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Healthline: deprecate or blacklist?

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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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: [1]

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 [2] 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)

With all due respect, I do think JJ is right about that particular point (otherwise not wading into this entire back and forth). I think there's quite a few HQRSes whicsh support The Cleveland Clinic is well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic.

E.g. scholarly and otherwise HQRS mentions that Cleveland Clinic has a long history of promoting pseudoscienceMoreover, contrary to what is implied in the SIO's response, reiki and homeopathy are far from irrelevant to the practice of integrative oncology. Reiki, in particular, is offered to cancer patients in many academic medical centres (for example, the Cleveland Clinic)...

• The Cleveland Clinic, ranked the 2nd best hospital in the United States by U.S. News and World Report in 2017,40 runs multiple CAM centres, including the Wellness Institute, Centre for Integrative Medicine, Centre for Personalized Healthcare, Centre for Functional Medicine, and a Chinese herbal therapy clinic.41 Some of its CAM centres have received significant criticism over the years for having leaders that hold non-evidence-based beliefs that can cause harm to patients.
• Nevertheless, Reiki treatment, training, and education are now available at many esteemed hospitals in the United States, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Sources

CC is not alone in this, of course. But the overall trend for well-regarded academic medical centers to promote pseudoscience is precisely why we don't prefer such lay-facing sources in WP:MEDRS, as both you and Colin are definitely aware! — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 18:19, 13 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)

We may not want it to use it, but I object to claiming that Wikipedia is "endorsing" any source that we cite. We use sources, but we don't endorse them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:23, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. We aren't endorsing a source by using it. We also are not defaming a source in a legal sense by calling it "unreliable for our purposes". We, as a community, are making no claims wrt whether such sources are useful for other purposes outside of Wikipedia.

I think, in a colloquial sense, one could say that a pass at RSN is the community "endorsing" the source's general use in Wikipedia. But not an endorsement in any other meaning of the word. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 18:22, 13 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 [3], the ketogenic diet [4], [5] etc. Not a reliable source for medical claims about health. Psychologist Guy (talk) 21:51, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support deprecation and 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)

I stand by my statement that editors who lack the competence to edit medical articles shouldn't be editing medical articles. Part of that competence is understanding MEDRS. With sooo many open access sources, plus the likes of scihub, we don't have any reason to permit poor-quality sources just because they might be the ones hypothetical new editors will use. There is a gigantic difference between "knowing how to use and find MEDRS" and "being a topic expert", so don't act like expecting the former is elitism.

Regarding Cleveland Clinic, several of its centers peddle alt med propaganda.[6][7] JoelleJay (talk) 21:13, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

You are not going to find a medical journal or website dealing with nutrition that is entirely devoid of fringe science or pseudoscience. At some time or another journals make mistakes and publish nonsense, it is all down to quantity (in this case how often they do it). The British Medical Journal has a good tract record but have published a minority of papers supportive of acupuncture and have an editor who promotes vaccine misinformation. This does not mean the journal is unreliable. Cleveland Clinic may have published an article supportive of functional medicine but this doesn't invalidate the website or the good work they do, just like The BMJ is not invalid because they published some stupid papers on acupuncture. 99% of the time they are not doing this. Healthline is different because they are promoting fringe science, pseudoscience and nonsense about nutrition pretty much all of the time, similar to Frontiers Media. I don't think we should compare Healthline to the Lancet, BMJ or Cleveland Clinic. Psychologist Guy (talk) 01:49, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I didn't compare HL to any journals. I'm just saying the Cleveland Clinic panders to alt med junk with its functional medicine centers and therefore is not a good source for anything touching on the fringe stuff it offers. JoelleJay (talk) 17:53, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Sandy, the accusation of elitism was specifically at JoelleJay who quite explicitly stated that until editors reach their standard they should not edit at all. That isn't how Wikipedia works. Look, I get it that Healthline is awful for wellness stuff. But I also get that someone adds to our article what the symptoms excess sweating are or whether a drug is legal in the US or some other non-wellness fact, and currently they are having their edits removed or their source removed (making the claim unsourced) with a notice about "Healthline SPAM" which is a bad-faith accusation. When this proposal passes, as it seems to be, presumably they'll be unable to press the Save button or something like that. So, totally unable to edit Wikipedia with a non-contentious fact.

Did this edit improve Wikipedia? The article was unsourced entirely. The citation to Healthline was added six years ago by an editor who is a general practitioner and it appears a highly experienced Wikipedian (on multiple projects). We now again have an article that is entirely unsourced. I clicked on the source that was removed. It has a fantastic 3D diagram of the muscle in the neck that you can rotate about. Are their pages (they appear to have many) on the "Human Body" unreliable. I suspect not. Are their pages on general human body processes and diseases and disorders unreliable. I reckon generally they are not. But we are now going to prevent new editors from improving Wikipedia until they've achieved expert MEDRS status.

When I started on Wikipedia, I was translating a patient information leaflet that was in French into English (with Google Translate) and adding information about a drug that wasn't available anywhere in English. I made lots of mistakes about sourcing. It took me a while to realise you needed to read the whole paper and which kind of paper we wanted. I don't think I'm alone in having that kind of editing path. But the attitude of some here is to attack the newbies for not being perfect. In the fight against wellness nonsense and alternative crap, we end up making this the encyclopaedia only experienced exiting editors can edit, and the encyclopaedia with entirely unsourced random stuff. WP:MED went bad when it forgot to allow people to be imperfect. When having a list (as Zefr has linked to above) with which to go around removing good faith contributions and accusing others of adding "SPAM" to Wikipedia. Remove the wellness shit because it is shit, not because you are concerned with SEO.

Wrt open access, those editors with easy access to paid journals continue to have a huge advantage. But elitism is not just about access. It is about drawing up the ladder once you've made it. About denying a new editor base a chance to get on board. WP:MED went really bad in that regard, praising editors who spent all day bashing newbies. I don't want that mentality to return. Sure, we have a battle against misinformation and promotions of nonsense, but we also have a project that simply does not have enough editors to write and maintain what we have built. -- 09:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC) Colin°^Talk 09:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Look, I get it that Healthline is awful for wellness stuff. But I also get that someone adds to our article what the symptoms excess sweating are or whether a drug is legal in the US or some other non-wellness fact, and currently they are having their edits removed or their source removed (making the claim unsourced) with a notice about "Healthline SPAM" which is a bad-faith accusation.
@Colin, it seems to me this is a good argument for classifying Healthline as "Option 2" or "Option 3", but not blacklisting it. Particularly "additional considerations" option 2. Since it could still be useful for uncontroversial health claims outside of the wellness sphere. And, most of all, that it's use as a MEDRS has a lot more to do with the credentials and reputation of the author rather than HealthLine. Fair? — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 18:24, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Pretty much all articles on HL are written by freelancers with no expertise in medicine or science at all, let alone the specific subject. Each article is supposedly "medically reviewed", but the HL network of "experts" includes acupuncturists; people with degrees from Bastyr, Walden, Saba, Capella, etc; personal trainers; NPs; physician assistants; RDs; RNs; "holistic nurses"; social workers; yoga teachers; and plenty of people with real doctorates who nevertheless also promote quackery. JoelleJay (talk) 02:19, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Restricting usage of an, at best, low-quality lay-source is not gatekeeping wikipedia editing, come on. No one has to be a MEDRS expert to find alternative sources for the very basic information someone would be using HL to cite. The "spam blacklist" explicitly encompasses links that were never spammed (some sites which have been added after independent consensus), so a notice saying

Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist or Wikimedia's global blacklist. [...] Blacklisting indicates past problems with the link, so any requests should clearly demonstrate how inclusion would benefit Wikipedia. The following link has triggered a protection filter: healthline.com

is not a "bad-faith accusation" of anything, it's a non-judgmental request to replace the offending link with a better source. JoelleJay (talk) 00:49, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Em, the bad faith accusation was fairly clearly pointed at Zefr, who proposed this, based on their edit summaries that accuse editors of adding SPAM links. And the "gatekeeping" was about your explicit statement: "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". If the green text you have above is a correct reproduction of what potential editors will see, have you actually tried clicking on the link about blacklist. It links to Wikipedia:Spam blacklist. For real? They are told Healthline, one of the biggest health sites on the web, is SPAM? Not that it is "low quality" or "peddles wellness nonsense" but that the link they tried to add was SPAM. Is this really what you are proposing? And the second link is to some regexp list that only a nerdy programmer would love. That editor is going to think Wikipedia is nuts. How on earth are they going to get from receiving that message to linking to a better (but still readable) source? They aren't. They've just been told they tried to break the rules, by adding a spam link, and were blocked from doing so.

Wrt Shibollethink comment leading to JoelleJay's attacks on the authors, Well JoelleJay is talking rubbish when we step outside the wellness articles we all agree on. The muscle source was written this chap who seems far more qualified to talk about muscles than well any of us. And the Cleveland Clinic and Drugs.com and NHS and many other lay-friendly websites we aren't blacklisting don't mention their authors at all. What annoys me the most about this discussion is attack-shit about the authors or rubbish about these sources not being allowed to cite primary research and so on. This is nonsense argumentation, like saying anything just to attack something you hate. We can be better than that. There are articles on that site written by people qualified to do so and qualified to cite the research literature. We should separate the wellness rubbish from the other stuff. -- Colin°^Talk 07:50, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

"Fairly clearly addressed to Zefr"...in your response to MY comment, which you start by addressing Sandy...

And I stand by my statement that some bare minimum competence should be expected of editors editing biomedical articles. It is not difficult to find lay material on the basic concepts a non-med-savvy editor would be adding.

The text I quoted is not all the blacklist filter says. It gives way more instructions and information than that, and it doesn't "accuse" the editor of trying to break rules. And obviously I've visited the spam blacklist page, that's the origin of the green text stating that some blocked links are not spam but instead were blacklisted by consensus.

I don't see where the author is listed for the anterior tibiotalar ligament; the byline just says "medically reviewed by the Healthline Medical Network" and "by the Healthline Editorial Team". That doesn't mean it was written or reviewed by any particular person. And it's not only limited to "wellness". JoelleJay (talk) 20:07, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

What gets me is that intelligent folk here are complaining about a site that, in parts, spreads mistruths and exaggerations and such, and in order to attack it, they spread mistruths (the blueberry "meager nutrient content" nonsense) and claim, I don't know, that articles on brain function are being written by herbalists. Two wrongs don't make a right. You focus on the wellness stuff to ridicule them but have failed to land any serious blows on them wrt tuberous sclerosis or neck muscles. And all Zefr has done is demonstrate he doesn't know how to compare the nutritional value of blueberries and spinach. I'm just getting "Boris Johnson vs the EU" vibes, where really any old crap is written to attack something you hate, and it doesn't seem to matter that the crap isn't true or isn't really a proper criticism. Like the idea they can't cite the primary research literature.

I see this sort of thing over the years at MEDRS when folk want to raise the bar really high to win a particular argument they are in (usually against alternative medicine), forgetting that all the other sources they used on another article didn't meet that bar. You know, most of western medical practice is not supported by meta analyses of randomised controlled trials, ... the evidence is missing or lacking. But if you are in a fight, suddenly anything the other guy claims must be supported by meta analyses of randomised controlled trials. The same thing here. Suddenly, it seems, nobody can write an article on the brain unless they are a not only a neurologist or brain surgeon but have published many research papers on that specific issue with the brain. That's not the rule we apply to other sources we accept. For example, you attack their TS article for being reviewed by "a psychologist/nurse with zero research background/expertise in anything relevant to the topic reviewing the output of an unqualified freelance health writer". According to Healthline it was reviewed by "-- ----, PhD, PsyD board-certified as both a geriatric and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and is also a licensed psychologist." JoelleJay, perhaps you aren't aware that tuberous sclerosis is a very multi-disciplinary condition, and I'd expect someone with his qualifications to know something about it just as a neurologist or nephrologist or geneticist or so on. It is the most common single-gene cause of ASD and often comes with numerous behavioural issues. One specialist isn't going to know the whole thing. A geneticist wouldn't have made that mistake about genes but then they'd perhaps have screwed up when writing about autistic spectrum. Since when did we demand that the authors of our sources actually published research directly on the topic, as you just did. That's a bar so high it makes me boggle? Have you read any Cochrane reports? Because many that I have read are written by people who may well know how to do a meta analysis, but are not even in that field of medicine, never mind published any research on it. And yet we consider Cochrane reports as one of the best sources.

The discussion here has yet to established that outside of wellness and nutritional claims, and health-news stories, the body of material at Healthline on the human body, and human diseases, is so seriously lacking in reliability that it needs put on a spam blacklist. I would be happy to see it barred in some form for the former stuff. For the latter, no, you really need to do a lot better than that, like finding me an article that shows they don't know their arse from their elbow. -- Colin°^Talk 08:35, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

An article being certified as "medically reviewed" is a stronger claim than mere authorship, especially when the article itself is written by someone with zero credentials. We should expect expertise in the relevant domain for such a claim. And again, it's not limited to "wellness" topics. This article on the "vaccine debate" uncritically gives the views of antivax loons more space than those of what it calls "vaccine proponents", presenting it as if there are reasoned arguments on both sides.

I also have no idea what you're referring to re: HL pieces on neck muscles (or muscles in general). The only article you linked was a non-bylined one on a completely different tissue. JoelleJay (talk) 19:34, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Depracate and blacklist per this article: [8]. This article does nothing but push pseudoscientific nonsense. In my opinion, Healthline does not maintain a lot of rigor. NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 04:19, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

• We're getting into TL;DR territory here, so I just started querying various topics that could be problematic, following the indications at the top. First test: crystals. Crystals for Sleep says there's no scientific evidence, but spends most of the article interviewing a "modern alchemist" as though they're an expert. Crystals for Manifestation. [...]. Next test: Reiki. How to use Reiki Principles to Boost Well-Being doesn't address the [lack of] science. Next test: GMOs. GMO Apples, Potatoes Hitting Store Shelves appears to serve the primary purpose of casting doubt on the safety of GMO foods. This one isn't too problematic, but does spend a lot of time talking about things that it then says aren't backed up by research (e.g. The main concerns around GMOs involve allergies, cancer, and environmental issues — all of which may affect the consumer. While current research suggests few risks, more long-term research is needed sure makes it sound like there are substantiated concerns). None of this is particularly promising, even if it's not as bad as the worst offenders in this space (Natural News, etc.). The thing is, it's already a site that focuses on biomedical content which fails WP:MEDRS, so the only reason to deprecate/blacklist is if (a) there aren't other uses for it (I haven't seen any), and (b) it's frequently added (that sounds like the case). Support deprecation, no strong opinion about blacklisting. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:50, 9 June 2023 (UTC)
• Depracate for sure and likely need blacklist. Pretty plain as day based on the evidence presented here it's more than just not reliable and pushing fringe ideas quite broadly. It's not clear why so much text has been deidcated to such a WP:SNOW case either. Not really much more that needs to be said that hasn't been said already. KoA (talk) 04:54, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate Colins argument that "it publishes good content some of the time, therefore it should't be deprecated" misses the point of why sources are deprecated in the first place. The Daily Mail certaily publishes good content some of the time, but this is heavily outweighed by its other coverage. The same is true here. Red Ventures is a company whos business model is essentially to create voluminous content farms for SEO, rather than to produce carefully written advice by actual medical experts. The stuff brought up by other contributors is shocking, and doesn't appear to be confined to wellness. This source should really not be used for any reason. Hemiauchenia (talk) 05:26, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate and blacklist: In my time reviewing RfC:Reliability of La Patilla beside this section and making some comparisons, it is apparent that Healthline does not exist to provide accurate information and instead may promote dubious medical information in a method that targets readers searching topics, expanding upon topics that may or may not be scientifically valid. Reviewing WP:MEDASSESS, Healthline content can be described as "expert opinion" at best, though with its questionable review process and the use of advertisements, etc., this raises even more concerns. Given the prominence and potential of Healthline being used on the project, a blacklisting is appropriate to prevent not only the placement of unreliable information, but to also deter future discussions which will continue to arise when users attempt to cite Healthline.--WMrapids (talk) 05:24, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate and blacklist per copious evidence above. That some articles may be unproblematic is entirely beside the point and is if anything a point in favor of expungement - the problem is that they are not practically always accurate and that many inexperienced editors need help to avoid such bad sources that masquerade as reliable. To prevent accidental misuse we need deprecation and blacklisting. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:06, 5 July 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.

Removing healthline.com

A note: there are 867 article-space references to Healthline as I write this. If editors can help clear these down, that would be very helpful - David Gerard (talk) 20:26, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

David Gerard - GreenC has a usurping bot that was used last month to nuke a blacklisted source, but it requires an admin to add a spam blacklist to healthline.com to block auto-refills. cc: OhNoitsJamie. Zefr (talk) 21:55, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

The RfC is to deprecate, which is sort of like conventional weapons vs nuclear weapons (my tool). -- GreenC 22:11, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

yeah, I added healthline.com to the spam blacklist myself. I'm reluctant to automatically nuke it - I removed 17 by hand and several required human replacements in my editorial judgement. There's one we're now trying to find the original source that healthline used, the claim is fine actually! But it's medical questionable info, so ... - David Gerard (talk) 22:25, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

David Gerard - the problem with parsing whether healthline references are fine, such as in Food marketing, is that the right margin of the healthline source is populated with their own links to articles with extensive misinformation. As I understand GreenC's nuking bot, it removes the reference entirely, possibly leaving a statement unsourced (if refill is blocked), which is a better outcome than enabling healthline to advertise from a retained citation. Zefr (talk) 23:01, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

WP:DEPRECATE and WP:BLACKLIST (nuking) are separate processes. The consensus is "to blacklist Healthline as a hazard to readers. References to Healthline should be removed from Wikipedia." We should apply GreenC's bot to remove healthline completely and prevent refilling. Zefr (talk) 22:35, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

oh absolutely, I'm not saying to leave a single usage in! (Maybe self-descriptions at absolute most.) I'm saying that human review is best - I did 17 today, anyone here is skilled enough to do 5 or 10 in a day easily enough. Though maybe a bot rampage is appropriate? Maybe - David Gerard (talk) 23:13, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

There is last month's experience with now-blacklisted hugedomainsdotcom where Folly Mox had a view of the post facto result. What is better for the clean up? Manual removal of the blacklisted source from some 800 articles (tedious, editors will lose interest; my ongoing activity) or deal with sentences having no source (much preferred, imo)? It would be useful if a bot could insert the [citation needed] tag where the healthline source gets removed, since that is what we're trying to achieve by replacing it with a MEDRS source. Zefr (talk) 00:08, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Note: discussion moved to WP:URLREQ#Blacklist_healthlinedotcom where further actions were completed. -- GreenC 14:55, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

RfC: Is FossForce.com a reliable source for Free and open-source software (FOSS) articles?

