User:Vfrickey
I'm back. I won't spend a lot of time here, but there are still a few things left to do. I'm going to prioritize my efforts to where they'll do the most good, for wikipedia and the people who rely on it for information.
For those who confuse the perfectly legitimate use of a nickname on wikipedia with something more devious, please educate yourselves. Look my nickname up if you're curious. I'm done with explanations that just get snarked at by other editors.
 | This user values third opinions and occasionally provides one. |
On my user talk page, I recently gave people on both sides of a controversy over politicizing which sources are reliable enough to use in wikipedia (or even to try to engage other editors in building a consensus about) a soapbox to use on that page.
So, I archived everything and replaced it with the following discussion on my talk page.
One of the editors whose conduct I described (but whom I did not name) asked an admin to admonish me about the propriety of placing opinion essays in my talk page, so I moved the discussion to this page at the admin's suggestion. It's appropriate at this point to thank the admin involved for exercising restraint - as she reminded me in her talk page, she had the option to simply delete the text in question from my user talk page and considered doing so. Instead, this admin explained where I'd gone wrong and allowed me to fix the problem myself, which I did.
I hope that the editor who complained about me "drops the stick", for this isn't a personal matter, it's an issue which is important to the project's WP:NPOV ethic. I have no issue with the editor, but some of that editor's comments are recent examples of an issue we ought to talk about as wikipedia editors. Pretending it doesn't exist isn't an option.
Politics, "Fake News" and Reliable Sources[edit]
The only reason to consider a source unreliable for use in wikipedia ought to be if it can be proven to consistently be wrong on the facts.
Unfortunately, various editors and blocs of editors who curate certain articles have fallen into the habit of saying "this is fake news", "this is a liberal rag", "this is an alt-right fake-news site" and similar unhelpful things.
At the end of this road lies paralysis for those of us who are here to make an encyclopedia, because the process will keep getting hijacked by editors with POV they wish to push, or who behave in ways WP:OWN tells us we shouldn't.
I strongly oppose the use of terms like "right-wing fake-news" in our discussions of reliable sources and proposed sanctions for the same reasons I'd oppose the use of terms like "libtard", "Commie", "fascist", "alt-right" and Godwin's favorite, "Nazi" to describe editors or sources.
In the case of discussions leading toward a consensus on proposed sanctions, using an editor's political affiliation or the political affiliation of sources that editor wished to discuss in the course of allegedly disrupting the process of making an encyclopedia may be a personal attack deprecated in WP:WIAPA. One exception to that, of course, when an editor or a source unequivocally affiliates themselves with hate rhetoric.
Even a source of information with non-mainstream political affiliations can be cited as a usually reliable source. Fox News and the Huffington Post were both created to present news from non-mainstream political perspectives. Both are considered reliable sources when cited appropriately according to the guideline in WP:BIASED.
If a source is objectionable because it distorts facts for political reasons, drawing attention specifically and entirely to the distortion, not the politics makes the case for excluding a source stronger. The same goes for an editor being considered for sanctions who happens to have politically non-mainstream views or affiliations - WP:WIAPA tells us not to mention editors' affiliations (which includes their politics). That requires a sanctions discussion to focus exclusively on the misconduct itself, not the politics.
As an example of this, a complaint was brought before Administrative Noticeboard/Incidents against an editor for seeking consensus in several venues of the project for use of Breitbart as a source for a fact (not in any of the categories for which Breitbart wound up in WP:PUS) in a disruptive manner.
Breitbart.com is listed in Wikipedia:Potentially unreliable sources with the following guideline:
"Breitbart.com, which has a long and documented history of publishing misrepresentations, fabrications, half-truths and outright lies about people it politically opposes. See the site's article for examples. May be useful for discussing right-wing figures, but should never be used to support negative claims about people."
There is not a blanket prohibition against citing Breitbart.com in support of a fact in one of our articles, but some very strong and restrictive caveats and guidelines on when it's allowable ("May be useful for discussing right-wing figures, but should never be used to support negative claims about people").
