Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 05:02, 9 October 2024

Before posting, check the archives and list of perennial sources for prior discussions. Context is important: supply the source, the article it is used in, and the claim it supports.

Sections older than 5 days archived by lowercase sigmabot III.

Additional notes:

• WP:RSN
• WP:RS/N
• WP:V/N

• RFCs for deprecation, blacklisting, or other classification should not be opened unless the source is widely used and has been repeatedly discussed. Consensus is assessed based on the weight of policy-based arguments.
• While the consensus of several editors can generally be relied upon, answers are not policy.
• This page is not a forum for general discussions unrelated to the reliability of sources.

RfC: Universe Guide

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

The reliability of Universe Guide is:

• Option 1: Generally reliable
• Option 2: Additional considerations
• Option 3: Generally unreliable
• Option 4: Deprecate
• Option 5: Blacklist (not mutually exclusive with 3 or 4)

–LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:13, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

• universeguide.com: Linksearch en (insource) - meta - de - fr - simple - wikt:en - wikt:fr • Spamcheck • MER-C X-wiki • gs • Reports: Links on en - COIBot - COIBot-Local • Discussions: tracked - advanced - RSN • COIBot-Link, Local, & XWiki Reports - Misplaced Pages: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.com

Background (Universe Guide)

Universe Guide is an amateur blog about astronomy that is cited on many pages about astronomical objects. This website has been discussed at this WT:ASTRO discussion, this WP:RSN discussion, and this WT:AST discussion, and there is general consensus that it is unreliable, and due to persistent usage, it has been suggested to be deprecated or blacklisted. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:13, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Survey (Universe Guide)

• Deprecate per the discussions linked in the background section. I can see this is regularly being added to articles, so deprecation seems warranted here. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:25, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 4: Deprecate That blog is a self-published site which is not peer-reviewed. Shadowwarrior8 (talk) 12:09, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 4 I've nothing to add from the last time this came up, it's a blog written from what one person researched on the Internet. It doesn't have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracyreputation for, if anything it's the opposite as per the discussions at WP:ASTRO. It's self published but not by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications, rather I am an amateur space enthusiast of many years as opposed to someone who is academically qualified. Nothing about the source makes it reliable for verification purposes, and if it is still being regularly added to articles for that purpose then deprecation is appropriate. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:20, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 4 too: Very clearly an unreliable source, even if it's a nice website.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrfoogles (talk • contribs) 05:29, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 4 for deprecation. Actually I called out this first on WT:AST, but was unable to make an RfC here because of personal issues back at home. One of my main issues with this website is this appears too often in Google searches, so it is inevitable it would be blindly used as a source. This is clearly a source written by a non-expert, and even makes its way to very prominent articles like Saturn or the James Webb Space Telescope. Deprecation indeed is necessary to keep this out of Misplaced Pages.

By the way LaundryPizza, I'm sorry for not initiating the RfC myself. Just got problems a few days ago. SkyFlubbler (talk) 15:16, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4, this website is almost always not reliable, and contain several inconsistencies (like saying that the temperature of star X is 4,400 K, but later saying that it is between 2,400 and 3,700 K). I wouldn't be comfortable if there was any starbox using data from Universe Guide. 21 Andromedae (talk) 18:02, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
• Comment: @LaundryPizza03: You asked whether it should be deprecated or blacklisted, but only listed deprecated as one of the options for voting. Blacklisting is not bundled in deprecation. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

  Okay, I'll do that. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 02:44, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4 per above. I think over time we have to start to include more of this UGC, but this one seems to be poorly done. Maybe deprecate for now and come back and revisit in a few years if they improve. These things either improve over time or go away entirely. Lets take a wait and see attitude, and deprecate for now. Jtbobwaysf (talk) 03:55, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4, from a look at the source it’s clearly of extremely low quality and seems to just make stuff up. The site decided for us that brown dwarfs are actually definitely stars and calls them brown stars. It says there’s no evidence NGC 474 contains planets and that a wormhole would be required to visit it. We use that page as a source right now. 3df (talk) 21:45, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4 Amateur blog? Not reliable. Simple as that. If it were a blog by an expert in the field, maybe. But since its not, then I don't see the need for it to continue to be used as a source here. The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 16:56, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

RFC on The South African

Please consider joining the feedback request service. An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following list: Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

Which of the following best describes the reliability of The South African?

• 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 as in the 2017 RfC of the Daily Mail The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 10:03, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

• • The reason why I am opening this RFC is that I have a concern about The South African hosting plagiarised Misplaced Pages content in their news articles. The one that concerned me was this article that appeared to have directly copied from our Des van Jaarsveldt article. I emailed the paper informing them of this but got no reply. When I raised the discussion at RSN, opinions seemed to believe there was reason to doubt the reliability of The South African so this is why I am formally opening the RFC and asking the community given it has similar characteristics to the issues from WP:ROYALCENTRAL that led to it's subsequent depreciation. The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 10:07, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

    Might be worth looking at the author's others writings too.. don't have time to rn Bluethricecreamman (talk) 14:29, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

    • @Bluethricecreamman: Well I have looked into this particular author and it seems he has done it again in a later article about Pravin Gordhan. The article also appears to copy from the Misplaced Pages article, specifically the lede. I don't know if that may change people's opinion as to whether its just one author or the whole source needs a look at. Pinging @ActivelyDisinterested: and @North8000: so they can see too. The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 17:48, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Survey (The South African)

• Option 2 They appear to be a standard news organisation, although the issues highlighted raise concerns about their quality. I can't find any other issues being raised, although search for information on them is made difficult due to their name. I don't think one issue is enough to declare them generally unreliable or deprecate them, but it does show the source should be shown more scrutiny if it's used. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:09, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 2 (invited by the bot) Except in extreme cases, I'm against generalization (=overgeneralization) of any source. Which means "other considerations apply" is what nearly all should be. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 14:35, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 2 Its news stories attributed to journalists seem largely reliable, or at least no worse than many other outlets we trust. However, we need to be aware of the possibility of wiki-mirroring in these articles. There also appears to be incipient AI use which may require further discussion if more examples become evident.--Boynamedsue (talk) 07:30, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 3 I think having sat on the fence, I should cast my !vote. Had it been an isolated incident, I would have agreed with the above for option 2. However, based upon the evidence that I found that it has happened again (even after I informed them of the plagiarism), that suggests that it would be better to consider it unreliable since they have continued to copy Misplaced Pages. The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 06:59, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 2 Seems like we don't have enough info beyond the clear plagiarism cases identified. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we also should be willing to revisit/do another RFC if there is more info released confirming issues. Bluethricecreamman (talk)

Discussion (The South African)

• There are multiple publications that have very similar names, so it's not easy to search for information on the source. Also there appears to be two very different periods in its history - from 2003–2015 it was a freesheet distributed in London, but since 2015 it has been an online news source focused on the South African market. The BBC and Stanford Libraries both have media guides about South African news media, neither of which mention the The South African. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:09, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

  I've left a notification of the RFC on the Project South Africa talk page. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

RFC Jewish Chronicle

Please consider joining the feedback request service. An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following lists: Politics, government, and law Media, the arts, and architecture When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the lists. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

The reliability of the Jewish Chronicle is:

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

RFCbefore, Previous RFC Selfstudier (talk) 09:09, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Note (Jewish Chronicle)

Existing RSP entry is green with the following commentary:

"There is consensus that The Jewish Chronicle is generally reliable for news, particularly in its pre-2010 reporting. There is no consensus on whether The Jewish Chronicle is reliable for topics related to the British Left, Muslims, Islam, and Palestine/Palestinians; there is also a rough consensus it is biased in these topics. Where used, in-text attribution is recommended for its coverage of these topics."