Is FossForce.com a reliable source for Free and open-source software (FOSS) articles?

1. Generally reliable
2. Additional considerations apply
3. Generally unreliable

With these edits at Libreboot, PhotographyEdits removed cited info, claiming FossForce.com (and others) is not a WP:RS: one, two, and 2021 article purge and proposal to merge

Prevous RSN discussions: None found.

Talk discussions : one found in 2019; thin consensus, including me, was not reliable. Newslinger called it a "group blogs with no reputations".

An author "Christine Hall" is cited on a few editor talk pages, but I don't think it is the same Christine Hall.

About a dozen articles cite FossForce.com.

Three cites that have been removed from Libreboot over time include:

• September 2016
• January 2017
• April 2017

• Option 2: Additional considerations apply: While the articles are mostly by one author/editor, I contrast FossForce.com with somewhat similar (at a glance) liliputing.com, which was deemed generally unreliable blog, self-published source in this RSN discussion and RfC. FossForce, to me, covers FOSS topics with more insight than just re-publicizing a single press release or vendor post, and discusses the info in some detail. FossForce also covers FOSS topics - not just new products up for sale - over time, as shown by the three cites above. While the FossForce website does show advertisements, it again contrasts with Liliputing by NOT being affiliate-spam directly connected to PR announcements about products being written about. Therefore, I feel this otherwise marginal source should be allowed, particularly for FOSS articles with few generally reliable sources.

The present intention is to use the 2017 cites to support statements about the History of Libreboot without the personal WP:BLP info. They have been used differently at Libreboot previously. -- Yae4 (talk) 18:14, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option #1 (invited by the bot) My actual answer is that I generally reject all such over-generalizations.....it should be about the objectivity and objectivity of the particular piece/authot/source with respect to the text which cited it. But if forced to make a generalization, that source looks to be good. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:37, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
• Summoned by the notification at WT:COMPUTING. Yae4, I again respectfully disagree with going straight from a one-on-one content dispute to an RSN RfC, without discussion on the article's talk page (WP:RFCBEFORE). At Libreboot, PhotographyEdits removed text cited to two sources, and you reverted it, agreeing they're not WP:GENREL, but arguing they should stay because they weren't discussed at RSN and are widely used at Wikipedia (FossForce is cited in 13 articles), and asking PhotographyEdits to point to a consensus discussion before removing.

But Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. No one needs a consensus discussion, or an RSN RfC, to remove citations that they deem unreliable from an article. If you disagree with a removal, that should first be discussed on the article's talk page; if that doesn't solve it, you can start a non-RfC discussion here to ask for input on whether the source is good enough for the claim. RSN RfCs are for repeated disputes across several talk pages, or sources in widespread use, not to resolve mundant content disputes. BTW, I searched, and FossForce is only used in five articles (ItsFoss, the second source, is used in 2 articles).

When a specific statement is challenged, the WP:ONUS is on you to gain consensus on the article's talk page to keep it. Skipping directly to an RfC here implies inclusion is all-or-nothing, where an outcome other than "generally unreliable" would mean the claim stays in the article. This is undesirable from a process standpoint. Best, DFlhb (talk) 23:58, 13 June 2023 (UTC) updated 02:32, 14 June 2023

@DFlhb:

> (FossForce is cited in 13 articles)

> I searched, and FossForce is only used in five articles

I agree with 13, based on my Wiki-search linked above. I disagree with 5, but what's a factor of 2 to 3 difference?

I considered discussing this and doing an RfC at Talk:Libreboot. IMO, having it here makes it more likely to get uninvolved opinions, from editors with broader perspective, makes it easier to find later, and may carry more weight later. I think the small proportion of FOSS-related articles to all Wikipedia articles needs to be considered, relative to "widely used". There are also related issues at Libreboot, particularly how to handle the "fork", what sources are primary or secondary, etc., and I'm hoping some editors with broader perspective may notice and have suggestions. Thanks for your comments. -- Yae4 (talk) 02:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

13 indeed; I fixed the first mention (see my edit summary), forgot to fix the second mention. DFlhb (talk) 02:32, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

At VeraCrypt, A cite to Fossforce is used to support the claim "VeraCrypt is considered to be free and open source by [...] DuckDuckGo's Open Source Technology Improvement Fund".[9]

OSTIF does consider Veracrypt to be open source[10] and DuckDuckGo did make a $25,000 contribution to the OSTIF with the funds earmarked for the VeraCrypt project,[11] but it appears that the "DuckDuckGo's" claim is an error that is not in the FossForce source. Could someone please change the claim to "VeraCrypt is considered to be free and open source by [...] The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund" and change the cite from Fossforce to OSTIF? OSTIF Cite:[12] I don't edit articles for reasons I won't get into here. Guy Macon (talk) 23:00, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Guy_Macon, I'd consider making the change for you if someone hasn't already, if you give a more direct opinion on the question at hand. Thanks. PS. Now and then I look at your User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer, and find it useful. Sadly, User:Guy_Macon/Yes._We_are_biased. looks good on the surface, but is it really accurate? (rhetorical). Cheers. -- Yae4 (talk) 22:21, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Option 1. In my opinion, Fossforce is a reliable source on the topis of free and open source software, an area where there are few good sources. I am also concerned about the possibility that this RfC was not posted because of a genuine question about Fossforce's reliability, but rather to win a content dispute that should have been worked out on the article talk page. I would encourage those who are involved in the dispute to ignore the result of this RfC and work it out through consensus and if necessary through a focused RfC on the talk page comparing the preferred content of both sides.

Regarding WP:YWAB, the purpose is not "accuracy". Any "we are biased against" / "we are biased towards" list is by nature subjecticve opinion. The purpose of the page is explained at User talk:Guy Macon/Yes. We are biased.#The purpose of this essay, and it is quite effective for that purpose. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:05, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

More Perfect

Hi, I'm commenting to see what others think about the reliability of More Perfect Union (particularly within labor). I'm looking for input from others who are well versed in labor issues. LoomCreek (talk) 00:10, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

It looks no more nor less reliable than any other newsmedia source. I don't think Wikipedia should use newsmedia sources at all but so long as Wikipedia uses NYT I see no reason why this one should be excluded. At least it's honest about its biases. That's more than most of these news outlets do. Simonm223 (talk) 12:29, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

(Summoned by bot) @LoomCreek: You'll probably have more luck asking "is More Perfect Union reliable for [some kind of claim] in [one or a category of articles]". It's hard to offer a judgment on the whole without specific examples. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:58, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

More Perfect Union appears to be a joint venture between a 501(c)(4) political organization, and a 501(c)(3) that it controls. It is led by a political operative and a former NowThis/HuffPo person, which isn't exactly the sort of sterling editorial credentials that one would expect for a reliable news group. I'm unsure of whether it has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, but it seems more like an advocacy org than a newsorg based off what I can find. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 15:37, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Filmcompanion.in (2)

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.

---

Filmcompanion.in was added to the spam blacklist in Nov 2021 because IP spammers were adding links to it indiscriminately. Discussions at WP:ICTF (Apr 2023, Oct 2021, Nov 2020, Aug 2019) and elsewhere (Nov 2022), among experienced editors working in the relevant topic area (Indian cinema), suggest that the spamming campaign aside, the site may be a good-quality resource. Therefore, it has been proposed that the spam blacklist entry, which disallows all links to the website, be replaced by an edit-filter that disallows (say) only non-extended confirmed editors from adding links to it. This would hopefully prevent the spamming, while enabling citing of articles on the website on a case-by-case basis.

The question for this board, arising from discussion at EFN, is whether there are indeed any legitimate uses of Filmcompanion articles as a source that would justify such an approach? Abecedare (talk) 18:38, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Super quick reply. As noted, there was a spam campaign for FC in 2021. The links included parameters like "utm_source=Wikipedia&utm_medium=ReviewSeeding". This wasn't just IP's adding links. This was an organized and orchestrated spam campaign from FC (or from a company hired by FC). This was a pure attempt to use Wikipedia to promote the site. That's a negative and a big one. FilmCompanion was started by Anupama Chopra. Just going by her article here, she's a respected film critic, having reviewed films for several newspapers in the past, has several books on Indian films and had a weekly television show reviewing films. The website doesn't have any information about editorial staff, but Chopra's page on FC(www.filmcompanion. in/author/anupama-chopra) lists her as editor. So positives there. There is at least one section of FC that should never have anything on Wikipedia - Readers Write. Pretty self-explanatory there. I think there absolutely is some good content on the site, especially film reviews. You do see their reviews mentioned by other sources, also a plus. This may be a site where some parts of the site should be permitted, but not everything? Ravensfire (talk) 17:20, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

What appears to be the case here is that there is a reliable source that also has a spam problem. The proposed solution (removing it from the spam blacklist and implementing an abuse filter to restrict this source to autoconfirmed editors only) seems to be a more narrowly tailored way to deal with this problem than an outright blacklist. If this does not work, then we can always return to the spam blacklist (or implement a 30/500 restriction through abuse filter), but I don't think we'll come to that point. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 03:20, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

The abuse filter option may be ideal. Preventing IPs and unconfirmed users from adding FC, but letting long-time and honest editors add it. Kailash29792 (talk) 15:58, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Seeing that in the past the spam-blacklist has been used to prevent citing even when there's no current spam, and worrying that in the future the no-whitelist New special page to fight spam might be used, I'm hoping that anything rather than a spam-blacklist would become normal for anything brought to WP:RSN. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 13:32, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Consensus here seems to be tending towards raising an edit filter and to remove the site from the blacklist. I would request clarity on two points:

1. Should Anupama Chopra's reviews and articles in her own owned movie media channel (filmcompanion) be considered reliable, given that there expectably would be no peer review -- and given that she is the Director of the Mumbai Film Festival, as well as her having a evident conflict of interest (being married to a leading film producer, whose films she has admitted to not reviewing, due to a self-accepted conflict of interest)? (Reiterating -- her articles in other media channels presumably undergo peer review, therefore are acceptable, given her long-standing status as a film journalist).
2. Which parts of filmcompanion should be generally trusted as reliable and which not?

A consensus on these points will allow future article talk page discussions to have direction on the scope of acceptance of this source. Thank you, Lourdes 11:53, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

By policy, filmcompanion does not review her husband's productions, last I checked. 2001:8F8:172B:41ED:2D5E:DC11:DD06:64BE (talk) 12:52, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Yep, proven here. And Lourdes, the entire FC should be trusted as reliable, except for articles written by guests or unnotables like this. Kailash29792 (talk) 13:17, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks both. How will we know which writer is notable and who is non-notable? I feel this is important to clarify in order to avoid future disputes on article talk pages. We could also leave this to the discretion of article contributors. Lourdes 09:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

TrangaBellam, your guidance here will be valuable. Once you give some guidance on my queries, we can close this discussion and I will remove the title from the blacklist. Let me know. Thanks, Lourdes 10:21, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

TrangaBellam has not been active for the past week following this discussion. But seeing how persistently they have been fighting for FC's whitelisting, I would like to see FC removed from the blacklist whether they comment here or not. Kailash29792 (talk) 12:47, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I took a break. As a rough yardstick, anything that belongs to the "Readers Write" section or is not written by an individual critic can be discarded. More to the point, as and when disputes arise, I have faith in the collective wisdom of ICTF editors in guiding the community. TrangaBellam (talk) 15:04, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Sounds pragmatic. If all are in agreement, we may close this discussion. Thanks, Lourdes 03:49, 5 July 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.

O'Keefe Media Group and Project Veritas

Now that James O'Keefe has split from Project Veritas and is continuing his stings under O'Keefe Media Group, should the entry on the RS list be updated to include O'Keefe Media Group [13] underneath Veritas's entry? I reverted an IP edit that attempted to cite his website as a source for a BlackRock sting [14] but was wondering if this needs to be mentioned as it would seem unlikely that O'Keefe has changed his journalistic practices since leaving Veritas. Mfko (talk) 03:58, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Clearly unreliable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:33, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. Unreliable. A new entry at RS is probably appropriate. Woodroar (talk) 12:56, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Agree. No corrections policy that I can see. Tone is not that of an RS. No reputation for fact-checking or accuracy. Couldn't find any WP:USEBYOTHERS either. Adoring nanny (talk) 12:38, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

• I'm surprised he's not deprecated as a matter of course; setting up an RfC below to correct that. Sceptre (talk) 17:05, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

RfC (James O'Keefe)

What best describes James O'Keefe (including, inter alia, Project Veritas and O'Keefe Media Group) as a reliable source?

• Option 1: Generally reliable for factual reporting.
• Option 2: Unclear or additional considerations apply.
• Option 3: Generally unreliable for factual reporting.
• Option 4: Publishes false or fabricated information and should be deprecated.

Sceptre (talk) 17:05, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (James O'Keefe)

• Option 4, and blacklisted where possible: this should be pro forma, but I think we need an RfC to formally deprecate a source, no matter if such a course of action is blindingly obvious. Since the death of Andrew Breitbart, O'Keefe is the undisputed King of Fake News. Anything he touches is fruit of the poisoned tree. However, the entry at RSPS where we've said it's GUNREL is, I feel, too high; if I met O'Keefe in the middle of the Sahara and he told me it was scorchingly sunny, I'd make sure I had an umbrella and a parka on my person just in case; he's that much of a bullshit merchant. Sceptre (talk) 17:05, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 3 Back to basics. No reputation for fact checking or accuracy. Stories do not have the measured tone that is typical reliable source, and as mentioned elsewhere on this page, his latest outlet lacks a corrections policy. I'm unaware of any spam campaign from O'Keefe, which would be the usual reason for blacklisting. I don't see colorful prose such as "undisputed King of Fake News" as sufficient reason for deprecation. Ditto selective editing, as every source edits, and every source is selective. So just plain not reliable. Adoring nanny (talk) 01:46, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 3 with a caveat Obviously generally unreliable but I'm wary of adding an individual to the RSP list as this seems to stretch its purpose beyond what's appropriate. And until his new publishing venture is actually getting used or asked about here a lot, it is premature to call it "perennial". BobFromBrockley (talk) 02:16, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4, and nuke any references from orbit, as it is the only way to be sure While it is true that Mr. O'Keefe and his former workplace Project Veritas are not legally identical, they are in many ways synonymous and there can be little doubt that he was the animating spirit for at least much of the time he was there. I don't believe his reputation should be laundered by starting a new venture. Not only does Mr. O'Keefe not have a track record for fact-checking and accuracy, he has one of using underhanded and sometimes tortious or even criminal tactics to get information. He then explicitly uses such information in the style of a provacateur, going well beyond reporting bias into naked propaganda. Perhaps Mr. O'Keefe's new venture will be different--anything is possible. If it is, we can reassess in due time. But for now, I can see no good and quite a bit of bad from citing him anywhere on Wikipedia. Cheers, all. Dumuzid (talk) 03:59, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 - The truth value of anything he writes is basically unrelated to reality. Veritas is known to be entirely fake, and the reason for that is primarily due to O'Keefe. Use of his works as a reference is pretty much equivalent to not having a reference at all. The only time I could see it appropriate to cite him is as a primary source for what he himself has published, and even then I wouldn't even trust him as a source for what he himself has previously said, as he could decide to change his mind about the facts regarding himself at any time. Fieari (talk) 05:20, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 As not only does he (or PV) not have a reputation for fact-checking, they actually have a reputation for faslefication. Slatersteven (talk) 09:29, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 and blacklist/purge everything from it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:22, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4. I wouldn't even trust any ABOUTSELF claims, as they'd probably be edited out of context. Woodroar (talk) 23:48, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 - Nothing coming directly or indirectly from James O'Keefe, or from anyone who chooses to be associated with him, should be given any credence whatsoever. Nevertheless, I would characterize the deprecation as being of Project Veritas and O'Keefe Media Group, rather than James O'Keefe personally. John M Baker (talk) 00:14, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4, but honestly on a scale to 1-4 this person is at 9000. An agent provocateur and purveyor of disinformation should never be cited for anything in the Wikipedia. Zaathras (talk) 00:27, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 Andre🚐 00:43, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 Not even a close question. Deliberate serial fabrication and falsehoods. Blacklist. Banks Irk (talk) 02:42, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 Pure garbage. Volunteer Marek 21:56, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 per nom (Sceptre). I wouldn't even trust ABOUTSELF claims. -sche (talk) 03:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 - I haven't seen anyone try to use this source -- I'm presuming others have, or we wouldn't even bother with this? -- but it appears to be the same garbage as before. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:55, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 if we're actually doing an RFC, since he has a long and well-established history of using deceptive editing to produce disinformation. I'm not sure it was necessary to spell it out (was anyone trying to use it as a source?) but since we did end up having to actually add Project Veritas itself after numerous people tried to use it in various contexts I suppose it can't hurt. --Aquillion (talk) 16:17, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 Stay far away from using this as a source, blacklisting seems appropriate. Oaktree b (talk) 04:42, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
• Option 4 - history of editing videos to spread disinformation. starship.paint (exalt) 03:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

The reliability of the book Enigma Valtorta

I would like to start a discussion on the reliability of the book "L'énigme Valtorta : Une vie de Jésus romancée?" by J. F. Lavere, published in 2012 [15]. This is due to the use of several quotes from this book on Poem of the Man God article. I have tagged these quotes as "unreliable". The book'a level of support for the extraordinary features of Valtorta's writings is extreme and exaggerated.

