter Hitchens said that. Next is whether or not Hitchen's view should go into the article. My second disclaimer is that everything I know about Hitchens I learned in the last 5 minutes. My thought would be to include.North8000 (talk) 13:20, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

So IMO there are two questions there, one of them not germane to this noticeboard. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:20, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes restore. I guess that David Gerard's edit summary "rm deprecated DM/MOS, UNDUE and unusable" refers to Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. The RfC about Mail on Sunday doesn't apply here since we're talking about a review, i.e. an opinion, and opinions are okay RS-wise as was established for Daily Mail. (I also regard Mail on Sunday as WP:NEWSORG but acknowledge that David Gerard and I disagree about that guideline.) As for calling it UNDUE, that's a subjective WP:NPOVN matter which really should be up to the people who really work to improve the article, but since it's brought here I'll opine that Peter Hitchens seems at least as well known as the other reviewers cited in the article (Stuart Jeffries and Dan Einav). Peter Gulutzan (talk) 15:01, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't see why this opinion piece should be given leeway, other sources for reviews exist. Use them instead, as per the community consensus. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:59, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

KFYR-TV

Is it reliable? I wish to use it for its news content related to North Dakota legislation. QuicoleJR (talk) 23:45, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Also asking about IGaming Business and Williston Herald for the same reason. QuicoleJR (talk) 23:52, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

KFYR/KMOT should be generally reliable for North Dakota news. Most local TV stations generally are reliable for the areas they cover. (Disclosure: this is my topic area, and I've edited KFYR-TV fairly heavily.) Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:17, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Alright, thanks! QuicoleJR (talk) 13:54, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

MSN and politics

Not just about politics, I don't understand the overall consensus over MSN considering its not a news source, just a web portal. But I see MSN being used to a significant extent over at 2023 Indian wrestlers' protest in the form of [26] [27] [28]...etc. If its reliable for politics, is it reliable for Indian politics? >>> Extorc.talk 12:14, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I doubt its an RS for anything, as it is now a news service, it is (as you say) just a web portal. Slatersteven (talk) 12:17, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

@Slatersteven, I would really prefer removal of this source from the page considering the page is already plagued with WP:CITEKILL and alot!! of WP:UNDUE additions. What is your take on this? >>> Extorc.talk 12:24, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

As I said I doubt its an RS I have no issue with you removing it. Slatersteven (talk) 12:37, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

MSN runs a lot of syndicated content. Does it have original reporting too? Because there's 17,715 uses of msn.com in mainspace. I'm wondering if it's more like Yahoo! News or strictly just reprints, in which case we may have a slight mess - a lot of it's RS material, but a lot of it just isn't. Might be worth a clarification on RSP - David Gerard (talk) 12:52, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• This is probably due to people not understanding the difference between a news portal and a news source - and that we need them to cite the actual source, not the portal. Perhaps we need to make the distinction clearer in our policies? Blueboar (talk) 13:14, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

  And also maybe a soft filter for links to prominent web portals like MSN, if we decide that they need to be excluded entirely? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:49, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

  A filter might not be a bad idea, the problem with such portals is that they can hide the original source. Both MSN and Yahoo syndicate content from the Daily Mail for instance. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:50, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• I'm finding a lot of the MSN links in Wikipedia are turning out to be dead links - they don't seem to keep all syndicated content up. We may in fact have cause to want to discourage its use - David Gerard (talk) 23:59, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• Generally it's not hard to find the original article using a web search for any verbatim sentence in the article, so these are fixable manually. But nobody should be citing syndicated MSN/Yahoo content directly, because without knowing the original source you can't evaluate reliability. — Bilorv (talk) 20:38, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

I think it's just better to call-out news sources for any wrong information they published under criticisms. They point should be it should list exactly what the allegation is/are against the news outlet or journalist rather than just 'they publish all lies' or the equivalent. CaribDigita (talk) 00:12, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

NBC, MSNBC and Russiagate

As details emerge, many plots that were originally deemed to be Russian bots, may not have been.

Even the Pentagon papers many initially suspected was a Russian plot, but turned out to be an American servicemen.

Hamilton 68 is one such example, where the organization now claims that media misunderstood them, and they never claimed the 600+ accounts they were tracking were Russian. Kudos to Business Insider for correcting their posts on Hamilton 68 [29]

Insider has corrected three posts that initially described the dashboard as exclusively tracking Russian bots.