Editors may wish to comment on these issues specifically. Selfstudier (talk) 09:12, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Just a reminder but it's not technically possible to deprecate a source for a specific are of content and also a deprecated source is not more unreliable than an unreliable source. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:07, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Well, there are clear wording differences between WP:GUNREL and WP:DEPREC, beyond the availability of technical means for the latter. Andreas JN466 12:28, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm just summarising Deprecated sources should not be considered to be either unique or uniquely unreliable. WP:DEPREC itself is a short summary of WP:DEPRECATE, but this is better discuss in the discussion section. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:40, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Survey (Jewish Chronicle)

• Option 2 in general, Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area. The recent scandal gives rise to significant doubts over editorial control and practices which taken together with the lack of transparency over ownership and recent checkered history suggests we should not consider this source reliable without inline attribution at a minimum and unreliable for matters relating to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.Selfstudier (talk) 09:31, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

  You didn't seem concerned about funding in the case of Al Jazeera; you wrote I am not persuaded that any bias produced as a result of Qatari funding. Why the different approach here? In this case there could be donors or lenders we don't know about (which isn't uncommon for news orgs), but what could be worse than being owned by an absolute monarchy? — xDanielx /_C\ 16:59, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

  Please take your irrelevancies elsewhere, the discussion section maybe. Selfstudier (talk) 17:13, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

  It's relevant because holding Jewish publications to a different standard would bias the topic area. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 20:43, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

  Al Jazeera is somewhat of a special case, as it has complete editorial independence despite being state-funded (a setup similar to the BBC). CVDX (talk) 13:20, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Almost all news orgs claim editorial independence, including RT for example. — xDanielx /_C\ 16:10, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Repeats comment about irrelevancies. Selfstudier (talk) 16:15, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 3 for Muslims, the British left and Israel/Palestine since 2016, option 3 for its entire output since 2020. The JC has had a long history of false reporting on Muslims, the British Left and Israel/Palestine (a complex of topics which frequently intersect). In the post 2010 period the JC frequently libelled individuals and published false information on these topics. Individuals were forced to resort to complaints to IPSO in order to get corrections published. Professor of Journalism Brian Cathcart writes the publication of falsehoods has been a characteristic of the paper’s journalism for years. The paper broke IPSO's code 41 times between 2018 and 2023, an astounding number for a small weekly paper, and paid out in at least four libel cases. All were against Muslims or people on the British left.

IPSO lamented the paper's lack of cooperation with complaints in very strong terms The Committee expressed significant concerns about the newspaper’s handling of this complaint. The newspaper had failed, on a number of occasions, to answer questions put to it by IPSO and it was regrettable the newspaper’s responses had been delayed. The Committee considered that the publication’s conduct during IPSO’s investigation was unacceptable. Given the difficulty of obtaining corrections from the paper in cases where individuals are named, it is likely a large amount of false information has also been published where nobody is named, so the possibility of libel actions is eliminated, and the chance of IPSO cases is significantly reduced.

The 2020 change of ownership, meaning nobody actually knows who owns the paper, combined with the false stories on Gaza, suggest we should not use the paper in any capacity until the question of ownership is clarified.Boynamedsue (talk) 09:52, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Just in addition to this, I feel, having read others' comments, a date of 2010 for the beginning of the qualification on reliability regarding political topics may also be valid, given that marked the period where Stephen Pollard took over. I would certainly consider extending it back that far in terms of BLP. However, the real collapse in standards occurred from 2015.--Boynamedsue (talk) 06:21, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2 in general, Option 3/4 for WP:A/I/PIA area (Option 4 for WP:A/I/PIA coverage from 2024 going forward, given this year's string of fabrications and widespread concerns about journalistic integrity voiced in both the Israeli and international press). --Andreas JN466 11:17, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

  Explanation of Option 2 "additional considerations", as requested below:

  The current RSP entry says, There is no consensus on whether The Jewish Chronicle is reliable for topics related to the British Left, Muslims, Islam, and Palestine/Palestinians; there is also a rough consensus it is biased in these topics. Where used, in-text attribution is recommended for its coverage of these topics.

  Per Option 2, in-text attribution should in my view not just be recommended but required for any topics that are related to "the British Left, Muslims, Islam, and Palestine/Palestinians" but do not fall under WP:A/I/PIA. This should also apply more generally to assertions and allegations of antisemitism that do not fall under WP:A/I/PIA. Andreas JN466 07:14, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  I also support comments by others that journalistic standards at the Jewish Chronicle appear to have dropped lower and lower over the past 20 years, with step changes in 2008, 2015 and after the change in ownership in 2020. Andreas JN466 11:06, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4: major scandal for a prominent newspaper which should be immediately deprecated for the following reasons:

1-Unknown owners who are likely right-wing ideologues;

2-Publication of fabricated stories supporting Israeli premier Netanyahu's narratives;

3-Allowance of an unknown freelance journalist who came "out of nowhere" to write these fabricated stories under a pseudonym and with a falsified resume

4-The fired freelance journalist then making death threats to an Israeli reporter due to the revealing of their identity

5-The resignation of the newspaper's most prominent columnists who have also stated that the JC's editorial line had become "sensationalist" and "unbalanced". Makeandtoss (talk) 11:17, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

These issues all relate to the period from 2020 to now. If it’s technically possible to deprecate for a specific timeframe only, is it right to assume you would argue for deprecating for this period specifically? BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:20, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

I can continue mentioning how the JC was bought by right-wing owners in 2008 and how the newspaper played a prominent role in slandering pro-Palestinian voices as antisemitic including UK Labor Party former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and how it promoted the new antisemitism concept which included anti-Zionism. Also notable that JC had too many IPO violations since 2018. Makeandtoss (talk) 12:58, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

There was no change of ownership in 2008. BobFromBrockley (talk) 13:34, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

My bad, editorship* as mentioned in MEE article. Makeandtoss (talk) 14:53, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

1. Are there any other sources deprecated because of the suspected political leanings of their owners? If not, are we going to start doing this? I might have some suggestions.

2 & 3. are the points with substance to my mind. However, the JC have retracted the stories and cut ties with the writer, admitted the mistake and said they are reviewing their procedures for dealing with freelance journalists. This is substantially the same procedure as the Guardian announced faced with a very similar situation.

4. It's baffling that you think that this has bearing on the Jewish Chronicle's reliability.

5. Columnists resigning is not a criterion of reliability or unreliability. Nor, for that matter, is being "unbalanced". Samuelshraga (talk) 08:07, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

There really is a world of difference between

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/26/open-door-column-note-to-readers

and

• https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/conclusion-of-jewish-chronicle-investigation-into-elon-perry-daaqr8b9

Do please read them both and compare. Andreas JN466 08:21, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree re no.4. Re no.5, though, I think columnists resigning can be an indicator of unreliability if their reasons for resigning relate to criteria of reliability. Whereas some of the resigners (e.g. John Ware) have only mentioned a dislike of the editor's politics, most have mentioned being uncomfortable with the lack of transparency about ownership and many have expressed other reliability concerns, as the links already on this page show. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:59, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

@Bobfrombrockley I agree with you that some specific complaints of the columnists are relevant - and they are discussed by others, as far as I see the relevant concerns relate to the identity of the owners (see again point 1). The fact that columnists resigned in and of itself is not. And the complaints brought by @Makeandtoss - that resigning columnists (stated that the JC's editorial line had become "sensationalist" and "unbalanced" are not germane to this discussion. Samuelshraga (talk) 10:37, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, Option 2 in general afterwards, Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area since 2020. This isn't about the current event, rather the current event appears to be the culmination of issues that have been growing for several years. Multiple external sources have commented on this, as have columnists that have recently ended their association with the paper. Oppose 4 in general. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:18, 22 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1 pre-2015, option 2 post-2015. It would be insane to deprecate a 183 year old publication, so strongly oppose option 4. I have argued in the talk section above that the IPSO breaches in the 2015-20 period should give rise to caution but not lead to option 3. I would urge those who are swayed by these breaches to read the actual rulings; you will find a couple of serious errors but the majority are fairly trivial and have been more than adequately corrected. I would argue against a generally unreliable status for antisemitism for that period because, prior to Jewish News taking off, the JC was the only UK Jewish paper and therefore the only outlet giving deep coverage to UK antisemitism. Designating it unusable means the whole topic can only be covered in a skewed way. I would therefore urge a formulation such as: “use with caution and attribution” for that topic in that period. Since 2020, the case for General unreliability, especially on Israel/Palestine, is strong, but even here we should explicitly note that there will be exceptions for authoritative contributors such as those who have resigned (eg Anshel Pfeiffer, Colin Shindler). BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:17, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

  the only outlet giving deep coverage to UK antisemitism

  The problem is that they make all sorts of highly dubious accusations of antisemitism, many of which appear to be politically motivated (i.e., in order to attack people who criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians). If the "deep coverage" is dishonest, then using it will not improve Misplaced Pages. -Thucydides411 (talk) 08:05, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