Here, I would like to state that this book is not WP:RS on scientific or theological matters, given the author's lack of track record on the subject.

There are a few issues:

1. The back cover of the book states that J. F. Lavere is a retired engineer in France. I have read elsewhere that he was a chemical engineer, but let us just assume that he was just some type of engineer. Did he publish any books on engineering? Not that Amazon knows about. [16] In fact this was his frst book ever for all we know. He wrote other things later, but here he was fresh from the engineering field and his lack of experience is obvious.

2. Would J. F. Lavere be even a WP:RS source on some type of engineering? Obviously not, gven that he has no track record we know of. So he is certainly not an authority on theology. But he is being used as such. That must stop.

3. His book is quite open about the fact that many items he quotes come from web sites and blogs. For instance, he mentions quotes from Roman Danylak and bases them directly on Danylak's personal website. That issue is currently being debated on this noticeboard. And there seems to be no support for the reliability of that.

4. The book includes unsourced and clearly contradictory statements are being quoted in Wikipedia, e.g.

"In January 1962, Fr. Berti was given an authorization to publish by the Vice Commissioner of the Holy See, Father Marco Giraudo: “You have our[who?] total approbation to continue the publication of this second edition of The Gospel as revealed to me by Maria Valtorta," concluding with, "We shall see how it is received."

It is absolutely impossible for Giraudo to have written that, given that in the book Lettera a Claudia, the publisher Emilio Pisani states that the title "The Gospel as revealed to me" was invented in the 1970's with the publication of the French translation. TThe title did not exist in 1962, and Lavere gives no indication of where ho obtained that quote. But the quote is floating on all kinds of blogs. There are other obvious errors exaggerations in that book, too many to discuss, but it is largely a claim of exceptional origin for the writings of Valtorta, sprinkled with exaggerated theological claims.

5. In that book Lavere has walked out of the enginerring world and has commented on topics such as botany where he has no expertise. The book can not be considered reliable, unless it includes the chemical formula for a new shampoo. Lavere would probably know about that, but not the topics in this book.

The real problem is that unless this book is declared as unreliable, 30 more incorrect and exaggerated claims from it may be added to Wikipedia. This must stop. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 19:41, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Some information to provide additional context that has been missing thus far. From the book by Laurentin and Debroise, "Insagine su Maria" which is RS (reliable authors and publisher), we have the following excerpts:

pp. 66-67:

"If a good part of the seven hundred and fifty characters (for the great majority are unknown from history) is perplexing, two hundred and fifty have been identified historically, thanks to some unpublished works by Jean-François Lavère."(24)

Footnote 24: Cfr. François-Michel Debroise and Jean-Francois Lavere, Les Protagonistes de l'Évangile d'après l'æuvre de Maria Valtorta, in corse di pubblicazione

—

p. 67:

"For years, Jean-François Lavère has been dedicating the free time he has thanks to his retirement to recording and evaluating the set of material data contained in Maria Valtorta's story (places, historicity of the characters, archeology, arts and techniques, uses and customs, flora and fauna, and of course, chronological coherence). After verifying more than eight thousand data on the approximately ten thousand registered, it obtained a credibility rate of 99.6 percent."(25)

Footnote 25: Jean-François Lavere, L'enigma Maria Valtorta, "Bollettino Valtortiano", I semestre 2009.

—

The book also references this list of experts (p. 71) regarding the works of Maria Valtorta (last updated 2019), on the website www.maria-valtorta.org which was created and maintained by François-Michel Debroise, author of multiple books co-authored with Laurentin:

Footnote 29: www.maria-valtorta.org/Travaux/Experts.htm

One of those living experts is Jean-François Lavère.

—

Now, I'm not suggesting this automatically makes the book by Lavére, L'Enigma Valtorta RS given the issues with the publisher already mentioned (lack of editorial oversight), but it does show that Lavère is considerably more credible than some would have us believe, and quite respected in the community of experts, especially considering he has co-authored with heavyweight Laurentin and Debroise on similar material. In short, his research and opinions matter. To call him or his work "fanatical" or "fantastical", is patently absurd.

Regarding the concern that we must disallow the book entirely, because 30 or more opinions may be pulled out of that book, is not a valid argument. As always, there is WP:DUE, and it would make no sense to have an article with a total of about 50-60 citations, having 30 or more come from one book, RS or not. But a few selected references presenting an expert author's opinions should be acceptable. Arkenstrone (talk) 20:46, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Collapse trolling. IP blocked (for edits here and elsewhere). Abecedare (talk) 22:24, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

The problem is you are using your original research to determine whether the book is reliable or not. You should provide a secondary source such as a review essay to determine the reliability. 95.12.119.26 (talk) 20:25, 24 June 2023 (UTC) That's not really the case, IP user. We can make judgments on reliability of sources based on other factors than reviews from experts. Of course, those help, but it's not the be all and end all.Boynamedsue (talk) 20:47, 24 June 2023 (UTC) @Boynamedsue No, you can't. That's an explicit violation of WP:OR. If you don't understand this, you should read WP:COMPETENCE. 95.12.119.26 (talk) 21:25, 24 June 2023 (UTC) IP 95.12.119.26, there is no WP:OR in saying this was the author's first book, and that he has no track record. If you have a list of his previous publications, please present them. If he was a professor anywhere, please say where. Thanks. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 21:28, 24 June 2023 (UTC) @Yesterday, all my dreams... Do you have a secondary source documenting this is his first book? If you do have, make sure it is not from Rodong Sinmun; only reliable sources are allowed. 95.12.119.26 (talk) 21:44, 24 June 2023 (UTC) WP:OR is a restriction specifically and solely on article content. It is not a restriction on editing discussions such as this. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:49, 24 June 2023 (UTC) IP 95.12.119.26, the easiest way is to look at Amazon (I provided a link already) or worldcat, etc. See what he has published. You will see 2012 was the first date. That is easy. I will stop for a while based on the suggestion of Abecedare. But per WP:BURDEN more burden is placed on those who claim reliability. So please say why that is not his first book, and show which books he published before 2011. You will not succeed. I am sure. I have checked. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 21:53, 24 June 2023 (UTC) IP 95.12.119.26, as stated below 90% of my argument was based on the lack of track record of the author. As for the statement by Giraudo I used the reference to the book Lettera a Claudia which contradicts the statement by Lavere. As for his use of blogs and personal websites, they are all over his book. It is not WP:OR by me, he states that he used those websites as his sources. Lavere does not directly say that "God personally told him" that Valtorta's book is divine, but if you read the book you will get that feeling. So I do invite you to read Lavere's book. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 21:12, 24 June 2023 (UTC) IP, per WP:OR: This policy does not apply to talk pages and other pages which evaluate article content and sources, such as deletion discussions or policy noticeboards. Yesterday, you don't need to reply to each comment, especially to reiterate arguments you have already made. Abecedare (talk) 21:40, 24 June 2023 (UTC) @Abecedare @NatGertler That statement did not exist there before. It was stealth added in May 2023 by an old sleeping account, who is now blocked indefinitely. 95.12.119.26 (talk) 21:53, 24 June 2023 (UTC) Your interpretation that WP:OR applies to talk pages and arguments over reliability is not a majority position anywhere on wikipedia. I'm not even sure if it is a minority position of more than one. What I do know is that suggesting a user lacks competence to edit is not just an insane escalation at this point, but it a violation WP:NPA. I will take this to WP:ANI if I see you do it again.Boynamedsue (talk) 22:04, 24 June 2023 (UTC) @Boynamedsue Baseless accusation of PA is a personal attack. Please stop casting WP:ASPERSIONS. Thank you. 95.12.119.26 (talk) 22:08, 24 June 2023 (UTC) Ok, so would you like to confirm that when you advised me to read WP:COMPETENCE, you were not suggesting that I lacked competence? Because it read like that, and I find it hard to think of another interpretation of your comment. Boynamedsue (talk) 22:16, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Right, shall we try with the basics on this, we can look at the publisher and the type of stuff they normally publish, as well as the other published work of Levere. Do you know of any other publications by Levere? What is the publisher of this book? Boynamedsue (talk) 20:52, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Boynamedsue, the publisher is a French publisher Rassemblement À Son Image [17] mostly a religious publisher. But 90% of my argument was based on the "author's lack of track record". This was his first book as seen here [18]. He may have learned a few things 5-7 years later, but in 2012 he was fresh from the engineering workshop. He has only ever published on one topic: Maria Valtorta. He wrote a few things later as shown in the link, but he had published nothing before this book. And no PhD, no professor, etc. And wondering off to discuss topics from botany to theology does not make that reliable. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 21:08, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Ok, this is a lot easier than I thought. The publishing house generally publishes books on Catholic spirituality which reflect the opinions of the authors. It also publishes a lot of reprints of out of copyright religious books. I see no evidence of editorial oversight at a sufficient level that controversial facts can be supported, although it is obviously good for the author's opinion. Boynamedsue (talk) 22:25, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, not an acceptable source for statements of fact but could be used for the author's opinion if due. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:40, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

So sourcing material from books of this kind is acceptable provided it is presented not as fact, but as the authors opinion. Understood.

For greater clarity, this particular author, Lavere, has published with other authors, including Laurentin, and Debrois, in the same year (2012) which are also considered reliable sources. For example: Dictionnaire des personnages de l'évangile selon Maria Valtorta.[19]

It would seem somewhat strange to say that the author Lavere, is unreliable in once instance and reliable in another, especially when dealing with material that is closely related (generally to do with Valtorta's work) and published in the same year.

Further, the book in question includes a preface by the Bishop Johanan-Mariam Cazenave’s, the Secretary of the Syrian-French Synod, so it's not without some level of high-ranking ecclesiastical support. Arkenstrone (talk) 19:59, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

What does ecclesiastical support have to do with reliability? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:24, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Peer review as in WP:SCHOLARSHIP. Since we're not dealing with a work of physics here, but rather a work concerning religious matters, and specifically, religious matters pertaining to the Catholic Church, experts constitute high-ranking or respected members of the Catholic Church. Arkenstrone (talk) 21:53, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

No, experts constitute those with relevant academic expertise and publishing histories, many of whom are high-ranking or respected members of the Catholic Church. I'd also note that we're dealing with a matter of *history* here first and foremost. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:58, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Experts are domain-specific. Academics in physics, chemistry, or biology are concerned with empirical data, and while they are highly relevant in their specific fields of inquiry, they are generally irrelevant in matters of religious doctrine and faith (unless, for example, they are doing a carbon dating of a religious artifact, or doing mathematical or statistical analyses of some kind).

Church history is part of it, but not exclusively. It is also a matter of Church doctrine, and what is and is not contrary to Church doctrine, faith and morals, which requires experts in that domain, i.e., high-ranking or respected members of the Church who can weigh in on such matters. Arkenstrone (talk) 22:37, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Think of it this way: what would it do to a published work in physics, if the preface to that work was written by Richard Feynman, Neils Bohr, or even Einstein, praising the work? Same principle. Arkenstrone (talk) 22:43, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Is Johanan-Mariam Cazenave a renowned figure on the level of Feynman, Bohr, Einstein, etc? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:49, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

The fact he's a Bishop means he's sufficiently high-ranking and knowledgeable to be able to weigh in on such matters. In any case, I said "same principle." I wasn't making an equivalence. Arkenstrone (talk) 23:04, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Lets start here... Who is Bishop Johanan-Mariam Cazenave? What is the Syrian-French Synod? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:07, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Arkenstone, I did have a good laugh at your reference to Richard Feynman, Neils Bohr and Einstein. But Johanan-Mariam Cazenave is no Einstein. And given that Lavere makes a large number of fantastic scientific claims across multiple fields in his book, Cazenave (as a theolog) was in no pisition to evaluate them. It woud be like a physicist trying to evaluate a book on dentistry - he would not even know what types of drills the dentists use. So the argument about Cazenave is vacuous. And recall that the fact that the publisher has no serious editorial oversight on these issues, renders the whole argument pointless. Please accept that this is a book by a publisher with no serious oversight on scientific or historical issues, and an author (Lavere) who directly references blogs and personal websites as his sources. This is not a WP:RS item. And recall the inherent asymetry in WP:BURDEN. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 23:42, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Is Cazenave a theologian? I'm having a hard time tracking down a Catholic Bishop of that name. Perhaps its a pseudonym or pen name? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:49, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

<Sigh> I said, "same principle." And I repeat, it wasn't an equivalence.

Care to elaborate on "fantastic scientific claims" since you brought it up (on the Poem talk page please, not here)? This work isn't being used in the article to support scientific claims, so why are you focusing attention on that?

You are far too harsh on Lavere, especially considering the fact that he co-authored other works with Laurentin and Debroise, whom you seem to hold in high-regard. Though not relevant to this discussion, many of the scientific claims that are made in Lavere's book, are made elsewhere in other books or publications, by experts in those fields, which we will get to in due course (and you know it). So, "fantastic" would seem quite the exaggeration.

Perhaps Bishop Cazenave's praise and commendation is "vacuous" as it relates to scientific claims, but that's not what we're concerned with here. So please, let's stop conflating things.

Bishop Cazenave can weigh in on issues concerned with Church doctrine, and what is and is not contrary to Church doctrine, faith and morals. For those issues, his praise and commendation is pertinent and certainly not vacuous.

In any case, this discussion is getting longer than need be, drifting into tangential issues. Lavere's book can be used for his statements and opinions, but not for controversial facts. So long as statements and opinions are not presented as facts, we should be alright. Arkenstrone (talk) 06:24, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Arkenstone, a few points:

1. Regarding Einstein, you do have a technical way out, because you did not say "Albert Einstein" so can suggest that it was Eduard Einstein... smiile.

2. This discussion started for only one reason: because you kept adding this book to Wikipedia, although I told you that it is not reliable. You did do despite the asymetry of WP:BURDEN. And this discussion was dormant for several days and would have quietly ended with the final comment by Horse Eye on June 25th. But it restarted when you began huffing and puffing about the importance of Cazenave and how his statement contributed to the reliability of the book. I think the opposite is true, but I will let you explain yourself first. But we must clarify that this book is not reliable for facts and all statements you have added from it so far need to be deleted.

3. Given that you brought up Cazenave, in all fairness you must answer the question you were asked about him, namely Who on earth is Cazenave? Do you have any idea who he is? Why is there no trace of him on the internet? Does he even exist? How do you know? How do we know they have not tried to pull a Follieri here? As you may recall Follieri was Anne Hathaway's boyfriend and would get actors to "wear bishop outfits" and negotiate to sell chuch property that was not for sale. Do a Google on "Raffaello Follieri" to refresh your memory if necessary. So how do you know who he is? Perhaps you could call Hathaway and ask her if she remembers Cazenave as part of Follieri's old gang. Who knows, you may even get a date with Hatahaway...

This whole thing has turned into a joke because the book in question is a joke, and the recent attemptat defending it based on Cazenave is a joke. Let us accept that the book is unreliable, deleted the references to it, and then I will tell you about Cazenave. We may still have a laugh after that. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 14:34, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

• @Arkenstone: you keep ignoring the point so I want to make something clear: if Cazenave turns out not to exist I will be taking you to ANI and asking for an indeff/cban on competence grounds. Now perhaps you will take this seriously. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:54, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we have any reason to think Cazenave doesn't exist. However, we have no reason to think he is an expert on what long-dead popes might or might not have said. A figure who claims to be a bishop in an extremely obscure Indian church (well, actually, a third party claims that online, but he certainly claims to be some sort of bishop) is not a reliable source just by virtue of making such a claim. A bishop might be a useful primary or even secondary source on the doctrines of their own denomination, but beyond that they are governed by the same rules of establishing reliability as everyone else. Boynamedsue (talk) 20:03, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

@Boynamedsue: we actually do, Roman Catholic Bishops are important figures and always have significant coverage (at least from Catholic sources). They almost always have their own Vatican hosted web profile. I can't find a single mention of this Cazenave outside of the context of this book. Arkenstrone isn't claiming he's a member of an extremely obscure Indian church, he's claiming that he is a Bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:25, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Even the supposed "Syrian-French Synod" is only mentioned in the book and conversations about the book (reader's groups and so on). That such a synod exists without a mention anywhere else is simply unbelievable. Woodroar (talk) 20:45, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back: "Very Rev. Jean Bernard de Cazenave" is Vicar General for France of the "Nordic Catholic Church"[20]. Apparently, he was at some point an archimandrite in a French Syriac Orthodox group, whether canonical or vagante, I don't know. This source seems to be entirely dubious. Jahaza (talk) 21:07, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Right last name, wrong first name and rank. We need a Bishop with the first name of Johanan-Mariam. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:53, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't take any form of threat seriously. If you wish people to respond to you, then try some civility WP:CIVIL. I see you have been warned regarding personal attacks previously. Your statement is hostile, and an accusation of malicious conduct and/or competency as per WP:NPA. I would remind you what @Boynamedsue recently said to an IP user above engaging in similar behaviour: "What I do know is that suggesting a user lacks competence to edit is not just an insane escalation at this point, but it [is] a violation WP:NPA. I will take this to WP:ANI if I see you do it again." You have been warned. Arkenstrone (talk) 22:51, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

This is the part where you present reliable sources which indicate that Bishop Cazenave exists. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

@Arkenstrone: have you uncovered any evidence that Bishop Cazenave exists and if not are you still assessing that they exist? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:58, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

This discussion started for only one reason: because you kept adding this book to Wikipedia, although I told you that it is not reliable.

No, that's not what you said. Your statements were filled with false assumptions and accusations, and extremely disparaging attacks rooted in some incorrect perception of what you thought was taking place (something about an Australian website?), a clear violation of WP:NPA, which I brushed off, asking you to focus on the content instead of the editor. You can review that part of the talk page if you wish.