It appears MSNBC still hasn't corrected some of their stories for example this 2018 article [30] , [31], [32]

Morrell testified that he concocted the letter with the 51 agents that "certified" that the Hunter Biden laptop was likely Russian disinformation, in an effort to influence the 2020 elections.

Did Russia aim to influence the 2020 elections? Yes, however the extent of the impact of IRA was 0.1% or negligible compared to American tweets, according to university studies. [33]

Shouldn't media that jump to the conclusion that whichever plot is "Russian interference" without adequate evidence (which includes anonymous sources) be labelled as unreliable? For example the letter with 51 agents, clearly stated that they did not have evidence to say it was Russian interference, it just fit what they thought it could be. Shaping public influence to vilify the FBI who said the Hunter Biden laptop did not appear to be Russian disinformation.

In this video are many clips from msnbc which turned out to be false, and clearly sensationalistic. [34] Aufumy (talk) 03:02, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

RfC: Instagram

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Closed RfC per WP:RFCNOT. This is covered by WP:SPS, WP:UGC, and WP:RSPUSE. RfCs are for proposals, not questions about policy. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:59, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

---

Per previous discussions, [35][36][37][38] what is the reliability of Instagram, same as Facebook (which is also unreliable since 2020), which is owned by Meta since 2012. There are many sources in biographies of living persons (instagram.com  , but the exception of help.instagram.com). 112.204.197.139 (talk) 22:51, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

About Issue*wire, stylised as Issue*Wire

Hi all,

Apologies if this is malformed - "Before starting an RfC please consider: is your question a one-off, or is it project-wide? Is it about reliability or prominence?" - posting on this page generates an RfC?

This website describes itself as "PRESS RELEASE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK Distribute your Press Release to over 150+ media outlets, magazines, major news outlets. Get Genuine Media Coverage and Exposure at Major Media Outlets" at https: //www. issuewire. com/

It is currently (5 Jun 2023) used as a reference in these articles:

• 2021 Azad Kashmiri general election, reference 7
• Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, reference 8
• Sushil Kumar 'Indu' Tiwari, reference 6
• Binod Chaudhary, reference 40
• Tom Morello discography, reference 70
• Santia Deck, reference 6
• Vasant Gajera, reference 4
• Bahari Ibaadat, reference 9
• NEC Software Solutions, reference 12
• List of press release agencies, reference 7 ?!
• Francisco Burgos, reference 4
• Horwitz Publications, reference 12
• Edmonton Soccer Dome, reference 23

It would appear to me that citations from a website that advertises itself as generating press release copy for other press releases would not be in any way considered a reliable reference.

Your thoughts about this?

Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 11:23, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Press releases distribution companies generally hose and have their byline on press releases generated their clients. Press releases are considered usable under the strictures of WP:ABOUTSELF. There are examples in your list of both proper use (Uncle Nearest, a whiskey company talking about its history and distribution) and improper (Horowitz Publications, with a comic book seller talking about a used comic book they are offering.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 15:05, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• edited to avoid black-listed website

Facepalm I should have know better when I clicked Publish changes and the relevant edit filter disallowed my edit before posting. As for Horwitz Publications, I see no issue whatsoever here. As for Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, I would first ask that a very large sample of their sippin' whiskey be sent to Peter in Australia aka Shirt58 at his home address <redacted>, <redacted>, Melbourne, Australia, as an interim discussion point.--Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 10:58, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

CIA Factbook vs Scholarly Articles

It is stated in the Lebanon page, that 95% of the Lebanese population is Arab according to the CIA factbook (quite unclear how they deemed them to be Arab) [39] while multiple journals have stated them as being genetically Canaanite. [40] [41] Shouldn't the journals have precedence over the factbook ?