  That may be your opinion but there are no RSs saying that as far as I know. If we had restrictions on

  BLP and/or ARBPIA in the relevant period, that would address that risk anyway. If we make them generally option 3, then we avoid the risk but also lose a lot of potential to cover antisemitism in UK society. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:56, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, option 2 post-2015 Bobfrombrockley really saved me a lot of typing. I also want to emphasize that we really need to be treating most sources, even our top sources like WSJ, NYT etc as green to yellow anytime we are treading into areas where bias etc could come into play. While fundamental facts (times, dates, etc) typically are objective, even good sources can have some bias in how much emphasis they put into certain aspects of a topic or even that they chose to cover a topic at all. This also applies when we look at how much scrutiny is applied to various sources. Outside of the false reports issue (which is hardly unique to this source) are they under the microscope because they are much different than other sources or because their politics disagree with other sources? As a rule we need to put less stock in "the color of a source" and more thought into what the source is claiming and what evidence they present for the claim. Springee (talk) 13:40, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Objectively speaking, they produce far more false reports than other sources. Including sources we deprecate, like the Daily Mail.Boynamedsue (talk) 13:44, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, Option 2 in general afterwards, Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area since 2020 as per ActivelyDisinterested. The Jewish Chronicle has issues stemming from its recent change in ownership, but those issues are much more clearly problematic, and more evidenced in third-party sources, for Israel/Palestine-related issues then issues outside that topic area. Loki (talk) 18:15, 22 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1 pre-2015, Option 2 in general afterwards, Option 3/4 for WP:A/I/PIA area, muslims, and the british left, especially after 2020 seems they used to do good work tho ive seen the ridiculous scandals in the wake of continuing israel palestine conflict. agree for same reasons as loki, springee, hope the org becomes more transparent soon. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 18:28, 22 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 2 in general, Option 3 for muslims and the British left, Option 3/4 for WP:A/I/PIA area - Based on the provided background and latest developments, and considering JC's longstanding IPSO issues, undisclosed ownership that complicates the evaluation of the publication's impartiality, questionable editorial standards, etc etc. I've been following the gargantuan discussion preluding this RfC. These issues are not recent or limited to their latest scandal. - Ïvana (talk) 18:56, 22 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 3 from 2015 onwards. No opinion for 2014 or earlier. In answer to queries about the year: 2015 was the year a general campaign of false allegations of antisemitism was launched against the British left and against Jeremy Corbyn in particular. Daveosaurus (talk) 04:14, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  What is your source for the JC having "launched" a "general campaign" in 2015? This was not mentioned in the previous discussion. If the JC actually engaged in a campaign at this time, then a secondary source would say so. I do see that a 2015 JC front-page editorial made claims of antisemitism about Corbyn. But an editorial (even an inaccurate one -- it's an editorial!) is not what means when one says a newspaper has a "general campaign of false allegations", which suggests misconduct. SamuelRiv (talk) 04:38, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

It wasn't the JC in particular it was the British press in general. Restricting the Option 3 to 2015 onwards leaves earlier JC journalism able to be used if people familiar with the history of the paper consider it reliable. Daveosaurus (talk) 05:19, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

To clarify then, Davesaurus, you think the British press in general should be option 3 after 2015? BobFromBrockley (talk) 07:05, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 4. The unreliability and political bias of the JC has a long history. Their more recent opaque ownership and financing raises yet further concerns. By 2023 Brian Cathcart calculated that over the previous 5 years the JC had broke the IPSO code an astonishing 41 times* and had lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases. There have been further cases since. This is all the more remarkable, because it has a relatively small circulation. By that metric the JC is substantially worse than other notoriously unreliable publications such as the Daily Mail which Misplaced Pages deprecated. However, irrespective of the final decision, it needs a strong warning of bias on all politically related, and non-Jewish religious issues. Andromedean (talk) 10:22, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 3 for 2020 onwards (dating to the change of ownership). Bias and IPSO complaints from earlier are recoverable issues. Mystery owners are not. The chain of accountability is important. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 10:43, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1. Bias isn't unreliability. A single scandal, with the freelancers dealt with, isn't an indictment of the whole publication. Andre🚐 19:30, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Andre, this isn't a single scandal, but multiple breaches of the IPSO code, libel cases, opaque ownership and funding, we are drowning in problems. By all means explain why these aren't relevant but please base your view around the evidence presented in the discussion. It's as if you haven't read anything or decided to insert a straw man fallacy! Andromedean (talk) 19:58, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Libel cases do not impact the publication's reliability unless they end in a judgment or verdict that is damning to the publication. There was an extensive discussion in the above thread about the IPSO and the ownership and my conclusion is that there's a bit of smoke but no fire (since the fire was extinguished by cutting ties and retracting the problematic material) as far as liability for the publication for the recent scandal, but the IPSO is a red herring since The Times also had a similar number of breaches, and I don't think it matters that it publishes more text, because that's not a metric defined anywhere. The relevant metric is a reputation for upholding accuracy and fact-checking. So long as Al Jazeera, a state-run propaganda outlet owned and operated by Qatar, is generally reliable, I'm not convinced that the ownership standard is one we care about. WP:NEWSORG nor WP:RS define this. The concern is whether the org stands by their fact-checking and corrects errors. Andre🚐 20:12, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  No. Policy on this is at WP:SOURCE. The publisher matters. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:55, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  As it says there, "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." It does not mention having to know who owns the publication. Andre🚐 21:01, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  No. WP:SOURCE says the publisher affects reliability and it even identifies a specific reliable publisher. Also, here we have other sources saying that its unknown publisher is a real problem for the source. Three of its columnists quit because it does not have a reputation for reliability. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:17, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  That is a misread of the policy. Jewish Chronicle is the publisher, the question at hand here is whether they are reputable. It doesn't at all mention individuals or groups funding the ownership, that is irrelevant and a reach. The columnists quit due to the recent scandal. The publication has been around for many years, so its reputation is something at hand here for editors to weigh in on. Andre🚐 21:20, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  No. You misread policy. Jewish Chronicle is the source under discussion. Your contention that it is self-published only makes it unreliable. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:27, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  It is not self-published, it is a publisher. It is owned by a consortium led by Robbie Gibb. Andre🚐 21:30, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  You just said again it is a self-publisher. Jewish Chronicle is the publication. If as you claim, Jewish Chronicle is also the publisher, then Jewish Chronicle is self publishing. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:41, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Your argument makes no sense. Jewish Chronicle is both the publisher and the publication, just like most newspapers. Or technically the publisher is the consortium that owns it, but is also known as Jewish Chronicle. The New York Times is the publication published by The New York Times Co., also a privately owned and operated organization. Self-published is when an individual publishes their own book or article. Jewish Chronicle is the outlet. Andre🚐 21:44, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  We have mainstream sources across the board, from The Guardian to The Telegraph to The Jerusalem Post to Haaretz, telling us that the identity of the actual owner is unknown. You can't just sweep this concern under the carpet: it is being voiced by media professionals, including former contributors to the Jewish Chronicle, not Wikipedians. Andreas JN466 21:45, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Please show me where in the policy the identity of the owner is mentioned as anything pertaining to its reliability. Andre🚐 21:48, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  You just admitted that with the Jewish Chronicle, the publication and the publisher here are two different things, although you then pass it off as a 'technicality.' You go on to describe the publisher as the owner. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:53, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, it's no different than The Nation, published by its namesake owner, The Nation Company, L.P., the Jewish Chronicle is both the publication and an eponymous group that publishes it. Andre🚐 21:56, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  So, the owner is the publisher. Publisher matters under SOURCE. And the publisher, here has been put in doubt. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:01, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Continued below. Andreas JN466 22:10, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Rather than clutter the survey, kindly take this to the discussion section. Selfstudier (talk) 21:44, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