"Huffing and puffing." Really?

The final sentence I added about Bishop Cazenave, wasn't the thrust of my argument. That was a statement to indicate that Lavere's work is not without some level of ecclesiastical support. So to call his work "a joke" is quite a stretch and not rooted in reality. It's also interesting that you ignored the main part of the argument about Lavere co-authoring other works with Laurentin and Debroise, in the same year (2012), having to do with similar material (Valtorta), whom you do consider RS.

Regarding Bishop Cazenave, digging a little deeper, he is a Bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, the sister Church of Rome, and under the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, the Supreme head of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church. You can read the details of the common declaration of Pope John Paul II and the Patriarch of Antioch of 1984, which should help clear things up.[21]

(Regarding your attempts at dry humour, you lost me. Suffice it to say, don't give up your day job.) Arkenstrone (talk) 00:04, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Some additional information on the Syriac Orthodox Church and its history here:[22] Arkenstrone (talk) 00:24, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Arkenstone, Yada, yada, yada. I think all keyboards here are getting worn out and none of this will change the outcome of this discussion. Jahaza's additional coment that the book is entirely dubious seals the fate of this discussion. This discussion should end by declaring the book as not reliable for any factual information, and references to it should be deleted. That will happen, regardless of additional pages of discussion. I will suggest that below. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 00:42, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

You are ignoring my response and instead deflecting. And for the record, as per Wiki policy and the discussion resolved in the very first remarks, the book can be used for Lavere's statements and opinions, but not for controversial facts. Arkenstrone (talk) 07:33, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

@Arkenstrone: it can be used for that, but on Lavere's page not The Poem of the Man God. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:43, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Cazenave isn't mentioned in the linked source, I can't find a Syriac Orthodox Bishop by the name of Cazenave either. Where did you find this information when you dug a little deeper? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 04:57, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Arkenstone did kind of make the claim Cazenave was a Catholic bishop, but I think he was more guilty of imprecision than anything else. Based on an unreliable website, I think some people definitely believe him to be a bishop of the Syrian-Orthodox church of the Indies of Malabar. As it goes, though coauthoring with people who have published reliable works does increase an author's credibility, it does not, in this case, mitigate for the problems with the publisher. There are many writers who have some reliable works and some which are valid for only their opinion. Boynamedsue (talk) 06:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I did presume him to be a Bishop of the Roman Curia, instead of the Syrian-Orthodox Church. I had no compelling reason to doubt he was a Bishop, however. It seems absurd to me that an author would resort to such a ruse, risking their reputation and career on a preface commendation of a non-existant Bishop.

As it goes, though coauthoring with people who have published reliable works does increase an author's credibility, it does not, in this case, mitigate for the problems with the publisher

Fair enough. And for that reason, I understand that the book cannot be used to support controversial statements as facts, but only as the author's opinion. Arkenstrone (talk) 07:47, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Do you have a single reliable source which says he's a Bishop in the Syrian-Orthodox Church? Note that it can only be used to support the author's opinion on the author's page, there is no way to use it at The Poem of the Man God because the author's opinion is not due for inclusion. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:40, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

What "reputation and career" was he risking? Haven't we established that this was his first book, and it was outside the realm of any existing career we've found sign of? (And if you think that aspiring authors would never think of pulling shenanigans, sit down with me and some fellow publishers at a bar at a convention sometime, and we'll have some stories to tell you.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:51, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

NatGertler, I assume those stories would include Nicolas Bourbaki and some of their pranks. At some point Andre Weil carried business cards with the name Bourbaki and was accused of being a spy when they found them along with his own cards in his wallet at a border crossing. Cartan and Weil had that game going for quite a while. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 16:04, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to close this discussion: This discussion seems destined to end in the book in question being declared not reliable for factual information, because there is only one user arguing for reliability and a few others supporting unreliability. In the sense of WP:SNOW this discussion has no chance of proving the book to be reliable in the context of WP:BURDEN regardless of any additional drama on this page. I therefore propose that this discussion should close with the conclusion that the book was found not to be reliable for factual information, so we can move on. Thanks. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 00:42, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Read above. Lavere is credible given he has coauthored with others who have published reliable works. However, due to lack of editorial oversight of the publisher, the book cannot be used to support controversial statements as facts, but only as the author's opinion. Arkenstrone (talk) 08:33, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't go so far as to say he is "credible", I think the coauthoring lowers the odds against him, but on its own is not enough. The inclusion of its claims would be governed by WP:DUE and, to an extent, WP:FRINGE. I think the problem here is, at its root, the inclusion of claims of Valtorta's orthodoxy due to second-hand accounts of approval by senior church figures, and whether it's possible to include apologia from Lavere. That is a massive can of worms. Boynamedsue (talk) 08:49, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

The problem is that all these "fanatical" statements from this Enigma book seem to suggest that the majority of the Catholic Church (if not the entire planet) support Valtorta. That is far, far from reality. This is a controversial topic. Only totally drunk people would suggest that the book is not controversial. I have not had any drinks today, so I would not suggest that. So a can of woems would be an understatement. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 09:56, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Which "fanatical" statements? Some of the things Lavere is stating is also stated by co-authors Laurentin, and Debroise, AND Lavere in another book of the same year, regarding similar material, and probably others. So that's hardly "fanatical". While many controversial statements may not be used due to the issue with the publisher's lack of editorial oversight, that doesn't make them "fanatical". Controversial does not equal fanatical. Your penchant for hyperbole and exaggeration is not helpful. Arkenstrone (talk) 18:30, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

René Laurentin and François-Michel Debroise would appear to be controversial figures in their own right due to their promotion of fringy Marian concepts like apparitions (ghosts to the layman). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:52, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Boynamedsue, The problem with saying only "controversial" statements from the book should be excluded is that it makes the can of worms exponentially larger over time. Consider the statement that is already in the article:

"According to Lavère, in January 1962, Fr. Berti was given an authorization to publish by the Vice Commissioner of the Holy See, Father Marco Giraudo, and this statement attributed to Fr. Giraudo was added by Emilio Pisani, Valtorta's publisher, to volume 10 of the 1985 French edition: “You have our total approbation to continue the publication of this second edition of The Gospel as revealed to me [the Poem] by Maria Valtorta," concluding with, "We shall see how it is received.”"

Is this controversial? I think it is not only controversial, but clearly absurd, given that the Index was still active in 1962. And in the book Lavere gives no indication of the statement came about. This statement is tantamount to the Vice President of some country giving permission to ignore some of the laws in that country that are already on the books. These debates about what is controversial will turn that page into an utter mess. I agree with the position taken by Jahaza that the book is "entirely dubious" as a source. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 10:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if we need a formal close, but I agree that we have to consider the source unreliable or objectionable for any number of reasons. Whether it's dubious or a hoax or the author is careless about names and facts or it's factual but niche enough to be overlooked by every other reliable source, it really doesn't matter. The source lacks the reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that we require. Woodroar (talk) 12:47, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Woodroar, Thank you. It was about time someone said that loud and clear as you did. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 16:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Yesterday, all my dreams..., yes absolutely, that is a highly controversial statement. Anything that can only be sourced to a book without sufficient editorial oversight could be challenged on that basis. Boynamedsue (talk) 13:45, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Boynamedsue, So your definition of "controversial" is any statement that can only be sourced to that book and no other? If so, almost every statement from that book used in the article is controversial, because it has a single source, namely the book. And they are often sourced in the book itself to blogs and personal websites that would not be considered WP reliable. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 16:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Right, and this is one of the problems at present. That statement was made by Fr. Berti, who was present at the meeting with Fr. Giraudo. He produced a signed letter and testimony attesting to that event. The problem is that while this signed letter and testimony exists on websites that host information and historical documents concerning these events, they haven't been formally published, and so there is some difficulty using them as reliable primary sources. There is plenty of evidence to indicate these events did happen, it's just that we are unable to cite reliable sources confirming this at present. In due course, this may change, but until then, we are forced to treat them as "controversial" statements whose primary source evidence can't be cited directly. But certainly not "fanatical".

So the question is, is it possible to reference such controversial statements, reworked or reworded, not as fact, but as something controversial, and as the authors opinion or view? For example, there is a line of text in the sister article Maria Valtorta that sites Bouflet's statement (a critic of Valtorta) that all we know about Valtorta is from her autobiography. But this is incorrect. At least 2 biographies have been written about her. However, the statement remains, not because it's factual, but because he's generally considered a reliable source, with reliable publisher, etc. even though the statement itself is clearly incorrect. So we say that "According to Bouflet…" or "Bouflet states that…" in order not mislead readers into thinking that his statement is incontrovertible fact.

Also, @Yesterday is misleading you. As I mentioned before, some of the statements made by Lavere are also made by others, including Laurentin and Debroise and Lavere himself as co-author with other RS authors in other books. For example some of the statements concerning Msgr. Tettamanzi, Fr. Allegra, and Cardinal Gagnon, appear in both books. I will acquire copies of the other books to see which other statements also appear in these books so we can stop attributing to "fanaticism" that which is simply controversial or even reliably sourced fact. Arkenstrone (talk) 19:33, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

In search of Cazenave

Recently @Horse Eye's Back: asked about Cazenave again. Given that a few days ago I had said that after @Arkenstone: had had a chance to say his piece, I would tell you guys what I know about this man, I should do so. Hopefully this will end this discussion and we can move on. Two things we can be certain about: first that this is a very, very strange man, and secondly that he has not taken a vow of poverty, by any means. In fact Jahaza figured most of it out, as well except the part about his fancy bedroom. That place is in fact so fancy that it was featured in The Economist as one of the fanciest bedrooms around. There is even a picture of Cazenave in his Louis XVI bed, but given that The Economist is a family publication, he was alone in that picture at least.

What surprised me at first is that they never said he was "Bishop of A" with A as a city name. He was not the bishop of Paris for sure, and not even of an out of the way place like Annecy. So what did he do when the synod was over? The 2nd strange thing was that if had been a "usual bishop" he would have performed some weddings, funerals, etc. And there would have been pictures of him doing so on the internet. But there are none. So it must have been a "rent a bishop for a day" type of episcopus vagans situation just for the duration of the synod, and the front of the book focused just on that.

The third item was that if he had been to the Sorbonne, and was French, his name may not have been "Johanan-Mariam" but Jean-Marie. After a few seraches he turned out to be Jean Bernard Cazenave. The way we know that is the same man is that image searches show the same man. And the explanation for his not being at weddings etc. may be that he was monsignor amd an archimandrite tucked away in an monastery somewhere. But none of that is totally certain, and he may be a semi-Bourbaki character anyway. It is difficult to know who this man is, although we know that he exists and likes to drink in bars. There are pictures of him doing that.

So you can do a few Google " image searches" for Jean Bernard Cazenave and see him with his friends [23] etc. You will eventually also see him in bed, etc. as well. For someone who had been in a monastery, his taste in Louis XVI furniture is realy strange. Or maybe it was this monastery anyway.

Horse Eye, if you are thinking of going over to ANI about Arkenstrone about this, I think it will not succeed, given that The Economist is a reliable source and calls him a monsignor in that order. So you may save effort on that. Hopefully Arkenstrone will be more careful, and avoid that fate. Now, can we please end this discussion? Thanks. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:21, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

RfC: Reliability of La Patilla

What is the reliability of La Patilla?

• Option 1: Generally reliable
• Option 2: Additional considerations
• Option 3: Generally unreliable
• Option 4: Deprecate

WMrapids (talk) 22:17, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

---

 Comment: A previous discussion was raised regarding the reliability of La Patilla. In the discussion, concerns about the reliability of La Patilla included its reposting of deprecated and blacklisted sources (including Stop the Steal, anti-immigrant articles and frequent opinion articles from WP:BREITBART, WP:EPOCHTIMES, WP:ZEROHEDGE, WP:IBTIMES and others), its heavy bias and its leadership working directly on behalf of Juan Guaidó (one user describing the outlet as "propaganda"). Those defending La Patilla said that it is one of the most popular websites in Venezuela and that though it reposts questionable sources, it does not do it often.

@NoonIcarus, Visviva, and Burrobert: Pinging users previously involved. --WMrapids (talk) 22:33, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 1: La Patilla is currently one of the main outlets in Venezuela, with 13 years of experience mostly as a news aggregator, and as such, a valuable resource for references in Venezuela related topics. While concerns with editorial independence have been brought up, examples of how it has been affected have not been given. Per WP:SOURCECOUNTING, examples of unreliability were uncommon, and links provided before were not representative of La Patilla's overall performance.

I really don't want to go over the details again and the previous discussion can be consulted, and I would like new editors to participate and give their feedback, but I can invite them to look after its use in articles about Venezuela, and see that in those cases there have not been concerns regarding reliability. Pinging @Kingsif, JML1148, Red-tailed hawk, and SandyGeorgia:, who also participated in the last discussion. --NoonIcarus (talk) 00:05, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

While I have the chance, I'll put out to WP:BLUDGEON concerns pointed out in the previous RfC, as well as related ones. --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:04, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 Concerns have been raised over the quality of reporting decreasing since 2019 or 2020; before some cut-off date in that period, La Patilla can be considered generally reliable. After this, it is typically accurate but may present bias - sticking to the facts rather than using it as a gauge of sentiment would be wise, and editors could include in-line attributions. Obviously any of the reposts from other sources should be judged based on the reliability of the original source. There was a mention that alleged recent unreliability for coverage of politics; I don't find much credence to this, and think the allegation mistakes partisanship in a fact-checking source for "propaganda" (I won't speculate as to why). Kingsif (talk) 00:23, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

  The issue with placing a date on this is that La Patilla has reposted WP:RT[.]COM since at least 2013, WP:EPOCHTIMES since 2014, WP:BREITBART since 2015, WP:ZEROHEDGE since 2016 and PanAm Post since early 2018. WMrapids (talk) 05:48, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 3 I know I previously said I didn't want to be involved in this dispute anymore, but I feel quite strongly about this one. La Patilla has reposted articles from unreliable right-wing sources Breitbart and Epoch Times, among others. There has also been links made between La Patilla and right-wing politicians. Considering the Western sources that have been deprecated, I don't see why this shouldn't be considered unreliable. JML1148 ^{(talk | contribs)} 02:37, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 3 or 4: Per the previous discussion, La Patilla republishes WP:BREITBART, WP:EPOCHTIMES, WP:ZEROHEDGE, WP:IBTIMES articles, so obviously that is the audience they are catering for. NoonIcarus previously stated "Breitbart's unreliability is not as known is the Spanish speaking sphere also has to be considered", but if La Patilla were a quality source and had decent editorial staff, they would obviously not be republishing such articles like they have been doing for years. The argument that they are "one of the main outlets in Venezuela" is also a red herring since it has nothing to do with La Patilla's reliability. We can look at WP:FOXNEWSPOLITICS as an example; Fox News may be "the most-watched cable network in the U.S.", but that does not make it reliable. Visviva also stated in the previous discussion "I don't really have an objection to option 3 either. I went with the more cautious choice mostly just out of concern that there might be some valuable use of this source that hasn't come to light". Looking at what this user said, there are really no examples of La Patilla being cited by reliable sources except for discussing court proceedings against the outlet. BBC News did however describe La Patilla as a "satirical website" while BBC Monitoring wrote in an article discussing Venezuelan outlets that La Patilla "churns out a barrage of pro-opposition and anti-government news items", that the outlet "has a penchant for dramatic headlines, such as 'Venezuela in its third day of paralysis and anguish due to the red blackout, with no solution in sight'" and described La Patilla as "rabidly anti-government" . Overall, much of La Patilla's content has a pretty heavy bias and it republishes articles from unreliable sources.--WMrapids (talk) 03:47, 26 June 2023 (UTC) (Edit: Adding "or 4" after content farm concerns were raised)1 -- WMrapids (talk) 04:35, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

An edit breaking down how La Patilla is a questionable source, how it is not used by other sources and how the outlet has used fake news to promote its POV, providing the conclusion that La Patilla is an unreliable source.--WMrapids (talk) 17:18, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 3 There is quite strong evidence here of publishing content which is unusable for us, if it were a UK website, I have no doubt it would already be deprecated. Boynamedsue (talk) 05:16, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

As commented in the previous discussion, the examples provided for this is either content originally posted by reliable sources or statements by foreign politicians or entities. WP:ABOUTSELF applies specially in the case of RT; hence why WP:SOURCECOUNTING was cited: a large list of links was offered, only having in common word matches, without examining reliability in depth, and the few exceptions did not prove this was systematic for the WP:GUNREL qualification. --NoonIcarus (talk) 09:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 some important examples of unreliable behaviour have been brought here but a few examples are not sufficient to make it a perennial or deprecated source per WP:SOURCECOUNTING. As far as I can see from the previous conversation (uninvolved) the notability of the source has been demonstrated but few articles, if any, really investigate the topic of La Patilla unreliability and it is more about government pressure on the news site. I think the best compromise would be to add general considerations as to not be used "to substantiate exceptional claims or unsourced investigations" due to sensationalistic titles and rapid coverage. I think its mistakes are not really topic related. Accusations of partisanship have been brought forward but it is clear that La Patilla is independent and has published many articles about government and opposition scandals. Also let us remind that opinion articles are never to be used without attribution independently of the source.--ReyHahn (talk) 23:13, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

How does listing examples of La Patilla reposting deprecated and blacklisted sources equate to WP:SOURCECOUNTING? Someone made the backhanded request of "Continue the discussion until it is pages long just like Fox News (23, last time I checked WP:FOXNEWSPOLITICS), providing repeated instances of factual errors, and perhaps I'll concede." So, I was obliged to answer with many instances of La Patilla reposting articles from poor sources. Are we not here to review La Patilla's editorial behavior? It doesn't matter that La Patilla removes some words or phrases from the poor sources when they repost articles, La Patilla is still citing poor sources. Why would La Patilla's editorial team repost articles from poor sources for over ten years?