Zlogicalape (talk) 02:02, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

There's two points here. First is there is discrepancies between sources it usually best to mention this in the article, something that can be worked out on the articles talk page. The second is that genetics and culture don't have any real link. So someone could be a descendant of Canaanites but still culturally Arabic. Unfortunately sources tend to talk above both ideas with the same language. It might be best to mention the topics separately, but again I suggest discussing that in the articles talk page. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 14:50, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Culture wasn't used as a form of identity, if it was then that too isn't Arab ! Even if we were to assume that one is Arab and the other is Canaanite, why choose one over the other ! The talk page will be fruitless as most strongly identify with the Arab identity regardless of what genetics, culture ... say. Zlogicalape (talk) 15:54, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Are there any sources which say these two findings are incompatible? Also note that the linked articles do not state "stated them as being genetically Canaanite" they say that they're descendent from the Canaanites not that the modern ethnic group is called Canaanites. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:59, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I'd go with the CIA factbook. Caananites haven't existed as a distinct people for 3,000 years. Calling the Lebanese Cannanites would be like calling the English of the present days the "Bell Beakers" because of the close genetic relationship of present day English with the ancient inhabitants of England. Yes, Lebanese are genetically related to the ancient Caananites (so too are many Jews). The majority of present-day Lebanese would self-identify as Arabs and are they are regarded as a majority Arab country by virtually everyone. Smallchief (talk) 15:29, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

The key is that the given sources are not calling the contemporary Lebanese Cannanites. OP appears to be trying to use them to shoehorn a point which they actually don't support Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

The sources provided by OP aren't actually "multiple journals" either - they seem to be two reports about the same journal article. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

What do you mean by haven't existed as a distinct people ?! If you mean that they didn't have self-governance then sure but that is irrelevant ! But other than that, the people have remained the same within the same lands under different rulers. Does being ruled over by foreign empire erase your identity ?

Self-identification is irrelevant, and is not the discussion ! That could be a section on its own but should not be confounded with the reality of their identity ! Moreover, what ppl regard them as is also highly irrelevant ! Would you argue the earth is flat, bcz of the "majority" and "believed by virtually everyone" ? (in older times) We don't make arguments based on people's beliefs !

P.S: Many self-identify as Arab due to the misconception that they are genetically and culturally Arab ! Zlogicalape (talk) 16:12, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

They state 'over 90% genetically Canaanite' which makes them Canaanite ! And by incompatible, are you referring to if Arabs & Canaanites are distinct people genetically ?! Zlogicalape (talk) 15:58, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

How does that make them Canaanite? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:00, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

How does it not ?! Zlogicalape (talk) 16:15, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree with HEB, Canaanite is a historical ethnicity i.e. a group of people defined by self-identification. Nobody in contemporary Lebanon considers themselves a Canaanite. Zlogicalape shows a complete failure to understand the very important distinction between genetics and ethnicity. The phrase "genetically Canaanite" is meaningless gobbledygook because it confuses these concepts. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:17, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

(ec) There are several issues here. As Hemiauchenia says, there seems to be a confusion between genetics (which the original academic source makes clear is complex here), and ethnicity. Having said that, there are undoubtedly better sources than the CIA World Factbook to consult when discussing ethnicity. It is a tertiary source, often outdated and simplistic, and of little use when discussing the complexities involved when discussing 'Arab' identities. Ethnic self-identification is frequently fluid and contextual, and it can't be reduced to simple 'facts' in a database. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:37, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

1- A large portion of Lebanon identifies as Canaanite ! (False assumption)

2- Ethnicity includes includes genetics in its definition hence very much interlinked Zlogicalape (talk) 16:29, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

No, ethnicity does not 'include genetics'. It (usually) involves concepts around descent, but as defined in academia, is about self-identification, rather than biological principles the persons involved need have no understanding of, or see no relevance of. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:37, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

{{citation needed}} for both of those WP:EXTRAORDINARY claims. Per our article on Ethnicity, Ethnicity may be construed as an inherited or as a societally imposed construct. Ethnic membership tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language, dialect, religion, mythology, folklore, ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on group identification, with many groups having mixed genetic ancestry. In other words, the consensus view is that while ethnic groups may share genetic markers, genetic markers are not determinant of ethnic groups; ethnic groups are socially constructed. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:38, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

From the definition, ethnic groups TEND to be defined by cultural heritage, ancestry ..... OR ... In other words, there are multiple factors with genetics being one. If one is culturally Greek, linguistically Russian and genetically Chinese, what would his ethnicity be ?! Please clarify Zlogicalape (talk) 12:14, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