The OP didn't just describe this other editor's conduct. The OP coupled that issue to the political affiliation of Breitbart. The discussion soon veered toward other editors who allegedly endorsed Nazi ideology, supposedly associated with the editor. At that point, a discussion toward a consensus on proposed bans for that editor fell afoul of WP:WIAPA. The editor bringing the case to AN/I used the term "right-wing fake-news" repeatedly when advocating for sanctions against the editor in question.
According to WP:WIAPA, one of a list of personal attacks we don't do is:
" Using someone's affiliations as an ad hominem means of dismissing or discrediting their views—regardless of whether said affiliations are mainstream. An example could be "you're a train spotter so what would you know about fashion?" Note that it is not a personal attack to question an editor at their talk page about their possible conflict of interest on a specific article or topic."
In this case, we saw WP:WIAPA violated not just by impeaching the politics of the editor proposed for sanctions, but also denouncing him for his alleged affiliations with other editors. The sanctions discussion became an ad hominem forum, and did so almost from the beginning.
More recently, in Talk:Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections two recent articles in The Nation were repeatedly described as "fake news" by some editors curating the site for questioning the idea that the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak was the result of Russian hacking:
- "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack", by Patrick Lawrence and
- "A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo".
These two reports covered Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)'s December 2016 and July 2017 memos on the lack of evidence supporting Russian hacking of the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak
Although the first article was fact-checked, there was an inadvertent factual error and possibly an error in describing the significance of the evidence in one of the VIPS memos. Investigation by the editorial staff of The Nation also revealed a new fact - this was the first time that a memo had gone out from VIPS despite significant dissent among the organization's members, questioning the methodology of the analysis.
Please read those articles. I can't find a single thing listed in our article Fake News in either of them. Inadvertent errors are not the same thing as deliberate misinformation or hoaxes, but the charge of "fake news" has been applied to those articles consistently as one of several ways not to engage on the consensus about half of the editors in the discussion wanted to have about referencing that article.
Some editors based their objections to use of the The Nation articles on VIPS on technical grounds, but it's WP:OR for them to rule out using those articles in our article Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections on what they contend are technical grounds mentioned in reliable sources, it lends WP:Undue weight to one side of a notable controversy crucial to the subject of that article. At least The Nation has gone to pains to present both sides of the "hack vs. inside leak" controversy, in a way that conforms more closely to the WP:NPOV ethic than the articles attacking them and their methodology.
We don't have explicit guidance from the project regarding what "fake news" is. We have two resources: our article Fake News, which can only be cited as a primary source and with other limitations set out in WP:CIRCULAR in another article, but does at least describe it:
"Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media.[1] Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention.[2][3] Intentionally misleading and deceptive fake news is different from obvious satire or parody which is intended to humor rather than mislead its audience."
and a discussion formerly at WP:FAKENEWS, which centered around Zimdars' fake news list and is now redirected to WP:QUESTIONABLE amid considerable controversy.
If the term "fake news" is anything but a convenient way to mislead the public, it should be applied consistently. Unfortunately, our policy on what is "fake news" is still embryonic. Sentiment in the discussion regarding at one point favored a WP:PUS-like list of fake news sources, based on Zimdars' fake news list. The whole discussion has since been redirected to WP:QUESTIONABLE, leaving us without specific guidance on "fake news", again.
- It's hard to escape the impression that "fake news" is too often used as a synonym for "stuff I don't want in my article!" by some editors.
- Politics doesn't belong in the discussion of whether a source is reliable for our work. Whether what that source says is reliably true is the only acceptable criterion.
- Use of terms such as "fake news" should be avoided in discussions of source reliability because the project has not decided what "fake news" is.
- Discussion of whether sources are reliable enough to be used in wikipedia should not involve politics, but focus on reliability.
- When considering sanctions against editors, we ought to confine discussion to actual violations of our guidelines. The editor's politics should not be mentioned. Neither should the political affiliation of the sources they want to discuss be used to sway consensus against them (to go back to Breitbart, the reason it wound up in WP:Potentially unreliable sources wasn't its politics as such, but its distortion and misrepresentation of facts).