Here is just one example. In late-2022, La Patilla reposted the article "Maduro's regime empties prisons and sends violent criminals to the US border" from WP:BREITBART through their own editorial voice. In the article, La Patilla is asserting that the Maduro government is sending criminals to the US and that a "source, who is not authorized to talk to the media, told Breitbart Texas that the measure recalls a similar action taken by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro during the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s." However, looking at the facts surrounding the Mariel boatlift, only about 2% of the 125,000 migrants sent were estimated to be criminals, while other individuals were involved in small crimes or were formerly imprisoned political opponents. Just from this one example, we can see La Patilla pushing a false narrative, with the help of WP:BREITBART, to demonize the Maduro and Castro governments. WMrapids (talk) 05:35, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Quick note that La Patilla withdrew a related article and that Castro did release criminals during the Mariel boatlift, offering the option between emigration and jail time. Also, when I mentioned that discussions should be as long as Fox News', I did not mean they had to be artificially prolonged with a list of links, only that there such be enough community participation for that amount of time to reach the same conclusions. --NoonIcarus (talk) 07:31, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Please stop the continuation of the false narrative. If you read the source, the Cuban government wanted to release “undesirables”, such as political opponents and homosexuals, not specifically criminals. As the other sources state, the majority were not “criminals” as they are normally defined. WMrapids (talk) 13:16, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

That doesn't seem to be a reliability problem, since convicts were released regardless. The same can be said for many of the other point brought up, including calling Fidel Castro a dictator: describing the leader of a one-party state that ruled for almost 50 years is only normal. That it might be a debatable term and other sources won't use it is another matter, but it is unrelated to reliability. --NoonIcarus (talk) 22:59, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

You should stop using an inaccurate persuasive definition; you are "more concerned about swaying people to one side or another than expressing the unbiased facts" in an effort to avoid the truth. The truth is that the information provided by Breitbart and in turn La Patilla an extremely biased narrative that was created to push disinformation. Please stop. WMrapids (talk) 22:15, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2: For La Patilla to be considered "generally unreliable" as a source, there has to be sufficient amount of evidence proving that it has been routinely publishing misinformations and asserting them as facts. Like the newspapers of records that have been deemed generally reliable by the community, a news source that has been active for over a decade like La Patilla is bound to have published some mistakes from time to time. So cherrypicking a few examples of false or misleading statements is not going to be enough and the other participants of this discussion supporting Option 3 have not provided any example whatsoever.

Also, republishing translated articles from unreliable and deprecated sources does not automatically or necessarily mean that any of the informations in those republished articles is false. Claiming that an info that happens to be in a source has to be false because that source routinely publishes misinformation is association fallacy. You are going to have to check the republished articles one by one to see if most of them actually contain misinformation to actually support this assertion. If the primary concern is over these republished articles, then we could include in the summary on WP:RSPSOURCES that "republished articles from unreliable or deprecated sources should not be used to support exceptional claims or statements of fact" especially since La Patilla always clearly indicates the respective original news source and author either near the start or at the end of those republished articles. That is why I support Option 2 for "additional considerations apply".

Furthermore, as NoonIcarus said in the previous discussion on Talk:La Patilla, this source has retracted articles and removed questionable statements before indicating at least a degree of editorial oversight.

Lastly, being biased or opinionated for politics is not really significant or relevant for assessing reliability. Most of the generally reliable newspapers of records and other sources whose editorial stances and biases have always been clear to everyone do not even have their summaries on WP:RSPSOURCES indicate that they are biased. Jacobin is much less subtle about its political bias compared to La Patilla and yet it is still considered "generally reliable" (so far anyway).

--StellarHalo (talk) 11:46, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

• Bad RfC. The OP says complaints are about reposting "anti-immigrant" or "opinion articles" or "bias". That means it's not about "Reliability of La Patilla", it's about politics of La Patilla. That's an improper basis for starting a WP:RSN RfC with banning options. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 14:55, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  La Patilla’s use of blacklisted and deprecated sources, in addition to its spread of false narratives (example above), is directly related to its reliability in addition to its extreme bias. WMrapids (talk) 19:36, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  This brings up another important issue from the last discussion: many of the links cited as examples of unreliability were actually opinion articles. These are clearly distinguished from news articles, and as such should not be considered to weight unreliability. --NoonIcarus (talk) 23:08, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  Your opinion seems dubious as you are someone who wanted to remove Breitbart from being blacklisted. WMrapids (talk) 22:25, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

• Option 3 or 4. I read a dozen or so articles and a few dozen headlines, and I'm not seeing much that I'd consider trustworthy. Most of the articles were reposts, which suggests that they're a "content farm" more than a "news outlet". That they readily repost Breitbart, Epoch Times, RT, etc. should be an instant fail as far as reliability goes. If they do repost news from an otherwise reliable source, then we should use the original article, not La Patilla. Few reliable sites repost LP articles and (as mentioned above) several consider them biased or satirical, which points to their lack of a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. And, to be clear, it's not that their bias makes them unreliable, but that their bias leads to them repost fake news, rush content (and then retract it), write misleading headlines, etc.—which is what makes them unreliable. Woodroar (talk) 23:42, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with this assessment. La Patilla appears to be content farm since there is little original content provided across its articles. And yes, search through the list of WP:GREL sources and their use of La Patilla; you will find little to nothing. After reviewing "Healthline: deprecate or blacklist?", La Patilla seems to be similar to Red Ventures websites in the way that it may participate in churnalism. WMrapids (talk) 04:32, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Where did check for these headlines again? A quick browse through its website (lapatilla.com) will easily show plenty of articles that are original content. Here are some examples, just from today's headlines:

• Domestic:
• International:
• Opposition primaries (precandidates for next year's elections):

La Patilla is far from being a content farm at all. --NoonIcarus (talk) 19:06, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Domestic:

1. Repost of EFE
2. Repost of press release
3. Original to LP
4. Original to LP

International:

1. Original to LP
2. Repost of a journalist's post
3. Repost of Daily Star (United Kingdom) tabloid
4. Repost of Agence France-Presse

As for opposition primaries, of course La Patilla will cover the process themselves as they are the opposition outlet. So yeah, the majority of what you shared that is not directly related to the opposition is just reposts from other sources. WMrapids (talk) 20:39, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Translations are not reposts, specially when original content is added. It's also interesting to see how the goalposts are moved in face of the examples. --NoonIcarus (talk) 21:59, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

• Option 3. La Patilla acts as a propaganda outfit for the opposition against the Venezuelan government. Its extreme bias means we can't rely on it to provide accurate reporting. WMrapids has provided extensive documentation of its many editorial failings. As pointed out by Woodroar, its bias affects the type of content it publishes. It regularly refers to Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro as a dictator. It published articles that supported, and sometimes encouraged, the attempted regime-change operation to install Juan Guaidó as President. One of its articles exhorted its readers to "Follow the example that Caracas gave: They confirm nightly protests against Maduro in 30 capital communities". Another is titled "Support for Maduro's departure continues to grow: 85.4% of Venezuelans want the Chavista nightmare to end now". It is currently running a campaign called #NoEsNormal against the Venezuela government, in which it tells its readers to "avoid getting used to the vices of Chavismo".

Regarding the connection between bias and reliability, there is a point at which bias does affect reliability. Even when biased sources are not found to be generally unreliable, editors have decided that the use of such sites should be attributed (see entries for the Cato Institute, CEPR, Common Sense Media etc.) There are a number of examples on the Perennial list of sources found to be unreliable, with a note that the sources' bias contributed to the rating. Some examples:

- California Globe: Editors also note the highly opinionated nature of the site as evidence against its reliability.

- The Canary: “There is consensus that The Canary is generally unreliable. Its reporting is sensationalist at times; selective reporting, a left-wing bias, and a poor distinction between editorial and news content were also noted”.

- CESNUR: “CESNUR is an apologia site for new religious movements, and thus is inherently unreliable in its core area due to conflicts of interest ".

- Epoch Times: “Most editors classify The Epoch Times as an advocacy group for the Falun Gong, and consider the publication a biased or opinionated source that frequently publishes conspiracy theories as fact”.

- The Federalist: “The Federalist is generally unreliable for facts due to its partisan nature and its promotion of conspiracy theories”.

- Heat Street: “many editors note that Heat Street does not clearly differentiate between its news articles and opinion. There is consensus that Heat Street is a partisan source ".

Burrobert (talk) 12:02, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yet again it is claimed that the editorial line affects the reliability, but no examples of this are given. --NoonIcarus (talk) 11:43, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

References

Questionable and WP:FRINGE information examples

Here is a list of examples showing some questionable information presented by La Patilla:

• "Maduro's regime empties prisons and sends violent criminals to the US border" – A repost of a WP:BREITBART article that compares the alleged actions of the Maduro government to the false narrative that Castro packed criminals into the Mariel boatlift to send to the US
• "Report: Venezuela’s worst and darkest head North for destinations like Martha’s Vineyard" – Another WP:BREITBART repost that uses the Mariel boatlift comparison; "Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro is freeing some of Venezuela’s most violent criminals from prison and sending them to the U.S. southern border ... The source, not authorized to speak to the media, told Breitbart Texas the move by Venezuela of freeing criminals who then head for the U.S. is reminiscent of a similar action taken by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro during the Mariel boat lift in the 1980s"
• "This US airline will fire 593 workers who refused to get vaccinated against Covid-19" – A repost of a WP:EPOCHTIMES article that states "the company would start the process of dismissal of employees who refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus (Chinese Communist Party), according to a memorandum addressed to employees, obtained by The Epoch Times", with no editorial removal of this WP:FRINGE content from La Patilla.
• "When could the world be free of coronavirus? What some experts say" – Citing the WP:EPOCHTIMES for information about COVID-19; "According to an extensive article in The Epoch Times, the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the world cannot be controlled until at least 2027." Um, yeah.
• "Faith and freedom: How a Shen Yun dancer escaped from China" – A WP:EPOCHTIMES propaganda piece promoting the Falun Gong and Shen Yun; "like tens of millions of people in China, were in the crosshairs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) due to his religious faith. From night to morning, approximately 70 to 100 million Falun Gong practitioners, also known as Falun Dafa, went from being known to the general public as kind people who practiced meditation and followed "Truth, Benevolence and Tolerance," to being branded as enemies of the state in 1999."
• "Republican Mitch McConnell warns of the return to confinement in the United States if people do not get vaccinated against Covid-19" – More WP:FRINGE from an WP:EPOCHTIMES repost; "Many governors in 2020 imposed tough measures, such as the closure of schools and businesses. The result was widespread unemployment and an increase in health problems such as drug abuse. Some experts said that the closures helped stop the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19." Again, La Patilla left this dubious material in the article.
• "Iran's revenge on the United States after Soleimani's death could pass through Venezuela" – Pushing WP:FRINGE info from PanAm Post suggesting that Iran and Hezbollah would try to attack the US with the help of Venezuela.

This is what I've had time to place. May add more later if necessary, but this should provide a picture of La Patilla's editorial quality which promotes quantity over quality.--WMrapids (talk) 04:04, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Let's go through your claims of questionable info and WP:FRINGE one by one:

• Mariel boatlift comparison: Neither of those articles actually say that Castro sent criminals to the United States. They were just pointing out the similarity in which both Maduro and Castro regimes took advantage of mass exoduses to get rid of people they saw as undesirable.
• "This US airline will fire 593 workers who refused to get vaccinated against Covid-19": "CCP Virus" is simply a term the Epoch Times uses as a substitute for SARS-Cov-2 virus and a term that will never be used on here due to WP:UNDUE. Besides that, the content of this short article has no false info, as seen here
• "When could the world be free of coronavirus? What some experts say": That claim was clearly attributed to a subject matter expert and reported on by a newspaper of record and other sources. Not sure how that would be considered questionable or WP:FRINGE.
• "Faith and freedom: How a Shen Yun dancer escaped from China": You are going to have to point out which specific part of that quote you highlighted from this article is false.
• "Republican Mitch McConnell warns of the return to confinement in the United States if people do not get vaccinated against Covid-19": Again, besides keeping "CCP Virus" from the original, which part of the highlighted quote is WP:FRINGE?
• "Iran's revenge on the United States after Soleimani's death could pass through Venezuela": Analysis made by a subject matter expert on topics of national security, Latin America, and Iran affiliated with at least one prominent think tank and appearing in several reliable sources for relevant comments (Ex: 1, 2) is not WP:FRINGE especially when the expert knows about the content of the PanAm Post article.

Also, all this focus on reposted articles from unreliable or deprecated sources is nothing more than red herring. How many of the articles from this source currently being used as citations on 313 pages   are actually reposted from any of the aforementioned unreliable or deprecated sources? How many of those are actually reposted from somewhere else for that matter? There are several pages of subjects related to Latin American topics currently using original articles written by La Patilla itself as citations. If anyone here wants to erase all those citations, then you will have to prove that they contain misinformations.

StellarHalo (talk) 08:13, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

It is astounding what you are attempting to ignore.

• The Breitbart/La Patilla articles comparing Venezuela and Cuba are directly implying that both countries were attempting to send criminals to the United States (similar to the "weaponizing migration" charges below). For the former, the "source" was "not authorized to speak to the media" while only speaking with Breitbart (fishy) and for the latter, research has already determined that a very small percentage of Mariel boatlift migrants were criminals.
• The fact that La Patilla published "the disease caused by the CCP virus (Chinese Communist Party)" obviously pushes the fringe theory that the CCP were involved with the creation of the virus. If we were reading a good source, we wouldn't have to worry about WP:UNDUE terms, let alone WP:FRINGE terms, but this is not the case with La Patilla as their editors republish questionable material through a poor review process.
• Regarding the COVID-19 end date article, La Patilla is citing the Epoch Times on COVID-19 information. What reputable source would do that?
• Humire is a dubious source of such information and often participates in fear mongering. He is an Epoch Times contributor. He was a panel host at CPAC where he pushed conspiracy theories, calling COVID-19 the "china virus" (2:55), implied that the US-Mexico border is "heading into" the condition of the Colombia-Venezuela where he says China, Iran and Russia are present (10:15) and said that "Venezuela is weaponizing migration" (18:15). The Washington Office on Latin America has said that the SFS has made claims from "unspecified" sources in the past. Much of the information appears to be hearsay or conspiracies. Whether he is an Atlantic Council commentator or not, we have to pick apart each source and he is obviously not a good one.
• Your "red herring" charges are in fact a red herring itself, with your distraction tactic sounding like "You're showing that La Patilla is reposting questionable content from unreliable sources, but this is not related to reliability. La Patilla has previously been spread throughout Wikipedia, so we can't remove it do to its widespread use". Even if La Patilla were on every article in the project, it does not take away from the fact that it is unreliable and reposts material from other unreliable sources.

As perfectly explained above by Woodroar, La Patilla seems to be a content farm that does not fear (or have the capability to prevent) reposting unreliable content. WMrapids (talk) 16:15, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

This is blatantly false and can be easily proven by taken a quick look through its main page, as I explained above. There is plenty of original content, and most of its reposted content are translations from reliable sources such as AFP and Reuters (something that I also mentioned at the original discussion), while including some original text, which is common practice among newspapers. Jumping to this conclusion demonstrates carelessness in assessing the outlet's reliability. --NoonIcarus (talk) 19:17, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

First, please read Wikipedia:No original research. Your personal analysis of what conclusion or narrative those articles imply has no relevance to the source's reliability as far as Wikipedia is concerned. Only what the sources clearly and explicitly state themselves is relevant. The same goes for your interpretation of "CCP Virus". Second, as I mentioned in the main discussion above, you are using guilt by association to push and jump to unwarranted conclusions that info in a reposted article must be wrong, questionable, or WP:FRINGE solely based on the reputation of the original news site the article was taken from and more importantly that La Patilla routinely publishes misinformation just because some of the reposted articles originated from unreliable sources. Third, quoted speculative analyses on near future events or courses of actions by subject matter experts are used all the time by RS in articles and news broadcasts especially when those experts also happen to be specialists in the specific relevant topics of the breaking news in question. You calling those analyses "conspiracies" and "fear mongering" does not make them WP:FRINGE. Again, you are using guilt by association to dismiss the views of an academic who has a long history of being used as subject matter expert by RS rather than engaging with the substance of the speculative argument itself.

Most importantly, as I already said above, you have to prove that La Patilla routinely publishes misinformation if you want your claim of it being generally unreliable to hold any water and you have not done so. Also, and just as important, I have not gone through all the 313 pages using this source as citations but from what I have seen, vast majority of those are original articles of La Patilla rather than reposted and none of the few reposted articles being used are actually from any of the aforementioned unreliable sources. For reposted articles, it is easy to just assess the original sources they were taken from individually to determine if they should be used or simply just not use reposted articles at all like I suggested. It is quite clear that you are trying to use questionable origins of a minority of contents to dismiss the rest of the content of La Patilla wholesale. You keep focusing on the notion that reposting articles from unreliable sources affect the reliability of La Patilla's original contents without any evidence. StellarHalo (talk) 04:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

The RfC process is based on users interpreting which sources should or shouldn't be used based on reliability concerns and determining a consensus on the source in question. It's not difficult to see that "the disease caused by the CCP virus" is disinformation phrasing that was either promoted or ignored by La Patilla editors, which would show unreliability in both instances. The whole purpose of WP:RS is that "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published sources". Why would Wikipedia users find a source that uses unreliable sources reliable? This is not guilt by association if La Patilla is directly reposting articles from unreliable sources, La Patilla then becomes the unreliable source as it is not just association. Further, per WP:QUESTIONABLE, "Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts or with no editorial oversight. Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, that are promotional in nature, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions. ... The proper uses of a questionable source are very limited."

• Is La Patilla a questionable source? Y Yes

Now we can visit WP:USEBYOTHERS, which states "How accepted and high-quality reliable sources use a given source provides evidence, positive or negative, for its reliability and reputation. ... For example, widespread citation without comment for facts is evidence of a source's reputation and reliability for similar facts, whereas widespread doubts about reliability weigh against it." Already recognizing that La Patilla is a questionable source, we can visit the concerns by other users (such as @Visviva and Woodroar:) who note that La Patilla is not used by WP:GREL sources.