I would just answer this point simply by reiterating the quote by subject matter expert Brian Cathcart: the publication of falsehoods has been a characteristic of the paper’s journalism for years. The problem is not bias, though the source is biased like every newspaper, it is consistent and sustained inaccuracy used to support its biases.--Boynamedsue (talk) 06:12, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2 with the additional considerations of: generally reliable or at least not noticeably objectionable pre-2009, and "use with caution" from 2009 onwards (Pollard era), most notably with respect to BLPs and politics (the source of almost all the libel cases and other complaints), given its significantly worse track record of inaccuracy and sensationalism in this area, and then option 3 for content related to ARBPIA and related politics (including the intersection of race, religion, etc.) from 2020 onwards (the period of uncertain ownership and further step up in the editorial murkiness/malpractice and political beholdenness). Iskandar323 (talk) 19:51, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1 for now. I'm open to changing my !vote if other evidence emerges, but so far I'm only seeing a single story with serious accuracy concerns, which doesn't say much about the broader reliability of the 183 year old newspaper. The other evidence that has been provided against JC's reliability is IPSO complaints. Anyone can file an IPSO complaint, so only the ones IPSO (partially) upheld seem potentially meaningful. As TFD mentioned, there were four of those in the past two years, so I read through those. They all have some kind of merit, but seem fairly minor. One was about the text the Islamic Republic has repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel and Jews off the face of the Earth. Definitely imprecise, but we regularly see worse hyperbole from other biased-but-reliable sources. Another complaint took issue with the text Labour banned him from its list of potential council candidates, saying the candidate was rejected but not (permanently) banned. Also imprecise, but we see far worse errors from WP:GREL sources regularly. — xDanielx /_C\ 17:08, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

  I don't think anyone knows how many complaints the IPSO receives, only changes after a complaint was made. For all publications over the five years 2018 to 2022, IPSO investigated only 3.82% and upheld 0.56% of the remaining complaints. 1.41% were resolved directly by the complainant with the publisher during the process and 0.43% were resolved by IPSO mediation. For examples of complaints about the JC which the IPSO rejected see Thomas Suarez's Youtube video here Andromedean (talk) 17:44, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, option 2 post-2015 - just gonna second pretty much everything that Bob said. Somewhat lean option 3 for ARBPIA post-2020 but not strongly so, and complete deprecation, especially pre-2015, would be a mistake. The Kip 18:42, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1 per u:Andrevan. The newspaper handled the latest scandal involving Elon Perry properly by severing the ties with him and removing his articles. Other media outlets have also had similar issues . The IPSO rulings are a nothingburger, other sources like The Times have had multiple IPSO rulings against them as well and others like The Guardian simply choose not to be regulated by IPSO. It would definitely by good to know who owns the newspaper but I'm not sure how it would be relevant. Alaexis_¿question? 20:38, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 1 per the arguments above. I previously had a somewhat lower opinion based on this scandal, but having read into it, it seems to me that the reliability issue has been sufficiently addressed. The political shift to the right is concerning on a personal level, and so is the departure of experienced and skilled journalists, but neither of those impacts the reliability for facts. The IPSO complaints are mostly the process working as intended, and the offending articles for this current scandal seem to have been removed (and are obviously, as any other thing written by such an author, unusable). The JC still has a reputation for fact-checking and reliability, and until that changes, it would not be reasonable to consider them unreliable, including in the I/P area. In addition, it has an important role of representing British (and other diaspora) Jews, and we should be highly cautious not to run out of centrist/right-leaning diaspora sources, including in the I/P area. I also find the argument about ownership entirely unconvincing: I don’t find it likely that there is any plausible ownership even close to comparably problematic to Al Jazeera, with the state in effect (though at least officially indirectly) both aiding Hamas and funding (with to be fair, no beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence of editorial control) a source we currently consider reliable for I/P. FortunateSons (talk) 11:37, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Whoa ... this calls for a bit of context:

  • Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing. Here’s what we know about the controversial deal, CNN, 12 December 2023
  • ‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas, New York Times, 10 December 2023
    • Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials. For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them. During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue? Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.
  • What Is the Hamas Chief Doing in Qatar?, Der Spiegel, 2 November 2023
    • Qatar is one of NATO's closest allies in the Gulf and has even been designated as a "Major Non-NATO Ally." In 2011, then United States President Barack Obama personally requested that the Emir of Qatar take the leadership of Hamas into his country. At the time, Washington was seeking to establish a communications channel to the Iranian-backed terrorist group. The Americans believed that a Hamas office in Doha would be easier to access than a Hamas bureau in Tehran.
  • Qatar ranks about twenty places above Israel in the Press Freedom Index.

  Andreas JN466 12:02, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  All we need to do here is look at the editors who !voted anything other than 1 in the snow closed AJ RFCs. Selfstudier (talk) 12:25, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Selfstudier can you explain this comment about our need to look at editors? BobFromBrockley (talk) 05:21, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

  I think its pretty clear, don't you? If some editors want to go on about AJ in this RFC then pointing to their comments at the AJ RFC makes sense, no? Selfstudier (talk) 08:13, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

  Israel's low press freedom rating probably has to do with its regular involvement in military conflicts, but in any case, why is it relevant here? No Israeli sources are being discussed. Qatar's rating of 58.48 isn't great, and that reflects a mix of state-owned (e.g. Al Jazeera) and independently-owned (e.g. Doha News) news orgs.

  Returning to the topic of JC, it seems very speculative to say that there might be donors or lenders we don't know about, who might attempt to exert influence, which might impact reliability. With Al Jazeera, it's hard to prove anything but there are many signs of Qatari influence, such as leaked cables where US diplomats discussed the use of Al Jazeera in diplomatic negotiations. — xDanielx /_C\ 17:00, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  I agree it would be speculative for us to say that "there might be donors or lenders we don't know about, who might attempt to exert influence, which might impact reliability". But we have a wide spectrum of mainstream sources saying it, from The Telegraph to The Guardian to Haaretz to The Jerusalem Post. We have insiders like Lee Harpin, senior reporter at the JC till 2021, who left after the takeover and now

  • says the new owners wanted more views "well to the right of the Tory party",
  • that "The current predicament of the @JewishChron does not come as a surprise. Leadership chosen on ideological grounds by those who gained control of the publication. Communal orgs should have been raising concerns months and months ago",
  • and that "The rot is deeper and for regular observers and readers of the paper, its direction over the last few years has been tragic to witness".

  You'd have to bring counterarguments published by people with similar standing in equivalent venues, rather than arguing with the people here. Andreas JN466 18:33, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Fair point, there is an accusation of owner influence rather than mere speculation. That said, every news org has criticism from disgruntled employees, especially in the past ~20 years when many news orgs had to undergo major changes. Harpin's criticism actually seems much less concerning than, for example, Peter Oborne's criticism of The Daily Telegraph, which includes accusations of owner and advertiser influence as well as (frankly more relevant) a focus on clicks over reliability. One can find comparable accusations from disgruntled employees of most major news outlets. — xDanielx /_C\ 20:26, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  Well, at least you know who the owner of The Telegraph is. ;) I take your point about disgruntled employees, but the JC does seem to have had rather a lot of them since the takeover, and the concerns have been echoed very, very widely, both in Israel and the UK, by outside observers. Lionel Barber weighed in today: Regards, Andreas JN466 21:37, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  @Andreas I'm confused why you would say that Qatar ranks about twenty places above Israel.

  The comparison you're discussing is Qatari state-owned media with a privately held British newspaper. Samuelshraga (talk) 10:41, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1. Option 3ers believe this isn't about a single event, yet can't point to evidence of unreliability beyond that event. Meanwhile, substantiated IPSO complaints are at the level of other major newspapers like The Times showing there isn't a pattern of disinformation like the Daily Mail. Al Jazeera is relevant because I'm sure we can all agree holding Jewish publications to a different standard than Muslim ones is wrong and will increase bias on wiki. It's bizarre that this standard is applied here to say that Qatari ownership of Al Jazeera can't impact its reliability but ownership of the JC does.