If a large proportion of Lebanon identifies as Canaanite, then you should go off and find sources that say that. Then you can present it in the article alongside the mainstream view, should WP:FRINGE not apply. While ethnicity has a degree of correlation with genetics in many, but not all, cases, it is a different thing. If you wish to define ethnicity, you must find articles that explicitly talk about that, rather than ancestry. Boynamedsue (talk) 16:40, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

This is going deep into WP:RGW and WP:OR territory. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:44, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Canaanites don't exist today. Until reliable secondary sources say that Lebanese people are Canaanites rather than are descended from Canaanites, we can't call them Canaanites. —DIYeditor (talk) 23:54, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

This is really the crux of the matter. The sources cited by OP may be reliable for the claim that there is substantial genetic continuity between the ancient Canaanite population and the modern Lebanese one (though really we should cite the scholarly article rather than news articles based on a press release about it!) They do not claim (and are therefore not reliable sources for the claim) that the modern Lebanese population is Canaanite or not Arab. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 11:51, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Could both of you please expand on how a person that has Canaanite genes as the vast majority of his genes not be Canaanite and be Arab ?! If 90% of my Genes were Ethiopian, I'm Ethiopian (putting aside linguistic and cultural identities). If most of my genes were Greek, I'd get the citizenship ... Zlogicalape (talk) 12:22, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

This gets into WP:OR and WP:SYNTH territory. It's best to stick to describing obvious facts and what can be cited to a WP:RS. You are drawing a conclusion rather than citing a source. As I explained, saying that someone "is a Canaanite" is different from saying that someone "is mostly descended from Canaanites". This are not equivalent statements. For just a simple illustration, a Japanese-descended American might be 100% descended from Japanese people (not likely but just for illustration) but we would not describe them as Japanese simply because that is their genetic background. Someone in Scotland might be 90% descended from Picts (just for illustration) but that doesn't mean we would call them a Pict. —DIYeditor (talk) 12:30, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

But that is a different topic and a different form of identity ! I'm not drawing out conclusions , just stating them , from a genetic point of view, which is one of the forms of identity which is also mentioned in ethnicity ! I believe your example states the problem perfectly, the first person you mentioned is Japanese but also American ! As each are different ethnic groups ! Genetics aside for the moment, If I am culturally Greek, linguistically Russian and nationally Syrian, then how would you define that person's ethnicity ?! Zlogicalape (talk) 12:54, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It's very simple. If you want to say that modern Lebanese people are mostly Canaanite, you need to find a reliable source that says that. A source saying that they are descended from Canaanites, or have Canaanite genes, is not the same thing. You can find reliable sources which say that Danny Dyer is descended from Edward III: you would I hope agree that this is not the same as Danny Dyer being Edward III. The sources you are citing do not say that modern Lebanese people are ethnically Canaanite, or that Canaanite is a coherent modern ethnicity. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 13:35, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Tertiary sources, such as the CIA Factbook, get their information from secondary sources. Where those sources conflict, they choose whichever they consider better but don't tell us what sources they used or how they resolved any differences. Because of these problems, this type of source is best avoided and a better source should be used.

However, since Canaanite refers to a civilization that existed four thousand years ago, it's a WP:REDFLAG claim that they still exist today and therefore we would need to show that that is the common description in reliable sources. :TFD (talk) 12:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

But the same applies to the Greeks, just because the name changed in the case of the Levantine coast, it shouldn't be any different ! Zlogicalape (talk) 12:25, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

That could make a big difference, because people draw continuity between ancient and modern Greeks. But we still require proof that the modern Greeks have the same make up as the ancient ones. TFD (talk) 14:57, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Is PRISM a reliable source or not?

Recently, user:Fumikas Sagisavas added and changed a lot of contents related to climates, especially temperatures from this source, e.g. Special:Diff/1158651729. This source is called "PRISM Climate Group, Oregon State University". The url is http://prism.oregonstate.edu/explorer/ .
I'm not an expert on Climate changes and temperatures, so I brought it here. -Lemonaka‎ 01:53, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

User talk:Fumikas Sagisavas#Climate campaign -Lemonaka‎ 01:55, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Because it is calculated based on a large number of perennial meteorological observations, climate data and related information, there may be slight errors from actual measured values. When there is no NOAA weather station in the area, it can be used as a substitute, such as NOAA does not have a weather station on the summit of Mount Rainier.