• Is La Patilla a questionable source and has limited use by others? Y Yes

Lastly, let's focus on fake news promoted by La Patilla. Not only does La Patilla post questionable content from deprecated and blacklisted sources, it does so itself. For instance, during the 2014 Venezuelan protests, La Patilla published the article "Unacceptable: Repressive forces beat and arrest a special young man (Photos)" (it still hasn't been fixed after nearly 10 years), though the photographer later explained the photos saying "I'm going to be very clear about this image, I took it, and it's a GN official helping a protester to breathe" and the Associated Press stated "A Bolivarian National Guard officer holds a demonstrator’s head up to help him breathe". The conservative Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia would also write "The violinist was the latest victim of the disproportionate violence of 'the paramilitary forces of the Chavista dictatorship,' as repeated in digital opposition media such as La Patilla ... However, as at other times in this crisis, the narrative of a heroic youth massacred by the Bolivarian dictatorship does not stick to the facts", with the article further explaining that La Patilla said a tear gas canister was the cause of death while further investigation showed that a ball bearing, possibly fired by protesters, was the deadly projectile and that Reuters had photos of protesters with makeshift firearms. In another instance, El Mundo analyzed a photograph from Hurricane Irene in 2011 that was used by La Patilla show shortages in Venezuela, writing "Whether for laziness and lack of diligence when it comes to verifying the origin of the image or because of a desire for manipulation, ... the Venezuelan opposition decided to systematically use this image."

• Is La Patilla a questionable source that has limited use by others and has promoted manipulated content? Y Yes

With these concerns identified, one can see that La Patilla is unreliable. WMrapids (talk) 08:19, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

General question on if sources authored by someone with a master's degree are considered reliable for Wikipedia in-regards to history

Hello, are sources written by authors who have a master's degree (Master of Arts; MA) reliable for history-related articles? Or can only sources written by authors at a PhD level be accepted on Wikipedia? Not sure if this is the right place to ask this. ThethPunjabi (talk) 02:16, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

You're approaching it from the wrong direction. Sources are expected to be authored by recognized experts in their field, no matter their level of academic attainment. A PhD may be part of that qualification, but is never all of it. Similarly, no degree at all is necessary when someone is broadly regarded as an expert in the subject being discussed. Mere academic attainment is never a sole criterion for reliability. See WP:RS for more. Acroterion (talk) 02:34, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Acroterion Thank you for your response. ThethPunjabi (talk) 03:18, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

As a general rule I would not view a degree as a reason to accept or reject a particular author/source. For example, I would be more willing to accept a journal article written by an undergrad (thus technically no degree) and published in a respectable journal vs something written by a post doc but self published or published in a low quality journal. In the case of the journal paper, unless the author is well known, we generally have to rely on the reputation/quality of the journal.

This can also extend to historical books published outside of traditional academia. While a lot of history is going to be written by people who are within academia, some specialized areas (say history of an industry or technology) might be written by people without degrees in that area (perhaps a journalism degree or something else). In those cases we would have to look at both what is being claimed (is it an extraordinary claim that requires greater evidence or is it an uncontroversial claim) and the reputation of the source. Occasionally a book by a non-history will be viewed as a reference quality work for it's specific subject. Springee (talk) 02:38, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Springee Thank you for your reply. ThethPunjabi (talk) 03:18, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

• @ThethPunjabi: I don't think the educational attainment of an author is the crux of the actual dispute this RSN query appears to relate to. IMO the problem is that a newspaper column is being used to contradict scholarly writings published by I B Tauris, Anthem press, and Oxford University Press. (There are also secondary issues of the the newspaper column being misinterpreted, and the article in the OUP edited volume, which is a republication of this journal article not being cited properly. But those are not the primary concern of this board and can be easily addressed on the article talkpage.)

Pinging @Acroterion and Springee: to check whether they believe their generic advice, which I agree with, is being appropriately cited in this case. Abecedare (talk) 04:23, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Abecedare I did post this question for an entirely unrelated issue. I simply found the response relevant regarding another discussion I recently had regarding educational qualifications of an author and its impact on the reliability of said authors on WP. Stating this before anyone gets any ideas on my intentions. Also, the other editor I was discussing with had qualms over the academic credentials of the writer of the newspaper article – and their opposition to inclusion of the source was centred on educational qualifications (see the talk page discussion). And may you expand on how the newspaper article is being "misinterpreted"? I am aware the majority of sources' views on the matter (which I state explicitly in my edits to the article), however this minority view has a place in the article as well. ThethPunjabi (talk) 04:26, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification.

As Acroterion and Springee indicated, assessment of a source's reliability should take into account a multitude of factors. For example, the Nalwa book is likely an unacceptable source because of its age (1935), publisher, and lack of academic reviews and peer-reviewed articles written by its author (at least I didn't find any on a quick search). The author holding "only" an MA would be the least of the concerns because during the 1930s the PhD degree was not as well-established as it is now and many recognized experts and academics lacked it.

And again, IMO the advice offered in this section is being misapplied to the Dawn article case though I'll let Acroterion and Springee speak for themselves. By the way, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is indeed scholarly uncertainty/dispute over Damodar Gulati's religious identity but per WP:DUE, if you want to include the argument that he was a Sikh you would need to find sources at par with the ones that say otherwise. Abecedare (talk) 04:48, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

@Abecedare I agree with you that the Nalwa book source is outdated. I originally posted this question here to basically see where WP policy applies regarding author educational credentials so I could have basically get a better understanding. In retrospect, a separate post should have been made for the Damodar Gulati issue but the user I was discussing the issue with on the t/p did post on here a few weeks ago seeking advice but received no response. Btw thanks for your reply. ThethPunjabi (talk) 04:53, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

WP:SCHOLARSHIP says that Masters dissertations and theses are considered reliable only if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence. This is because of the relative lack of review for such theses, but it does indicate that merely having a Master's degree doesn't make one an expert source for purposes of WP:SPS. That being said, merely having a Master's degree (or a Bachelor's, or no degree at all) does not disqualify an author from writing reliable works; what matters is the extent to which there is some sort of editorial review structure with a reputation for fact-checking/accuracy. This is why WP:NEWSORG allows journalism to be cited, and why WP:NEWSORG also notes that opinion pieces are not presumed to be RS. I don't think merely having a Master's degree transforms an opinion piece from being unreliable to being reliable. In any case, we should be trying to use the most respected and authoritative sources in writing articles; unless the journalism is presenting facts that were not known at the time of the scholarly work's publication, it's generally better to use scholarly works for these sorts of historical claims. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 19:47, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with the thrust of the debate that it is not the nature of the degree that is important, it is reputation of the person. For example Antonia Fraser has only (!) a batchelor's degree, yet her reputation as a popular historian is unsurpassed. Xxanthippe (talk) 06:25, 1 July 2023 (UTC).

Or Nina Totenberg, who has no degree, but is an authoritative source on the US Supreme Court. Banks Irk (talk) 23:26, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

True, but for our purposes she is surpassed by nearly every academic historian... So there are levels to this. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:42, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

It depends on what you mean. A master's degree alone would not, generally, be sufficient to pass the threshold for WP:SPS (though they could pass it if they became an established expert in the field regardless); however, if they are published in an WP:RS, then reliability can be derived from that RS and at that point their degree no longer really matters. That is to say, we wouldn't generally cite a blog post by someone with only a master's degree in the field; but if they wrote a book published by a high-quality academic publisher, or a piece in a major periodical, or otherwise published something in a WP:RS who we can trust performed their usual controls for fact-checking and accuracy, then that could be cited because it gains reliability from that. --Aquillion (talk) 00:06, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Is AfterEllen a reliable source for BLP reporting?

AfterEllen was last discussed in July 2020. The reliability of this site has come into question due to three related discussions at Talk:Dana Rivers, Talk:Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and Talk:Camp Trans, with a focus on a November 2022 article on Rivers.

Is AfterEllen a reliable source for BLP reporting? Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:52, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I would argue no, they are not reliable, particularly for trans and non-binary BLP reporting due to their strong bias. As noted in the last discussion, the site underwent a severe editorial change in 2016, after firing all of their staff, pivoting towards a focus on anti-trans content. As a result the publication was condemned by a coalition of editors from other mainstream lesbian publications ([24]) and was a focal point of a piece by NBC News in January 2019. In one academic paper the site's editorial shift towards trans exclusionary content has been described as an oppressive and dangerous theoretical stance that disparages and denigrates some of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community: trans women.

Currently, according to their about us page, they have only a single editor and contributing writer. It's unclear whether the remainder of the contributors to the site are freelancers, or bloggers who have been given a platform. There is no editorial, fact checking, or corrections policy published anywhere on their site. Their terms of service states that the site does not warrant that the content is accurate, reliable or correct or that any defects or errors will be corrected.

While the site does have an opinion section, the opinion articles are also unidentifiably mixed in with their news section. While some opinion articles are clearly marked as such in the article header ([25]), there are many opinion articles that are not and are otherwise indistinguishable from their news or celeb reporting without manually checking the opinion section ([26], [27], [28]).

The publication is also known for pushing and amplifying harmful myths through its reporting and opinion articles like the cotton ceiling ([29], [30]), that being trans is an ideology ([31], [32], [33], [34]), and that LGBT teachers are grooming children ([35])

When taken in combination; the heavy anti-trans bias, lack of fact checking, editorial, and corrections policies, and the difficulty in separating opinion articles from factual reporting makes AfterEllen an unreliable source. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:52, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Is the cotton ceiling a myth per se? There seem to be sources on the topic. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:02, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Biased sources aren't inherently unusable; in this case the apparent lack of fact-checking (indeed, as you point out, the notice that they don't warrant that the content is accurate or that it will be corrected if it turns out to be inaccurate) seems like the bigger issue which makes clear it's not a RS. It's depressing how many sources have fired all their staff and dispensed with fact-checking and around the same time as taking on a strong bias. The uses above also run into a ton of other issues, like whether a very marginal and very biased source would actually provide any wp:weight if the fact-checking issues magically disappeared, but the latter seems like the straw that makes it unusable. Do we have any articles that cite pre-2016 pieces? If so, we should also look into what the editorial status of the site was before the firings and change. -sche (talk) 05:40, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

It is unfortunate that they haven't made their fact checking or corrections policy available on their site, it doesn't prove that they don't exist. Relying on legalese from the ToS misses the mark completely - the NYT also say that it "DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. THERE MAY BE DELAYS, OMISSIONS, INTERRUPTIONS, AND INACCURACIES IN THE CONTENT OR OTHER MATERIAL MADE AVAILABLE THROUGH THE SERVICES" in their ToS.

So are there any examples of them getting facts wrong and not correcting them? Alaexis_¿question? 07:32, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

If AfterEllen have corrected or updated any articles after the 2016 editorial change, they have done so silently as I've not been able to find evidence of any articles that contain any sort of correction notice from a few searches.

As for just getting facts wrong with or without correction, this is difficult to quantify because the site's opinion articles are otherwise unidentifiably mixed in with their factual reporting. For example this article pushes the harmful myth that trans men are erasing butch lesbians, and is categorised as factual reporting despite from the text clearly being the opinion of the article's author. Do we want to count factual inconsistencies in marked and unmarked opinion articles against the publication? Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:43, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this counts as getting facts wrong, rather than having different opinions about a phenomenon. Anyway, the article is clearly an opinion by a non-expert and I can't imagine it ever being used on Wikipedia. Alaexis_¿question? 07:18, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Do we have any articles that cite pre-2016 pieces? If so, we should also look into what the editorial status of the site was before the firings and change. Out published an article in February 2019 with some details on how AfterEllen moved from being a mainstream lesbian focused publication in the early 2000s to the relative fringe publication that it is today. While it names key articles that corresponded to the publication's shift towards transphobia, it doesn't cite or name any specific pre-2016 articles.

In fact it is difficult to cite all manner of articles, especially for those published pre-2016, because as the Out article states, the archives and the work of some contributors [disappeared] overnight and some contributors witnessed their bylines simply changed to "staff" with no reasoning offered. A former contributor to AE speculated that it was a punitive thing when you tangle with AfterEllen's Twitter or publicly take issue with their current editorial direction.

The research paper (I can provide by email if needed, it's not in WP:LIB and I received a copy through WP:REREQ) that I cited above also documents some of the site's history. While it mentions a couple of articles that were published prior to 2016, the one article (no archive available) that it links to in the bibliography, by Julia Serano, is no longer available. Likewise the one penned by Jack Halberstam in 2015 was also removed.

Byline erasure was mentioned in the 2020 discussion on this source, see Hemiauchenia's comment at 23:33, 2 July 2020, but not discussed in any real depth. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:30, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• The consensus in the July 2020 RfC about AfterEllen was: "There is general agreement that AfterEllen is reliable, but that it should be used with context." The key word here is context.
  This RfC was opened because there was an edit (by a non-experienced editor) to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival article that added Dana Rivers as an activist at Camp Trans. It was poorly worded and the three sources provided were an article by Dana Rivers published in 2000, the tabloid Toronto Sun, and the New York Post. However, since Camp Trans is included in the lead and in the "Exclusion controversy" section (where other trans activists are included), I saw no reason why Dana Rivers' involvement in Camp Trans could not be added to the article.
  In my response at Talk:Michigan Womyn's Music Festival#Dana Rivers, I provided several sources that mention Dana Rivers' association with the Camp Trans protests at Michfest. Among them is an article by AfterEllen that says: "Rivers had also been active in “Camp Trans,” a campaign against Michfest, a female-only festival in Michigan that Reed and Wright attended frequently." – AJ (November 28, 2022). "Trans Activist, Dana Rivers, Found Guilty of Murdering Lesbian Couple and Their Son". AfterEllen.
  User:Sideswipe9th dismissed all the sources as not being acceptable and said about AfterEllen that it "is not a reliable source for BLPs, and its anti-trans bias also needs to be accounted for." To which I responded: "As for your comment that AfterEllen has an "anti-trans bias" ... so what? PinkNews is pro-trans and I haven't seen you reject PN as a "reliable source" because of its pro-trans bias. Besides which, per WP:BIASED: "reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective....Although a source may be biased, it may be reliable in the specific context."" This is the reason behind why this RfC has been opened.
  As a lesbian-centric website, AfterEllen is a knowledgeable source about the lesbian community, lesbian culture, and lesbian history. In the past it published articles about MichFest. In 2018, it published an interview with Lisa Vogel, the co-founder of MichFest. Therefore, if it involves MichFest, AfterEllen can be used as a source.
  Dana Rivers' involvement with Camp Trans has been documented by several sources, including Rivers. There is no reason why the AfterEllen article cannot be used as a source in this matter. (I also provided this source: mantilla, karla; Vogel, Lisa (October 2000). "festival: Michigan: transgender controversy… …and right-wing attacks "americans for truth" claims MWMF endangers children" (PDF). Off Our Backs. 30 (9): 8–9. ISSN 0030-0071. –(via JSTOR), which published the following: "More than 60 gender activists from these groups [Camp Trans Planning Committee, Boston and Chicago chapters of Lesbian Avengers] plus members of Transsexual Menace, supportive attendees and renowned activist Dana Rivers gathered across the road from the Festival this year to do outreach and education on what they viewed as a discriminatory policy being unfairly applied....").
  The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival article is not the Dana Rivers biography article — and the AfterEllen source was not going to be used in the Rivers BLP.
  Let's not kid ourselves here, this RfC is just an attempt to censor AfterEllen and stop it from being used as a source in Wikipedia, even in lesbian-related subjects. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 12:38, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• PinkNews is pro-trans and I haven't seen you reject PN as a "reliable source" because of its pro-trans bias. Since I noticed you brought this source up several times, I thought I'd respond to this (though I can't speak for Sideswipe9th - as I mentioned, my view is that the problem isn't simply that AfterEllen has a particular bias but that, post-2016, it is only known for that bias; it doesn't seem to have any meaningful coverage or usage in any other context.) Of course, if you want an in-depth discussion of PinkNews you can start another discussion for it, but even just at a glance there seem to be 300+ citations to it on Google Scholar, demonstrating strong WP:USEBYOTHERS; high-quality academic sources treat it as reliable source of information about LGBT issues. In comparison, AfterEllen has almost no coverage or citations post-2016 (when the site's new owners replaced literally all its employees, effectively turning it into a new publication with no relation to its previous self); virtually all coverage after that point is either discussing its pre-2016 incarnation or just discusses the way it was suddenly changed. Trying to equate AfterEllen to PinkNews is WP:FALSEBALANCE. --Aquillion (talk) 11:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

"Trying to equate AfterEllen to PinkNews is WP:FALSEBALANCE." No, it is not. Because PinkNews is slanted in favor of pro-trans and it is used by some editors as a source in LGBT-related articles. It is blatantly hypocritical to take a stand against sources that are anti-TRA, yet favor sources that are pro-TRA. You are indulging selective reasoning.
If you want proof of PinkNews' partisanship all you have to do is search "Dana Rivers" in its website, and except for a 2016 article ("San Jose woman Dana Rivers, 61, has been charged with murdering a lesbian couple and their adopted son") you will not find anything about River's 2022 trial and conviction. The self-proclaimed "world's largest and most influential LGBTQ+ media brand" which declares it "exist[s] to inform", suppressed coverage of the trial and conviction of a prominent trans activist who murdered two lesbians and their son. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 10:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

At the minute I see opinions which are disagreed with, not really any evidence of factual errors. The argument that all RS clearly label and separate opinion and fact, therefore as this publication doesn't it is not RS is entirely without merit. Loads of sources mix the two, and we just say "this bit is factual, this bit is opinion, it needs attributing if the opinion's inclusion is due".Boynamedsue (talk) 21:29, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• I should note that the July 2020 discussion was never a formal RfC (see [36]), and the close was a non-admin one, so there isn't the same weight behind it as if it had been an actual RfC close. One of the people supporting its reliability, Gleeanon409, was later determined to be a sock of the LTA Benjiboi, so their opinion should be discounted. My opinion that AfterEllen post 2016 is a such a minor outlet that there is little reason to cite remains the same as the 2020 discussion. It's barely more than a glorified group blog at this point looking at the authorship credits for recent posts. We wouldn't cite other minor gender critical outlets like Reduxx for the same reason. (though AfterEllen is a lot less bad than Reduxx). Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:53, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