RSN and RSP are a good way to skew article bias by designating sources supporting certain viewpoints as unreliable so as to remove them from articles in contentious areas. Judging publications individually is naïve in such an environment because editors will unconsciously create different standards for their favoured sources. We need to consciously ensure we're holding all sources in the Israel-Palestine conflict area to the same standard. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 21:14, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

@Chess:The times has 12 IPSO rulings against it and 5 for its website, which is shared with the Sunday Times, since 2018, publishing 312 editions a year. The JC has 6 for the jc.com, which have not been counted up to now, and 12 for its paper edition. This is over just 52 yearly editions.

To suggest these numbers are similar is a clear misrepresentation of the facts, given the probability of a the JC publishing an actionable falsehood in a given edition is AT LEAST 6 times higher (we do not know how many of the website stories originated in the Sunday Times). This disparity is further compounded by the fact that the JC is around a third of the length of the times, and so produces many fewer articles. A generous calculation would be that a JC story is ten times more likely to be punished by IPSO than the Times.

It is also clear from the rulings that the Times' corrections are spread over a range of topics, whereas all of the JC's false stories relate to the British left, Muslims and Palestine. This is more a campaign of disinformation by the JC rather than good faith errors. Boynamedsue (talk) 07:54, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

For reference, evidence of unreliability comprises points like the following:

• Publishing a string of sensational stories described as "wild fabrications" or "wild inventions" in Israeli and British papers
• Failure to vet (or knowing publication of) the falsified résumé of the freelancer writing these stories, who was instantly rumbled by Israeli journalists
• Failure to conduct a proper investigation after the fabrication scandal
• Failure to publish a transparent report on what happened (see e.g. for comment)
• Your claim that upheld IPSO complaints are running at the same level as for The Times is false.
  • For material published since 2020 The Jewish Chronicle has 5 listed under "v thejc.com", 7 listed under "v The Jewish Chronicle".
  • Equivalent numbers for The Times: 5 listed under "v thetimes.co.uk", 8 listed under "v The Times"
  • Equivalent numbers for The Daily Mail (deprecated): 6 listed under "v Daily Mail" (incl. "v Scottish Daily Mail, excl. "v Hull Daily Mail"), 11 listed under "v Mail Online"
  • The Times and The Daily Mail are daily papers, The Jewish Chronicle is a weekly, with far fewer articles per issue. Its collection of upheld IPSO rulings per article is an order of magnitude greater than for The Times and The Daily Mail.
• Number of lost libel cases seems large relative to the size of the publication. We are writing an encyclopedia, not a gossip rag.
• The owner of Al Jazeera is known. The owner of The Jewish Chronicle is not. This is a unique situation, and the paper has taken a turn to the far right under the new, anonymous ownership. There are multiple mainstream media reports saying this lowers confidence in the paper's reliability.
• Multiple mainstream media reports (some listed in the Background section below) have deplored the loss of journalistic standards at the publication. Half a dozen of the paper's top columnists have left in despair.

Andreas JN466 09:23, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

If we're deprecating publications for a single freelancer fabricating stories let's get rid of the New York Times because of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. Additionally, the New York Times also has anonymous owners as it's publicly traded. We only ban reliable sources based on their ownership if the ownership is negatively influencing the publication. Please point me to the cases where a source was banned because its owner was unknown, because asserting this is a unique situation because the paper has taken a turn to the far right means this is because of the views of the Jewish Chronicle.

This is a very high standard for the Jewish Chronicle that we do not hold other reliable sources to. The New York Times has had journalists fabricate content. The result of their investigation was to fire the journalist. This is the same thing the Jewish Chronicle did, so explain why you're not holding the Jewish Chronicle to a different standard when you say they failed to conduct a proper investigation after the fabrication scandal. Or say that the New York Times is unreliable as well.

IPSO complaints are not a way to quantify unreliability. Complaints would only quantify reliability if they all represented the same flaw and were comparable across an entire industry, but IPSO complaints can be made for a variety of reasons and WP:GREL publications like The Guardian opt out of them. Your math shows that the Jewish Chronicle is an order of magnitude worse than the Daily Mail and that The Times is (5+8)/(6+11)=76% as unreliable as the Daily Mail. If you believed the Jewish Chronicle was 10x worse than the Daily Mail you wouldn't have !voted for "Option 2 in general". If the number of IPSO complaints had any statistical validity The Times would be at WP:MREL or below.

RSP is very quickly devolving into a method to enforce groupthink, because declaring a source as unreliable or just WP:MREL means one can effectively prevent its viewpoints from being presented on Misplaced Pages. Additionally, because the standard for reliable sources is de facto "does it agree with other reliable sources?", we end up with a ratchet effect that makes it harder to prove a source is reliable as the number of reliable sources that source agrees with goes down. This eventually leads to a corpus of sources that uniformly agree on what the truth is.

The only way to prevent selective exclusion of sources is to consciously question whether our standards are objective. You can't handwave this burden away when it's been brought up repeatedly by other editors. The reason why I !voted Option 1 isn't because I am disputing most of your claims, it's because you cannot show why similar evidence would prove unreliability for other publications. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 15:39, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Completely agree. Andre🚐 15:50, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

a) Most people are not suggesting deprecation and b) It's not just about rogue freelancers so lose the strawmen. Selfstudier (talk) 16:09, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

!voters aren't suggesting deprecation because the Jewish Chronicle is obviously more reliable than the Daily Mail. But the IPSO argument implies that the JC is 10x worse than the Daily Mail. Both cannot be true at once. I'm refuting the IPSO complaint counters with a reduction to absurdity that demonstrates why the number of IPSO complaints isn't a meaningful metric to evaluate sources on.

Rejecting IPSO means the rogue freelancer story is the only evidence of false information being published by the source. You have provided no other specific cases.

Columnists resigning due to changes in ownership/political slant can only prove bias on the part of the JC. As the editnotice you're supposed to see when editing this page says, bias is not a reason in itself for a source to be unreliable, but may require in-text attribution.

The objective standard we should be following is whether a source can be used for citing false information on Misplaced Pages. We rank and categorize sources to prevent false information from entering the encyclopedia. You can write as much as you want, but if you can't give specific examples of false information, then you haven't shown the source is unreliable. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 19:40, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

All of the upheld IPSO cases found problems with accuracy – typically incendiary, false claims ascribing words to people they had not actually written or said. This sort of thing is apt to cause BLP problems here. I don't understand why you think such inaccuracies are irrelevant for our purposes, or do not qualify as "false information" (and please go a bit more lightly on the bold). Andreas JN466 20:28, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Reliable sources also have substantiated IPSO complaints. Our dispute is over whether counting the number is acceptable, because you haven't bothered analyzing their specifics. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 17:25, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

These IPSO rulings seem quite similar to me in nature (in one case, practically identical).

You are proposing that the number of upheld IPSO rulings against a publication (proven inaccuracies, misrepresentations or libels) should be irrelevant to us. That is hardly sensible.

Your previous post was a textbook example of circular reasoning – you said, "the Jewish Chronicle is obviously more reliable than the Daily Mail. But the IPSO argument implies that the JC is 10x worse than the Daily Mail. Both cannot be true at once. You start with the assumption that the JC is better than the Daily Mail, so if it collects ten times more adverse IPSO rulings per article than the Daily Mail, then that proves IPSO rulings don't matter. Absurd indeed – but not in the way you mean.

The fact that these IPSO rulings generally occurred in a single topic area makes it all the more important to take note of the risk we would take by hosting the JC's truth claims unvetted and unfiltered by other, more reliable publications, here in our BLPs and other articles in that topic area. If the claim is important, another more reliable publication will pick it up, and we can cite that. That is responsible sourcing for an encyclopedia, given the substantial concerns about the JC voiced in the press. Andreas JN466 19:35, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

You start with the assumption that the JC is better than the Daily Mail, so if it collects ten times more adverse IPSO rulings per article than the Daily Mail, then that proves IPSO rulings don't matter. Absurd indeed – but not in the way you mean.