Of course, when PRISM and NOAA data appear for selection, NOAA data must be used first, because NOAA data is based on actual observations. Fumikas Sagisavas (talk) 05:12, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

What? A model generated information can be used as the NOAA measured numbers? Are you sure? -Lemonaka‎ 05:15, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I mean, PRISM is a climate model generated by a computer program based on Oregon State University's collection and observation of meteorological data in multiple places. And NOAA is the actual measurement.

Another point is that PRISM has nothing to do with NOAA, and at most it refers to the data of NOAA. Fumikas Sagisavas (talk) 05:20, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

You said "When there is no NOAA weather station in the area, it can be used as a substitute"... Which means "a model generated information can be used as the NOAA measured numbers". I'm a little bit astonished by this topic and I decided to wait for peer-review. -Lemonaka‎ 05:23, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

In addition, the website climate-data.org [42] is also based on the PRISM computing mechanism, which generates regions of any country other than the continental United States, including Antarctica. There are at least a thousand articles using this source. Fumikas Sagisavas (talk) 05:16, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

RfC: La Patilla

An RfC regarding La Patilla's reliability has been started in the article's talk page. NoonIcarus (talk) 11:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

LWN.net

LWN.net both publishes articles with editorial oversight, they edit submissions. They state they require a high level of technical competence for publishing articles.

However, they also re-publish mailinglist posts, I think for archiving purposes. Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to establish some reliability regarding wikipedia policies. I propose:

• Reliable for technical articles and establishing notability
• Primary source for published mailinglists

PhotographyEdits (talk) 12:23, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I mean, we don't really need an RFC for this. LWN is treated as an RS in practice - they're an actual publication with standards and a tremendous respect in their field, but reprints are extremely obviously reprints. Is this a live issue in dispute somewhere? - David Gerard (talk) 13:52, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

@David Gerard Yes, see this edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Libreboot&diff=prev&oldid=1158802872

I believe that a whole paragraph based on an e-mail that was re-published by LWN has no place on Wikipedia. PhotographyEdits (talk) 13:59, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

In the first instance, we could just say: @Yae4: it's really pretty clear that's a mailing list reprint, not an editorial piece, and it's standard practice that press releases are treated as press releases even when a publisher runs them - David Gerard (talk) 14:10, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think the suggestion is generally correct for how to treat LWN. There are some LWN posts that blur the line a bit (mostly reprinting a mailing list post with some commentary) but their articles and analysis are clearly reliable and their pure mailing list posts should be treated almost as if you were citing them on a straight mailing list, but I think it makes them more valuable for citing simple facts which we do sometimes cite to PR/announcements about the subject themselves.

In this case in particular, however, I think that using the mailing list post to cite the certification by FSF is acceptable per WP:SELFSOURCE since the X200 is otherwise discussed there? It probably should be cited to LWN in prose even if used as the source in the cite and just say something like "In 2015, the FSF announced that..."? Skynxnex (talk) 14:36, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Independence of source

I'm having a discussion my talk page about the independence of a source, User talk:Fram#About the Flatwoods monster revert, about this edit and my revert of it. I tried explaining things, referencing MOS:POPCULT, but we have a fundamental disagreement about whether the official yugioh Twitter account is an independent source for information about a Yugioh character, and after this I think it is better if some uninvolved people gave their opinion here. Fram (talk) 14:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure which exact policy covers it, but a press release from a production company doesn't merit inclusion. It's not an independent source. Folly Mox (talk) 14:37, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

This is not a press release. Aberration (talk) 14:40, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Also, I don't like the fact you're basically suggesting we should apply the same policy to documenting fiction and documenting real-life events. The official sources for a fictional media are the ultimate authority on the facts over what happens in their fictional media. In fact, any kind of source other than the official one for a case like this would be inadequate. If this is actually a non-independent source by Wikipedia's standards (even though I don't think so, because by its definition, you cannot have any gain from the events inside fictional media), then I say a non-independent source should be preferred when it comes to documenting fiction. Aberration (talk) 14:51, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Inclusion of 'popular culture' content in contexts like this requires an independent source to demonstrate significance - to show that uninvolved commentators care enough about the connection to consider it worth writing about. 'Authority' has nothing to do with it. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:02, 6 June 2023 (UTC)