  I was going to make a follow-up to my somewhat-vague comment above, to more clearly say things you've now said better than I could've, so I'll comment here instead of next to my earlier comment: what Hemiauchenia says above (and what Silver seren says below) is my read too: after the 2016 firing of staff, deletion or reattribution of old articles, and mixing of opinion in with other 'reporting', the site has declined so much in quality and stature and increased so much in bias that (from a V / RS perspective) I wouldn't trust it as a source for a statement in a Wikipedia article unless other RS were backing up the same statement ... and in that case it'd make more sense to just cite the other RS (because even from a WEIGHT perspective I don't know what things "marginal biased source" would attribute much weight to).
  If any of our articles cite pre-2016 pieces and we have archived versions of those which survived the site's deletions of them I would evaluate the reliability of them separately, since it was different back when it used to be, as Pyxis says, a decent source for lesbian news. I would even be careful about using the post-2016 site for the ABOUTSELF purposes Silver seren mentions, since we can see that after the change the site not only fired old staff but e.g. reattributed their work, so I wouldn't necessarily rely on its post-2016 statements about the pre-2016 site. (Post-2016 ABOUTSELF statements about post-2016 site should be fine.) -sche (talk) 03:14, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

• No, it is well-established that failing to separate opinion and fact is enough to render a source unreliable. From WP:QUESTIONABLE: Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, that are promotional in nature, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions. When a source labels its opinions clearly, we can wall them off and use the non-opinion parts; but if opinions are a heavy aspect of everything it publishes, without a clear separation, then the entire source has to be walled off - at a bare minimum that puts it below the level that we could ever consider citing for WP:BLP-sensitive statements. Also, of course - WP:RS is something that ultimately must be positively shown; that is to say, if you think a source is reliable you have to show that it has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, which I don't think is evident in coverage here. We focus on inaccuracies in situations where a source might otherwise meet that bar but had glaring problems; but there's no need for it here, because nobody has really presented an argument for how the source could be a WP:RS aside from "well it's biased and that doesn't disqualify it, right?", a misapprehension which often happen in situations like these where a source's only coverage comes from the fact that they've published a bunch of inflammatory stuff and where the only reason it's here at all is because it has a strident opinion that some editors really like and other editors really dislike. Looking past that, if you want to - at the very least, use the source for WP:BLP-sensitive statements, but really, to a lesser degree, if you want to use it for anything but opinion at all - then you need to show strong WP:USEBYOTHERS or other evidence of a good reputation, evidence of a decent editorial policy, reasons to believe they perform fact-checking, and so on. And also convincingly argue that the majority of its coverage does not rely on opinion, I suppose. (Preferably, for all of this, from after the 2016 turnover because coverage makes it clear that management was completely replaced at that point.) These are not obscure points of policy. --Aquillion (talk) 23:48, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

• A lack of editorial and fact checking policies is usually a red flag for sources. Add in the mixing in of opinion articles and general "contributor" articles makes it seem highly likely that the site has lost it reliability post-buyout. While we can discuss the extent of reliability on the site prior to the buyout, it seems quite clear that it's become more or less a tabloid since. And I agree with Hemiauchenia above that even outside of that, it is such a minor web-based site that it shouldn't be used in any of our articles outside of the one on itself. Silverseren^C 01:44, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
• The July 2020 closure carries some weight, and I don't see that the outlet has changed significantly since then. I don't see a need to treat it as blanket unreliable, but rather it depends on context and what it's being used for. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:59, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

It is obviously not reliable for BLP reporting - this is clear-cut enough to be remove-on-sight. If anyone has restored it in contravention of WP:BLPRESTORE, I'd suggest taking them to WP:AE immediately. It's a blog with no reputation for fact-checking and accuracy and no editorial policy. While being a WP:BIASED source does not necessarily render a source unusable, being biased doesn't make a source usable, too; the only coverage of the blog elsewhere is to discuss its bias. Sourcing heavily focuses on its 2016 acquisition as wrecking what credibility it had (something previous discussions seem to have overlooked) - see eg. the paper Sideswipe linked above, or [37]. Likewise, the arguments made in defense of it in this and previous discussions seem to be focused more on its bias than on actually trying to find decent WP:USEBYOTHERS, or discussing its editorial policy, or explaining how it has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, all of which would be obvious first steps before we could use a source to eg. imply that a living person is guilty of a crime. Either way, any experienced editor would know at a glance that this is not a source that can be used for BLP-sensitive statements - the threshold we'd need to use a blog for statements like this is well above anything presented here. I would more generally say it's not an WP:RS for anything - there's just nothing to suggest that it would be; it seems to be a blog primarily notable for changing hands several times and, post-2016 acquisition, suddenly experiencing a drastic change of direction and publishing a bunch of inflammatory stuff, none of which really suggests that it has the reputation for fact-checking and accuracy WP:RS requires - but the idea that anyone could seriously argue that it's reliable for BLP reporting (which was not the focus of previous discussions, most of which had the same tiny handful of editors contributing to them anyway) is unfathomable and I suspect not one that WP:AE would look kindly on. --Aquillion (talk) 23:25, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

"but the idea that anyone could seriously argue that it's reliable for BLP reporting (which was not the focus of previous discussions, most of which had the same tiny handful of editors contributing to them anyway) is unfathomable and I suspect not one that WP:AE would look kindly on." Um ... who has said that AfterEllen was to be used in a BLP? The AE article was suggested as a source in the MICHIGAN WOMYN'S MUSIC FESTIVAL article. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 09:55, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Look at Talk:Dana Rivers; it was suggested there as well. But its use in Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was also focused on connecting Dana Rivers the topic. And Rivers, of course, does fall under BLP. BLP applies to mentions of living people in other articles, not just in their own articles, so you need a high-quality source to make that connection, which all else aside this clearly is not. One only has to look at the article in question to recognize that the connection being made here is ultimately about BLP-sensitive details regarding Rivers; obviously we cannot rely on a lurid blogpost from a blog with no discernible reputation beyond becoming an axe-grinding culture-war venue post-2016 for something like "MASS-MURDERER PARTICIPATES IN PROTESTS" or the like. I don't think it should be used in as a source at all, for anything - the problem isn't just that it's an axe-grinding culture-war venue, the problem is that that is all it is known for, not for fact-checking or accuracy - but at the very least it obviously cannot be used to say anything about living people. --Aquillion (talk) 11:40, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, it's like this: I'm only interested in Michfest, and didn't know until you pointed it out that the AE article had also been suggested in the Dana Rivers BLP talk page. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 09:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, the mixing of fact and opinion with no boundaries means that a site is inherently unreliable. But even when something is clearly news, is it reliable? Well, no, as you can see from this story which tries to claim that Nicola Sturgeon's resignation as Scottish First Minister was something to do with a controversy about a transgender rapist. In reality, it was absolutely irrelevant to it. I note that someone's inserted the note about the controversy into Sturgeon's article, together with a nice bit of editorialising about pronouns ... what a surprise. Black Kite (talk) 11:13, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

"this] story which tries to claim that Nicola Sturgeon's resignation as Scottish First Minister was something to do with a controversy about a transgender rapist." Responding to this is simply irresistible:

– Nicola Sturgeon Resigns As Scottish Leader After Trans Rapist Scandal, The European Conservative (February 15, 2023).

– Estranged wife of trans rapist Isla Bryson 'delighted' Nicola Sturgeon has quit after gender reform plans, LBC (15 February 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon facing calls to quit as poll shows voter fury over trans rapist scandal, Express (February 13, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon urged to resign after refusing to say if double rapist is a man or a woman, Express (February 2, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon brought down by trans row as SNP prepares to rip up her gender Bill, The Telegraph (15 February 2023).

– Adam Zivo: Scotland's woke government self-immolates over trans rights: Nicola Sturgeon badly miscalculated over controversy surrounding rapist born as a male being placed in a women's prison, National Post (February 15, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon facing demands to resign as 40 PER CENT of Scots want her gone over trans row, GB News (12 February 2023).

– The trans rights row sparking a crisis for Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, The Sydney Morning Herald (February 12, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon faces fortnight of criticism over trans prisons policy: Critics claim her career is ‘over,’ while trans Scots worry about sensationalised coverage after trans rapist put in women’s prison, The Guardian (11 February 2023).

– Confusion from Nicola Sturgeon over trans prison row, ITVX (31 January 2023).

"she ended up promoting a policy of allowing trans people to change their legal sex by self-declaration alone – a policy that, when rolled out in the prison’s service, led to a double rapist being placed in a women’s prison....Most of the Scottish media have, like the BBC, been observing informal self-censorship on the trans issue."
– Nicola Sturgeon: a cautionary tale, Spiked (22 February 2023).

"After that, a new row erupted over a trans woman who was to be put in a women's prison -- even though she had raped two women before she transitioned."
– Scotland: Why did Nicola Sturgeon resign and who will replace her?, Euronews (17 February 2023).

"It was Nicola’s failure to be able to say a rapist was a man that turned it in the end. If you can’t say that, why should anyone trust anything that comes out of your mouth? She made the mistake of ignoring women, and listening to lobbying groups that held to one view."
– Women’s rights activists celebrate Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, The Times (February 16, 2023).

"Back in 2021, the fissures over Sturgeon’s embrace of transgender issues as the next great civil-rights cause were already apparent. She has always dismissed feminist concerns that predatory men who are not really trans will cynically exploit relaxed gender-recognition rules to gain access to women’s spaces....Bryson had also just been convicted of rape, the quintessential male crime against women’s bodily autonomy. How could the Scottish government believe that such a person belonged in a female jail?."
– What Happens When Politicians Brush Off Hard Questions About Gender, The Atlantic (February 15, 2023).

There are more sources that also connect the same dots — AfterEllen was not the only one, nor the exception. Its article about Sturgeon's resignation was similar to what was reported in numerous British media sources. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 05:29, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• I fail to see what distinguishes the post-'16 site from any other random "news" blog with inadequate editorial standards. Like any such blog, it might be usable on a case-by-case basis for very non-controversial claims, but should generally be avoided and is absolutely unacceptable for any contentious claim about a living person. Note that there's a pretty healthy ecosystem of LGBTQ-oriented journalism, from prestige sources like The Advocate to lots of blogs like what AfterEllen once was: broad-scope and, while not top-tier, passing our minimum expectations for editorial standards. I doubt there are many claims that can be sourced only to post-'16 AfterEllen, and if there are, that in itself is a reason to be suspicious of the claim. -- 'zin^{[is short for Tamzin]} (she|they|xe) 21:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

National Geographic

I thought it was worth discussing National Geographic again, given that they have made the choice to fire all staff writers in favour of solely relying on freelance work. While I've definitely seem some good science reporting in National Geographic, where they actually bother to go and actually interview experts who were not part of studies, there's definitely some fringey stuff also, like their article about crystal skulls, which seems to give undue weight to the idea that these objects are actual mesoamerican artifacts. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:43, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• Is there perhaps a need to set a time period of reliability for the source? Since I don't think throwing out everything with it is appropriate. But clearly they've lost their reliability in recent months and years. We may need to say that only articles prior to a certain date remain reliable. Silverseren^C 01:48, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Wow, that's a terrible loss to the journalistic community. NatGeo was always the gold standard for cultural reporting. Never thought it would go digital only. Not that using free-lancers is bad, but they'll hire whomever now to get the job done. Certainly anything after the layoffs should be looked at with caution notability-wise, but the crystal skull article is much older... Oaktree b (talk) 04:38, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

G/O Media to start using AI

This is currently being discussed at WT:VG/S, and I thought I'd post it here since it affects sources covered by WP:RSP (such as The A.V. Club, Gizmodo, and Jezebel): G/O Media sites are going to start publishing articles written by AI. G/O is describing it as simply a "test" but given the precedent set by Red Ventures at CNET, I'd say we might need to start treating these sites with caution. JOEBRO⁶⁴ 16:59, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Anything written by AI wouldn't be considered reliable. If G/O don't make clear what articles are written by AI, then anything after the date they start using AI should be handled with care. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:55, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Have any of the G/O Media properties been evaluated for reliability since the acquisition? The editorial decline at some (Deadspin for example) was severe. Mackensen (talk) 15:47, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Mackensen, as far as I can tell based on WP:RSP, the only post-acquisition discussion has been a short 2021 discussion where Gizmodo was brought up. Kotaku, which isn't listed at RSP but is locally considered reliable at WP:VG/S, has been discussed a few times post-acquisition amongst WP:VG but there hasn't been a consensus whether it should be downgraded. JOEBRO⁶⁴ 17:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Here's an example of an AI-generated article at Gizmodo/io9, complete with some inaccuracies. Per io9's deputy editor, the article was published with very little notice and outside their editorial structure. At least the author is listed as "Gizmodo Bot" so it's easy enough to identify. Woodroar (talk) 00:04, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

yeah, the editorial staff are pissed - David Gerard (talk) 11:08, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Defector has a survey of AI bot articles across G/O Media. They are all of unusable quality, of course, because they were created to lure in views for ads that nobody cares about either. As someone on Bluesky just put it, "the internet is just a glorified crypto mining rig" - David Gerard (talk) 14:21, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Given the precedent with Cnet, we should mark anything on G/O sites from July 2023 onwards as Generally Unreliable. EDIT: Same deal for Insider and Men’s Journal. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 19:51, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

reliability of citing Maddow for archival clips used thereby

The Rachel Maddow Show is "an American liberal news and opinion television program". In a 2016 episode of this show, undated excerpted clips of the NBC Nightly News were included, and are transcribed in the Maddow show notes, but the details about the original broadcast aren't provided. Now, I don't want to cite the Maddow host, their opinions, nor analysis, but can we assume that Maddow is sufficiently reliable to cite, when we're only making use of the unquestionably-reliable clips used within? Is Maddow reliable enough to cite under the assumption that these clips they used weren't fabricated and transcribed out of thin air? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 14:22, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Can you provide any specifics so this isn't so hypothetical, like the show notes and clips in question? But in any case, I don't think clips should be sourced to some 3rd party work that happened to use them, especially if that 3rd party work is a partisan opinion show. I also think that citing TV news programs in general should be discouraged. Any notable event would be covered elsewhere in a more easily-verified text format. GretLomborg (talk) 05:42, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm eschewing specifics to avoid accusations of canvassing. What I have, though, is the official MSNBC transcript of a Maddow episode, which itself includes the transcript of an NBC Nightly episode. I don't really care about the Maddow framing (because it isn't relevant or used for our article) except to assume the NBC Nightly clips aren't whole-cloth fabrications on MSNBC's part; I think we can safely make that assumption given WP:RSP, but I wanted confirmation here. — Fourthords | =Λ= | 19:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with GretLomborg that if you want input as it pertains to a particular situation, you should give the full details of the situation (in particular, a link to the relevant discussion etc.). The way to avoid canvassing is by keeping your request factual and to-the-point. --JBL (talk) 20:04, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Vents Magazine

I have been removing this as a reference from pages due to it being unreliable (IMO). An editor raised the question about the reliability on my talk page since then so bringing it here for discussion on reliability and potential blacklisting based on paid posts. There is this at RSN and a more recent one here at RSN. The website does not list any type of editorial oversight, has writers openly seeking pay for posts, and have spammy blog content such as this. A Google search also found (fiverr dot com / gigs / ventsmagazine) showing that freelancers are offering to post on the website for pay. CNMall41 (talk) 19:05, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any reason to consider it reliable. Articles like this look like unflagged advertising. I would absolutely not consider this reliable. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:29, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

That's exactly what I have been seeing on the website. More like paid spam which is evidence of the Fiverr information posted above. --CNMall41 (talk) 02:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Nina Oyama's B'day

Request to assess reliability of my sources on a fair case-by-case basis. On Nina Oyama article, it claims that she is either 29 or 30, or born in 1993 or 1994. Whoever wrote that, is apparently guessing and why I decided to help out and research what is her actual birthday. I know Nina Oyama is an established comedian, frequently shown on TV screens for years and with a fair share of fans. And that she has a public Facebook page where she acknowledge that 18th August is her birthday. [38] Her one long time twitter account also thanks her fans every 18th August for wishing her a happy birthday. [39] [40] And why I am inclined to believe 18th of August checks out as her Birthday. So is Nina Oyama herself unreliable for stating even her own birthday? Like what reason could she have to go lie about the date of her birthday? The Rotten Tomatoes also writes her birthdate to be Aug 18, 1993. [[41]] And doubt Rotten tomatoes, a somewhat Professional authority in TV actresses that co-ordinates with professional talent agencies[[42]], make mistakes like these. So when reviewing the sources like how her social media page confirms her birthdate written in Rotten Tomatoes, is Rotten Tomatoes and Nina's Twitter and Facebook account for fans, truly unreliable sources for something so basic like her birthday? Or are certain editors, just being overly bureaucratic, when they know from what I wrote above, that she is of course born on Aug 18, 1993 and there's no agenda or conspiracy here to lie about things like these. GUPTAkanthan (talk) 12:15, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

WP:BLPPRIVACY is the relevant policy here. Neither of those social media accounts are verified, and neither explicitly state "today is my birthday". That second tweet was sent on August 17th, not the 18th. It's also possible to thank friends several days after a birthday, maybe even a week or two if you're forgetful—or had a particularly "fun" time. Our entry for Rotten Tomatoes at WP:RSP doesn't mention actor/biography pages. Their own FAQ says that their actor information might be wrong; it also mentions "data import errors", suggesting that their information is imported and not fact-checked. Woodroar (talk) 13:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