I'm pointing out your absurd double standard where you argue that the Jewish Chronicle is statistically worse than the Daily Mail, but then only !vote for Option 2. It makes it obvious that your !vote doesn't follow from your stated reasoning. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:14, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

The IPSO and fabrication problems are limited to a specific topic area. The "special consideration" in my Option 2 vote is that Option 3/4 should be applied to that topic area where there is strong evidence of poor reliability. I would be happy to cite the JC on lots of other topics – music, the arts, film and theatre reviews, biographies of Jewish scientists, etc. Andreas JN466 08:40, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

@Chess Well, have a look what the NYT did when it discovered one of their reporters was guilty of fabrications:

• 7,350-word front page story, with transparent and exhaustive reporting of what had happened.

What we got from the JC is this nothingburger:

• 106 words of generalities.

To claim that this is in any way equivalent to what happened at the NYT is risible. You don't have to take my word for it, because we have journalists pointing this shortfall out in the mainstream press.

• "Thinnest form of contrition" (Times of Israel)
• "Though Wallis Simons apologised to readers, he offered no explanation for how the deception occurred. Just an assurance that standards will be tightened. This will not do." (Prospect Magazine).

The concerns about ownership etc. are voiced in the British and Israeli mainstream press, across the political spectrum.

Using the Jewish Chronicle for WP:A/I/PIA coverage after this episode is not my idea of due diligence. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." If they sort their operation out, we can always revisit. Regards, Andreas JN466 16:17, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

What would writing a longer statement with a more detailed apology do? Elon Perry lied about his identity and his sources. He was caught within two months. The "transparent and exhaustive reporting" of the New York Times is full of florid prose about Blair's travel habits, counselling, and personal problems as he was a full-time employee of the New York Times.

I don't think the Jewish Chronicle would have any of that information for a freelancer, so most of that article couldn't be written even if the JC wanted to. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:27, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

He was caught instantly by Israeli journalists when he made claims that Netanyahu's family then tried to give extra visibility to. (A similar PR effort was simultaneously underway in Germany, with the Bild Zeitung tabloid publishing a related fake news story: )

Perry was caught by the simple expedient of Israeli journalists asking the IDF whether it really had the materials Perry claimed they had (they replied it was a "wild invention"), and then checking whether Perry really was a professor at Tel Aviv University (he was not). If the JC is unable to perform such simple tasks then it lacks basic qualifications for reliable reporting on such matters.

The editor should have explained to readers how contact with Perry was established, why they did not fact-check his résumé given that he made some tall and easily disproved claims about himself, why they did not try to contact the IDF to corroborate Perry's stories (standard practice in reliable publications is to require two independent sources for news stories), etc. This is all basic bread and butter for mainstream outlets, and the JC is simply and evidently out of its league here if they can't or won't apply such basic due diligence. Andreas JN466 09:01, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2 in General. Option 3 for issues relating to Palestine and the war in Gaza Its bias is very clear and overt. But as other editors have pointed out, this does not necessarily mean it deserves depreciation. However, depreciation and considering a source unreliable on a single topic are two very different things. For the same reason why editors are rightfully sceptical of Pro-Russian sources reporting on the war in Ukraine, it is best to be consistent and also treat with some scepticism the reliability of the Jewish Chronicle when dealing with Gaza and issues related to Palestine. Genabab (talk) 15:10, 28 September 2024 (UTC)
• Option 4 since 2024, Option 3 2015-2024— the problems with editorial standards at the newspaper have been ongoing for years and are only getting worse. (t · c) buidhe 23:08, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

  The idea that JC covers antisemitism in the UK is not a good reason to keep the paper when it has lost any reputation for reliability in that area. We should be looking for scholarly sources to cover these controversies anyway. (t · c) buidhe 23:12, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

  It's not possible on a technical level to deprecate a source for a period of time. It has to be all or nothing because the deprecation edit filter can't determine when an article was published. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:29, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

  WP:DEPREC assessments are independent of the presence and feasibility of an edit filter. Andreas JN466 09:14, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

  In every prior subject-area or time-limited deprecation discussion, the technical issues relating to the edit filter has come up. So yes, the feasibility of a subject-area deprecation needs to be addressed if we're going to adopt it. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 23:37, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  There are deprecated sources that are not subject to an edit filter (the National Enquirer is an example) – you can have one without the other. But consensus seems to lean towards "generally unreliable" anyway, rather than deprecation. Andreas JN466 06:48, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

I think Buidhe makes a very pertinent point. If the JC is frequently libelling people and making false claims around antisemitism, the fact it is the only source reporting on some cases of alleged antisemitism means these claims should generally not be included in our pages. Especially in cases of BLP.Boynamedsue (talk) 17:56, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA (including antisemitism) and Muslims, option 2 for other issues, per comments above and below (including mine).VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 23:59, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

  While it is a legitimate !vote that it be deemed unreliable on antisemitism (I have above argued that this would be a mistake, while Buidhe and Boynamedsue have made the argument for such a ruling), I just want to additionally argue that antisemitism in general should not be covered by AIPIA, only antisemitism directly related to Israel/Palestine, which I believe was the case in all of the relevant IPSO breaches. Personally, I think it is dangerous to not be able to cite the UK's only Jewish newspaper on the topic of antisemitism in the UK, without any evidence that it is unreliable on this topic in general (as opposed to antisemitism directly related to Israel/Palestine). At any rate, I think you'd need to present an evidence/policy-based argument rather than use ARBPIA. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:22, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

  I'm confused. Don't any of the other 4+ Jewish newspapers in the UK cover antisemitism? What's this "only XYZ" business about? And if the others don't cover the same incidents as the JC, perhaps that's indicative of the types of incident that have gotten it into libel and defamation territory. Iskandar323 (talk) 17:37, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

  Jewish News was basically a local paper until ~2020, at which point it became a better source than JC. Hamodia, Jewish Telegraph and Jewish Tribune are all impossible to use for Misplaced Pages as not web accessible, as well as very parochial. For 2015-20, JC is only source that fully covered antisemitism in the UK. BobFromBrockley (talk) 19:41, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  I only had to look as far back as this year to find an IPSO breach without a mention of Israel or Palestine which could be inadvertently interpreted as antisemitism.

  Lunn v The Jewish Chronicle. Just from memory I recall they changed what was said about Marc Wadsworth only after mediation

  I also know that the JC has made similar mistakes as other publications over the IHRA definition, that doesn't excuse the JC Andromedean (talk) 12:37, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  Well if it is indeed a pattern of unreliability in relation to non-Israel/Palestine-related antisemitism, then this needs to be a separate topic area to the Israel/Palestine topic area, and consensus would need to be established for this.

  The Media Reform Centre report (a terrible piece of research imho) doesn't say anything indicating that JC is unreliable; its only mention is that it reported on Corbyn's Facebook posts long before other media outlets did. If we designate the media outlets that the MRC report indicts unreliable, we'd need to stop using BBC, ITN, Sky, Guardian, Telegraph and Independent, which personally I'd oppose. BobFromBrockley (talk) 19:56, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, Option 2 in general afterwards, Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area since 2020 per ActivelyDisinterested. As usual in UK media, Private Eye seems to be one of the few places taking any notice of this issue. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:41, 1 October 2024 (UTC)
• Option 3 for topics related to Israel, Palestine, Muslims, British left, accusations of antisemitism and BLP claims irrespective of timeframe, option 4 in general since at least 2020. As for its reliability concerning other subjects in earlier periods, I don't know the publication well enough to make a clear vote. I think the publication's unreliability during the last few years has been established pretty well by other editors, so I see no reason to elaborate on that. However, I would consider it generally unreliable on these issues irrespective of timeframe; besides the fact that the JC has been openly Zionist since the early 20th century (hence qualifying as a biased source although not necessarily unreliable), the article about it mentions a lot of instances of the JC accusing people with views critical of Israel of antisemitism at least 56 years back, when they were sued for accusing an MP of antisemitic views with no evidence and had to issue an apology, and it also mentions numerous occassions - some of which predate the 2015 threshold - where the JC has posted serious false accusations against people and institutions with an opposing view to the JC's. Among other things, in 2009 the JC falsely accused a peace activist of harbouring suicide bombers, and in 2014 it falsely claimed that the Royal Institute of British Architects had voted for a "ban on Jews" from the International Union of Architects, while what in fact was voted on was a suspension on an Israeli architect association involved in the building of illegal Israeli settlements. Posting such false allegations against people and institutions with opposing views clearly cross the line between biased reporting and pure misinformation/fabrication, and as the above examples show, the paper has engaged in this behaviour long prior to 2015. I find it obvious that a publication engaging in deliberately posting misinformation to promote its views and smear opponents should be labeled as generally unreliable, and as the paper has engaged in this behaviour prior to the 2015/2020 threshold, I don't think it is appropriate to limit this judgement to this limited timeframe. As for other topics, I don't think I have enough background information of its reporting throughout its history to make a statement about its reliability on other topics in earlier years, but I do think that its opaque ownership, along with its history of posting fabricated stories and misinformation, raises serious questions about its reliability on other issues as well. --Te og kaker (talk) 17:47, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