That's just false. Both tweets were sent on 18th August. And how co-incidental is it that every 18th August, her fans wish her a happy birthday on her social media page on that particular date. And last year, she explicitly tweets a post on 18th August saying, But today (my bday) they got me coffee too! From my fav American restaurant![43]. And yes, Rotten Tomatoes does say that sometimes they can get it wrong but they also write, We work hard to make sure all of our movie and actor information is correct and it's not like they don't have editorial oversight. And these famous actresses are managed by real professional management agencies, who would surely contact Rotten Tomatoes and IMBD if they accidentally get the details wrong.GUPTAkanthan (talk) 13:27, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I just clicked that second twitter link, and it showed up at coming at 9:06 PM on the 17th. I believe Twitter shows the local time for the viewer rather than the sender, and I'm on Los Angeles time, so 9:06 in the evening in Los Angeles is 2 in the afternoon the next day in Sydney. That's likely where the confusion is happening here. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 13:50, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, the times/dates I see are 7:21 AM · Aug 18, 2020, 11:06 PM · Aug 17, 2021, and 8:04 PM · Aug 17, 2022. If Twitter doesn't show the local time a tweet was sent, there's not much we can do with it. Of course, none of this matters because the account isn't verified. Woodroar (talk) 13:52, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

"Verification" under the new Twitter regime doesn't mean much. The real question is whether it was verified under the old regime, which going to the Tweet now won't show you. However, the archive link for it indicates it was not verified. (And in general, the more we have to do detective work to determine a birthdate, the more we're getting into WP:BLPPRIVACY matters.) Nat Gertler (talk) 14:02, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

@NatGertler and Woodroar: I will abide to group "consensus" of course but a Gray area rule shouldn't prevent me from doing what's obviously correct, and so could use your consensus. And I have good reason enough to believe those are her accounts which explicitly confirms 18th August as her b'day.[44]. Nina is a celeb whose livelihood is heavily based on advertising herself to the public. [45] She constantly posts her upcoming comedy acts [46] and professionally relies on the internet and social media for her fans to know her. I highly doubt a catfish can successfully maintain a social media account of a public celebrity for so many years as that would be very difficult to pull off without Nina and her fans to not notice. And I did some detective work and found Zero duplicate social media accounts and you surely can't expect public figures like her to not have Facebook or Twitter. Furthermore there's a famous established Channel 10 TV show called "Have You Been Paying Attention?" Company has its own Facebook page and it's been verified. One of its latest posts [47] mentions Nina Oyama and it links to same Facebook account, which history shows its been active for many years since 2011 and posts regularly. I doubt a professional TV show who is actually working with Nina, to not be aware of her proper Facebook link. Given all this, I know it's obviously her but ask here for consensus.GUPTAkanthan (talk) 20:38, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

chordify.net

Is chordify.net a reliable source? I'm not convinced that it is compatible with WP:COPYVIOEL. See "Does this not infringe copyright?". Looks like it's used as a source in 30 articles. Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 12:45, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I have no opinion on the copyright aspect. But the whole thing looks unreliable to me. The site uses machine learning to extract chords from music recordings. That's a bit like using a large language model to produce book summaries. We would not use that and I think we should not use this. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 18:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

It seems as though they do have a corrections mechanism, though I too am sceptical of whether we should consider an algorithmically produced database of this sort reliable Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:13, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Random person no 362478479; if this were an RS, the entries would be vetted beforehand, not just potentially subject to correction after the fact. --JBL (talk) 19:15, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Three sources from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aryen Suresh Kute

The following three websites were called out in the above AFD as needing a discussion here regarding whether they should, in general, be considered RS or not. Provided are the specific links used in the article, but the three sites overall are in question.

• ZeeNews India
• Daily Pioneer
• ABP Live

If this list should be split into 3 separate discussions, that's fine. @Actualcpscm, Noneate, and Oaktree b: - Courtesy ping based on the AFD. - UtherSRG (talk) 14:20, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

All three sources are clearly and unambiguously paid-for promotional flimflam. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:31, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Anytime you see brand-wire (and similar phrases on other Indian sites), it's a paid marketing article. The writing alone on all three is so over-the-top it's obvious this came from a PR team. The lack of a name on the by-line, but just "Agencies" or "Bureau" is another red-flag. All are junk sources that should be removed from the article. Ravensfire (talk) 15:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

• The problem with most Indian newspapers and news-webites, and not just the three mentioned here, is that they publish sponsored content without labeling it clearly. For example, all the "supplements" published by The Times of India; the "Special" section of the Daily Pioneer; the "Brand Wire" section of ABP Live etc. And this is apart from articles that are potentially not paid for but are quick rewrites of press-releases nevertheless. Ravensfire has noted some other features to look for.

Unfortunately this practice is so ubiquitous among the organizations that also cover regular news legitimately that we cannot simply tag all these sources as "unreliable" and be done with it. So eternal vigilance, and not relying on WP:NEWSORG blindly, is perhaps the best we can do. Abecedare (talk) 15:24, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Should add that most of such article creations are done by editors with a WP:COI or as WP:UPE. Abecedare (talk) 15:33, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Can we list them at WP:RS/P noting that while the sites themselves aren't banned, there are some indications of sections of the sites which should not be used? Something we can point to so that article/draft writers can be alerted. - UtherSRG (talk) 15:47, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

No objections from me if someone has a concrete proposal. The only problem may be that this applies to dozens, and possibly hundreds, of Indian newspaper and TV channel websites. Maybe we can make a single entry pointed to by (say) WP:NEWSORGINDIA that mentions this intermingling of regular news and sponsored content. Abecedare (talk) 16:08, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

That would be most excellent. - UtherSRG (talk) 16:13, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I've drafted a proposal below based on the discussion here (and heavily cribbing some of your verbiage). - UtherSRG (talk) 16:43, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Ungh, those articles are obviously PR, with the flowery language. I'm not sure we can label the entire website as non-RS however. We could perhaps slap a label on the citation tool that when they pop up, it gives the user a gentle nudge to double check (I know we have certain sites that are black listed, but I'm not sure we can put a "warning" on sources). Best would be to perhaps list them as case-by-case here [48] with yellow background. Oaktree b (talk) 15:30, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Exactly what I'd like to see happen. - UtherSRG (talk) 15:48, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Proposal: Yellow/warning triangle for "Various India-based websites"

Many India-based news-style websites offer a mix of actual news and sponsored content. Caution should be taking in using such sites without a close examination and determination if the content is news or sponsored. Examples of sponsored content include "supplements" published by The Times of India; the "Special" section of the Daily Pioneer; the "Brand Wire" section of ABP Live etc.

• Support in principle; open to any tweaking of format, language, examples etc. This issue is well known to regulars at RSN but it would be good to have it memorialized somewhere especially for the benefit of WP:NPP and WP:AFC responders. See some previous RSN discussions (1, 2, 3 among many). this discussion, and this related writeup by Ms Sarah Welch for more background. Abecedare (talk) 18:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support as a great start. I would include some of the other clues - is there a disclaimer on the article that the story is provided by someone else and they are not responsible? Overly promotional in tone? There's certainly more, will add over time. And second that excellent page by Ms Sarah Welch, which should be linked as a helpful page. Ravensfire (talk) 21:20, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Having such quick guidance would be very helpful in evaluating sources, with the added benefit that use of such sources can be an indicator of UPE. JoelleJay (talk) 22:42, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Support. It seems that some guidance would be helpful. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:17, 6 July 2023 (UTC).
• Support this proposal as a good starting point; I'd like to have each source evaluated individually for the list of RS, but that seems like a monumental task. Oaktree b (talk) 04:30, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

  A perfect example popped up today [49], sourced to a press release, but the source bot tags it as a "green" source simply by where it was published. Oaktree b (talk) 13:48, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

Taking a stab at expanded guidance:

Even legitimate Indian news organizations (print, television, and web) intermingle regular news with sponsored content and press-release-based write-ups, often with inadequate or no disclosure. This is especially the case in articles about celebrities, reviews, and profiles of persons, companies and entities of borderline-notability. This issue is distinct from that of journalism quality and bias, and that of sham news-style wesbites.

Exercise caution in using such sources for factual claims or to establish notability. Look at the tone and language of the article; its placement in the publication; use of generic bylines not identifying an individual reporter or reviewer; overlap in language with articles found in other publications and on other websites, etc. Example of sponsored content include supplements published by The Times of India; the Special section of the Daily Pioneer; the Brand Wire section of ABP Live; the Press Release News or the Digpu News Network sections of Firstpost; the Business Spotlight section of Outlook India; the Brand Connect section of Forbes India; the Brand Solutions produced content on the Indian Express etc although the problematic content is not restricted to these sections alone. If in doubt, consult the Reliable Sources Noticeboard.

Feedback welcome so that we can refine the content, language and placement of such guidance. Abecedare (talk) 23:39, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I'd print that directly, excellent wording. Oaktree b (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Bravo! - UtherSRG (talk) 13:02, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Where would this go.. as a bullet point under WP:NEWSORG or somewhere in an India specific page? Pardon me, it's the Friday afternoon cranking me to make Feierabend — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 13:14, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

@DaxServer: The WP:RSP page has a Categories section. This type of guidance can perhaps go there, with a shorter entry in the RSP table (something akin to the "Peerage websites" entry but in yellow). How does that sound? Abecedare (talk) 14:20, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe a subsection "Sponsored content" or something like that with a text maybe a bit generic so it would cover the topic in general. Having a section/text on Indian news websites at RSP might be too specific. Under the See also, Topic-specific pages lists some lists. I think it would also be a good idea now to start a dedicated page for IN, maybe at a subpage of WP:IN, and compile these observations going forward, similar to WP:ICTFFAQ / WP:ICTFSOURCES. Your text would go there, further expanded if you're willing to — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 19:01, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I think for the RSP page, its good to be specific and since improperly disclosed sponsored content in Indian media has been a regular topic at this board I think a specific mention would be justified and helpful. That said, I would also support (in addition, not in place):

1. A short mention in WP:RS or related policy/guideline page that sponsored content is not independent and therefore not considered reliable (with possibly narrow WP:SPS exceptions) if this is not mentioned already.
2. Writing up a lengthier source guideline/FAQ in the WP:IN space that incorporates or links to concerns about sponsored content; other concerns raised by the MSW essay; sham "newspapers"; sham book and journal publishers; WP:RAJ; WP:ICTF guidelines, etc.

Any volunteers for (2)? :) Abecedare (talk) 16:55, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Yupp, makes sense. MSW's essay is quite a great start, never aware of it — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 07:28, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

My only concern as someone who edits frequently in the ITN and ITN/RD space is many of the news articles reporting on recent deaths would technically violate above 'criteria'. Just taking the most recent example with Sudakshina Sarma (currently nominated at ITN/RD, not ready for posting on the main page yet):

- This article from TOI reporting on her death does not have a specific reporter in the byline - a watchout mentioned above

- This article in Indian Express is written by PTI "agency"- highlighted earlier as a red flag

- Most of the news orgs reporting on her death have very similar, generic language, clearly copied from a centralized news feed or press release

I support the guidance outlined above, but examples/exceptions like this would be a daily occurence at ITN/RD. Would suggest including a caveat in the extended guidance, wherever it is ultimately published. Schwinnspeed (talk) 18:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any hindrances this guideline would cause to your said situations. The guideline is infact a watchout, to excerise caution; not a criteria to disbar and slap red flags when there's no by-line or by an agency. — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 07:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

+1 to what Dax said.

But fwiw, the TOI obit for Sudakshina Sarma appears to be plagiarized from this longer obit in the Frontline, which was published a day earlier and does have a named author. Would be a good idea to cite the latter piece instead. Abecedare (talk) 11:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

How do we handle it when someone openly offers to sell articles on these sites, claiming they will be published without a sponsored tag (FIVERR dot com/premiumsite/publish-your-article-on-techbullion-with-do-follow-backlinks)? I think it is troubling because this is only one of many I have found offering to publish with "no disclaimer, no paid/sponsored post tag?" This takes away from the overall reliability of sites when they allow this. --CNMall41 (talk) 02:27, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

This is indeed concerning but not surprising. I think this is more of a generic problem and happens everywhere where malicious intents are overlooked for an ROI. One approach we can take is to note them in the dedicated guideline (see Abecedare #2) and writeup on how to identify them; they mostly have same patterns of language and grammar. — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 07:26, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

RfC: TikTok and Instagram

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.

---

Hi peeps, not sure how this works to be quite honest, but as self-published sources, I wanted to nominate TikTok and Instagram to be generally unreliable (with the usual expert/uncontroversial caveats). Surprised these haven't been red-ed on the source board yet, to be honest. If they are deemed oddly different from other social media networks and this discussion has happened already, feel free to let me know or close it (WP:SNOW). Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 20:40, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

• Currently there are 581 cites to tiktok and, uh, 19,719 citations to instagram. At a glance at least some of them are possibly WP:ABOUTSELF but the massive number for the latter is probably worth looking at more closely and suggests it might be worth putting it in RSP. I'm not sure an actual RFC is needed because it's glaringly obvious that both are WP:USERGENERATED and not usable as sources; the main question is how to word it specifically. --Aquillion (talk) 20:58, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• We don't need an RfC about this. It's no different from any other WP:SOCIALMEDIA/WP:RSSELF. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:44, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Speedy close pointless RFC. Per Rhododendrites. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:03, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think that Mattdaviesfsic's point is that neither is explicitly described at WP:RS/P (although a number of other social networking sites are), and the directions on that page are to discuss it here, on this page. That said, we do have WP:INSTAGRAM. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:34, 6 July 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.

militantwire.com

A couple users keep restoring text sourced to militantwire.com, a substack which is being used in 10 other entries on en.wp, to Nahel Merzouk protests. It is being used to support the following text:

Furthermore, there were multiple confirmed cases of rioters firing in the air using Kalashnikov assault rifles.[58] A video was also filmed showing a rioter with PPS-43 style submachine-gun. Numerous cases of rioters firing at CCTV cameras with pump action shotguns were also filmed and verified.

Does anyone have experience with this substack? Do they have a corrections policy? Have they been reviewed anywhere? A search for "militantwire" "Nahel" shows this substack article has not been reported upon by any traditional media outlets, so at least for the moment, the information seems to be undue. Nevertheless, I am curious if people consider it a reliable source or not, given its use on 10 other pages. (It has been cited on other matters by Newsweek and SudOuest (a Bordeaux-based newspaper)...) Thanks for your help. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 17:17, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

They list staff on the about section. I don't recognize the first two authors and it's a little concerning the third contributor uses a pseudonym. Not much on writer Tom Lord. Not much on Lucas Webber, but he seems to be the most published of the three [50]. Webber may be an expert self-publishing, but I'm still pretty skeptical. TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 17:27, 7 July 2023 (UTC):

Thanks. Indeed, the author of the article cited in the entry being "War Noir" along with the obsessive detail concerning types of weapon is what caught my attention at first. My thought is that what can be verified via other sources is likely due, and what cannot should go, including the source. But I brought it here in case anyone had inside information on War Noir's reliability. :) -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 18:44, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Could you link the other sources that cite them you mentioned? TulsaPoliticsFan (talk) 19:17, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Nope, sorry... because reasons (good ones, actually). But here's how you can find them yourself: type site:"newsweek.com" militantwire.com somalia into google and you'll find a ref where newsweek cites the site. (If you remove "Somalia" you'll see that they seem to rely on them a fair bit actually, though not for War Noir's article.) -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 20:31, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Just a quick note that, per WP:NEWSWEEK, the modern Newsweek is a shaky source itself, so its use of the site cannot confer much reliability. (It doesn't confer non-reliability either, mind you.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 00:35, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Is Ji Hong Tai Chi reliable?

I am using this source for the article Tai Chi. I am not sure if it's reliable. The website claims their instructors are certified. SVcode(Talk) 23:50, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Even if certification were sufficient to be considered reliable (questionable in itself), we cannot accept the website's word that their instructors are certified, as that is something that would have incentive to claim even if not true. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 00:39, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

For history articles

Is this source reliaabel for history and caste articles? Llorenbishnu (talk) 04:50, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

The author, Biplab Dasgupta, was an economist, activist, and politician and taught economics at the University of Calcutta. The publisher, Anthem Press, is a publishing partner of Cambridge University Press.[51] The book has at least one positive review in an academic journal.[52] So prima facie it is fine. But keep in mind that according to the review the author uses the viewpoint of Historical materialism which is not exactly a neutral approach. And of course castes are a sensitive topic and I cannot comment on whether the book can be used for that subject matter. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 07:23, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Reliability of Military Watch Magazine

Resource is used in numerous articles about military equipment, but it has no features of reliability: as I can see, there is no information about a site owner and authors, it is cited mostly by Russian news organizations, and at least in some articles there are false claims. For example: "It was previously only confirmed that the radar station, which provides command and control for each Patriot unit, was destroyed" — there was no such confirmation, yet text implies that it's a well known fact. Siradan (talk) 11:58, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Rotten Tomatoes being cited for WP:BLP

I hope I'm doing this right as I don't have any experience doing WP:RfC, but I often come across RT being used a source for an actor's DOB and I revert them since they seem like a rather poor source when it comes to WP:DOB as they have the incorrect one for other actors and there are some actors that have age disputes on Wikipedia, the DOBs that RT have are most certain incorrect because other info for those actors such as what year they graduated high school or college are on their pages(with legit cited sources) and those years don't match up to the DOB RT has listed. I asked this a few months ago and pretty much all of the editors that replied agreed that since RT is not a journalism site and that it's main purpose is film criticism, it shouldn't be used as a source for WP:DOB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_403#Rotten_Tomatoes_reliabilty Kcj5062 (talk) 21:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@Kcj5062: I have removed the RFC tag from this discussion since the question you asked is not really contentious enough IMO to require that level of debate. The answer you received during the previous discussion that RT is not a good source for biographical information such as date of birth appears correct. Why do you think it needs to be re-addressed? Abecedare (talk) 22:18, 10 July 2023 (UTC)