  There was a case 56 years back, when JC published an opinion piece by one Labour MP calling another antisemitic; this is not disinformation, but opinion. Then there was a 41 year gap and they published a letter in which what the Guardian called a "peace activist" (and the Press Gazette specificies was an International Solidarity Movement activist) was falsely accused of harbouring two British men who he had simply met, who then carried out a suicide bomb in Israel, in a case that doesn't mention antisemitism. That's not a pattern. There's an plausible argument that the 2015+ pattern starts earlier, with the 2009 case (although this case doesn't relate to antisemitism), but considering how much coverage of antisemitism there was in these decades it would be perverse to stop using it on that topic because of the 1968 opinion piece. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:59, 3 October 2024 (UTC) (A reminder that neither an opinion piece nor a letter to the editor would be considered usable as a source for facts, especially biographical facts, anyway, so these two examples are really irrelevant. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:02, 3 October 2024 (UTC))

  However, the MP Christopher Mayhew sued the JC and received a public apology in the High Court. His argument was that, whilst his comments were anti-Zionist, they were not antisemitic. Andromedean (talk) 08:28, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  OK, but the 41 year gap between that and the next instance doesn't suggest a pattern does it? And would the article by Edelman ever be used on WP as a source for anything apart from this controversy itself? BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:04, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  Similarly the 2014 RIBA case is not a case of inaccuracy; it's a case of articulating a strong opinion. Once again, bias =/= unreliability, and we would not use an editorial as a source for facts anyway. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:45, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree that the architect story is clearly comment, but it is a leader, the official view of the paper, and the nature and way this opinion is presented is pretty indicative of the way the JC's very extreme positions work. The article doesn't mention the fact that the ban was motivated by the participation of members of the Israeli architects' association in the construction of illegal settlements in occupied territory, a warcrime according to the Geneva convention. It also conflates Jews and Israelis, which according to most definitions of antisemitism... is antisemitism. This lack of context and misleading framing is also typical of its news coverage.--Boynamedsue (talk) 09:25, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree an egregiously biased leader reflects more badly on a source than an egregiously biased op ed, and this is indeed evidence of a drift towards hard right positions under Pollard. But these opinions about what constitutes antisemitism are common opinions that we'd see in plenty of reliable sources (e.g. the Wall Street Journal or Telegraph) and not evidence of unreliability. Also important to note that the leader was one para in an edition that included other articles on the topic, a topic it had extensively covered, including the illegal settlement issue that provoked the boycott. E.g: I'd argue that we'd never use this leader as a source for facts, but it'd be fine to use a news article on this issue (like this one) as a source for facts in a WP article, while of course better to use alongside other sources. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:41, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

That particular article is much better than some it's published, and could have appeared in any reliable source. The problem is the sheer quantity of unreliable content it has put out means we have a hard job to separate the decent articles (which I assume that one was, doesn't seem to have any obvious howlers) and the dodgy ones.--Boynamedsue (talk) 21:48, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

If we look at its extensive coverage of this RIBA boycott (more extensive than any other source) I think we can clearly see that all the news articles are very solid, while the editorials and op eds are extreme. The editorials might become due when other, secondary sources (in this case architecture media) refer to them, but otherwise we’d ignore them and stick with the news articles. This is a good illustration of why designating its news articles unreliable because its editorials are extreme would be a bad idea. BobFromBrockley (talk) 07:55, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2, on I/P since 2019/2020, with protest of 2015 date -- please pay attention to sources! The only RS that have been posted for JC's change in reliability have been in the 2019--2021 area (for the IPSO case alerts and owner change) and 2024 reporting scandal. This has been discussed extensively in the thread immediately preceding the RfC. The first !voter here posted a 2015 date but offered no reasoning, and everyone to follow seems to have parroted that date. As I detailed below, giving opportunity to comment for weeks: the 2015 date, when it was brought up exactly once prior, is an artifact of the fact that IPSO started reporting in 2015 (it was founded 2014/11); the only other controversy that year was an editorial about Jeremy Corbyn. I am pleading that the closer reads this and gives the cutoff date consideration, and includes the previous thread. SamuelRiv (talk) 23:29, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

If you are going by IPSO rulings and the comments of the RS Cathcart, we should date back to 2018 not 2019. The best cut off is 2008, the editorship of Pollard, who was forced out after bankrupting the paper with libel settlements. But he was already committing libel in 2012, falsely accusing an Islamic charity of involvement in terrorism. They accused an entirely innocent man of being involved in a terrorist bombing in 2008 (just two months after Pollard took over) again paying damages. It is worth noting that corrections were only published here as part of legal settlements for damages, the JC resisted correcting their lies to the very last. The lower quantity evidence of unreliability prior to 2015 is precisely for the reason you state, IPSO, toothless and incompetent as it is, didn't yet exist to document the JC's abuse and provide recourse to its victims.Boynamedsue (talk) 08:30, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Why 2018? What specifically happened in 2018?

I can tell you specifically what (many) IPSO violations and internal communications regarding JC happened in 2019 and 2020, and further events in 2021.

(Not to get into the, but "being involved in a terrorist bombing" is a complete misreading of the very short article you link. Also just a reminder to everyone that importantly the UK has looser standards of libel than the US.) SamuelRiv (talk) 04:07, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, if a paper stares someone has "harboured" or "sheltered" terrorist bombers, I consider that to be an accusation of involvement. It is certainly libellous and false, as shown by the fact the JC were forced to pay 30k for damage to reputation.

I choose 2018 because that is the date that Professor Brian Cathcart refers to as the beginning of their insane run of IPSO judgments. 2018 was when they falsely reported comments by Mike Sivier implying he had denied the holocaust, and falsely claimed that Mark Wadsworth had "abused" Ruth Smeeth (you can find the video online, there is no way to characterise it as abuse).

And as for libel law, yes the UK's libel law is tougher than almost any country, but it meshes very well with our BLP policy. If you can't prove it and it damages reputation, don't publish it.Boynamedsue (talk) 06:51, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

The Sivier case is a really week case for establishing unreliability. The single inaccuracy IPSO found in that case was as follows. Sivier had said “I’m not going to comment on ‘thousands’ instead of ‘millions’ because I don’t know, but the Nazi holocaust involved many other groups as well as Jews, and it seems likely that the SWP was simply being ‘politically correct’ ”. JC summarised this as: “remarks he made about Jews and Zionism, including a claim that he could not comment on whether thousands or millions of Jews died in the Holocaust he said ‘I don’t know’”. After he contacted them saying he didn’t deny the Holocaust, they amended the article to include his response. This is not grounds for a designation of unreliability. BobFromBrockley (talk) 08:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

The IPSO findings on that case say: The article gave the impression that the complainant had said something which he had not, on a subject liable to cause widespread offence; a clarification was required to avoid a breach of Clause 1(ii). The publication had offered to issue a clarification stating the complainant’s position that he had been referring to why the leaflet made this claim when he said “I don’t know”, and stating his position on the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This clarification made the complainant’s position clear, and was sufficient to meet the terms of Clause 1(ii).

The way you've summarised it is apt to leave the same false impression as the JC did, and was slammed for. Press Gazette summary. Andreas JN466 08:56, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

The former IPSO case was a breach, the latter was not (it was resolved in mediation). Note that JC had one breach in 2017 and one in 2018; in looking up again the 2019 memo, I did find a reference on investigation starting as early as 2018 (citation to letter by Lord Faulks, Twitter post, 3rd image. As I've said previously I was fine with saying anything in the 2019--2021 area as an approximate cut-off year guidance (precision on that is deceptive), so given this 2018--2021 is appropriate too. All I care about is that these dates remain justifiable to sources, and that when people !vote they know what they are voting on. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:17, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

To be fair, the 2017 breach is not particularly concerning. It is outside the topic area where the JC's run of bad stories occurs. Distressing and unfair as it was to the individual concerned, it seems to be a kind of "cost of doing business" error that all papers, even the most reliable, suffer from.--Boynamedsue (talk) 20:08, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 1 pre-2015, Option 2 in general afterwards, Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area since 2020 A newspapers that refuses to even disclose who owns it (and hence can exert control over coverage) must be treated with caution, and probably not used for sensitive areas. The same applies to media funded by dictatorial regimes, for example Al Jazeera. Jeppiz (talk) 09:43, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

• Option 3 for WP:A/I/PIA area since 2020 (or 2019 as mentioned by SamuelRiv), Option 2 in general for the same time period - given the pattern of IPSO rulings, reliable secondary source coverage of its problems, and evidence of unreliability given by Andreas JN466 (Jayen466). starship.paint (RUN) 15:15, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Background (Jewish Chronicle)

• Mainstream media reports:
  • Alan Rusbridger: Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? Why it's troubling that we don’t know…, Prospect Magazine, 26 April 2024
  • 'Great disgrace': High-profile British-Jewish journalists resign JC over scandal, The Jerusalem Post, 16 September 2024
  • The ‘fabrications’ and resignations that plunged The Jewish Chronicle into crisis, The Telegraph, 16 September 2024
  • Opinion | Jewish Chronicle Scandal: When 'pro-Israel' Means Becoming a Megaphone for the Netanyahu Government, Haaretz, 18 September 2024
  • How the Elon Perry fabrication scandal shook the Jewish Chronicle, The Guardian, 20 September 2024
• History of IPSO rulings against The Jewish Chronicle:
  • The Jewish Chronicle
  • thejc.com --Andreas JN466 11:00, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Discussion (Jewish Chronicle)

• This articlel, from The Guardian, should be relevant. At lot of it seems to be from Elon Perry, whose articles they've recently retracted en masse. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:02, 22 September 2024 (UTC)
• Comment I am concerned with, as are several of the reports on this, about their vague, inadequate response. The statement they made is more like a cover-up: 'we won't tell you the details, we've 'memory holed' this so it will go away, just trust us.' As I suggested in the prior discussion, we should expect when something like this happens that the outlet 'reports the hell out of it'. We should know from them who and why touched off the investigation, who was involved, what was false, what can't be confirmed, where it leads, what charges that preceded the investigation and arose during it could be validated, denied, or for which there is no evidence, what was their investigation, what didn't they investigate, why, what processes went wrong in their organization, what the fixes are, etc. etc. etc. We should also expect disciplining of the editors involved. - Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:06, 22 September 2024

  For reference, this was the statement summarising the investigation, published one day after the announcement that an investigation was underway. --Andreas JN466 11:25, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I should have linked those in my comment for others' sake. That's what my comment refers to as inadequate, to say the least. Instead, they are 'sitting on the story', not reporting perhaps among the most important news, in the outlet's history. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:39, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment These additional qualfications add nothing, since they already apply to every other news publication.

For all green-lighted news media, they are considered generally reliable for news and additional considerations apply for all other information they publish. See News organizations: "News reporting from well-established news outlets is generally considered to be reliable for statements of fact (though even the most reputable reporting sometimes contains errors). ditorial commentary, analysis and opinion pieces, whether written by the editors of the publication (editorials) or outside authors (invited op-eds and letters to the editor from notable figures) are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact."

Also, per Exceptional claims require exceptional sourcing, "Any exceptional claim requires multiple high-quality sources."

No one has pointed out how this source has caused damage or even that there has been any discussion in articles about specific claims linked to it.

TFD (talk) 18:52, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

I have no doubt we should do a better job of making the policies cabining news clear everywhere (including on the perennial sources page) -- indeed, one of the reasons I think that page may be unclear (despite the extensive introductory hand-wringing), is it likely suggests in its format, news and other types of sources are the same (we should probably breakout news outlets from others, although I don't want us to then suggest all other sources are the same--perhaps sectioning would be better). But "editing notes" is what we should collectively give, and it only makes sense on Misplaced Pages that there would be collective editing notes, especially concerning its most plainly used but also difficult to use source, news. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:03, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• Objection: There is no cutoff year offered in the RfC, despite many or most in the prior discussion saying that there was a distinct and recent change in JC's reliability, with several sourced dates offered. So voters have added cutoff dates themselves -- but where on earth did the 2015 cutoff year come from? It's not been mentioned at all in the previous thread in the context of when problematic behavior actually occurred. All I could find is User:Bobfrombrockley's 17 Sept comment comparing the total number of complaints since 2015 for the JC and The Times. They do not say why 2015 is the cutoff -- presumably it is because IPSO began in September 2014, so that's the first year of their reporting. That is not the first year in which problematic behavior was reported by the JC -- as far as I can tell the first year in which secondary sources report problematic behavior, or report that JC internally was concerned about such behavior, was 2019. This is not the same as picking a year arbitrarily and counting the IPSO violations thenceforth -- we are taking a RS article that cites either internal communications about violations, or a particular violation as a bellweather event, for their own judgement that JC has dropped standards after that particular point. No such source has said 2015. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:47, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  I think Option 2 is supposed to cover it case by case after 2015 onwards, especially for non I/P stuff, and Option 3 for PIA after 2020 should be a clear enough point where facts from TJC should not be sourced for I/P issues. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 01:17, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  As per the discussion above, the 2015 date stems from a time where TJC started to receive a number of IPSO complaints. We are not writing an article here; RS are not specifically needed to make an argument that a source is unreliable for one reason or another. Cortador (talk) 08:13, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Please see my direct response to your !vote above (but reply here): what is your source -- because it was never said in this thread -- that there were "a number of IPSO complaints" in 2015? What is your source that the number of IPSO complaints in 2015 was significant compared to others? (Compare to the years we have sources for that IPSO complaints were significant, the years that alerts internal and external were raised.) SamuelRiv (talk) 12:32, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

  I have not voted in this poll yet. Cortador (talk) 10:35, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

  I think 2015 makes sense as a transition from green to yellow status as this is when the run of IPSO complaints began which all relate to the controversy over Antisemitism in the British Labour Party which began that year. This is when Brian Cathcart seems to start with his denunciation (although his main target is IPSO), so if you see the IPSO complaints alone as grounds for option 3 then it makes sense to start then. But there's also a strong case that 2015-20 was marked, not marked by general unreliability, but issues that call for additional considerations, e.g. extreme caution on the topics of the British left and Muslims or perhaps Israel/Palestine (although nobody has really given an argument for that specifically). Apart from Cathcart, all other RSs take 2020/2021 as a starting point: the mystery owners, compounded by the appointment of an amateur and highly ideological editor a year later. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:40, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  As far as I can tell the only direct relationship JC bears to the antisemitism controversy is their front page editorial against Corbyn. While that's significant, it's an editorial. Does that speak to reliability, in 2015? (Much less unreliability in news coverage of the left, Muslims, or I/P in 2015, the year of the editorial?) SamuelRiv (talk) 12:36, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment I think we have a problem here already, because people who are !voting option 2 are often not saying what they mean by it. I would invite them to clarify, or we are giving the closer a bit of a hospital pass. Option 2 covers a lot of ground, my own !vote is effectively option 2 prior to 2020, but the important part is exactly what considerations users think should apply.Boynamedsue (talk) 06:24, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  This is a very good point. Quite a few editors have !voted for option 2 for the whole period from 1841 to 2015 without indicating what extra considerations should apply, which isn't a usable conclusion. (For me, the additional considerations that should apply after 2015 is attribution and caution on the British left and Muslims, especially for BLP stuff.) BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:43, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  The previous RFC close mentioned pre 2010 and I chose not to date my comments on the grounds that stuff that old can in all likelihood be sourced better elsewhere and if not, one would have to ask why not. Selfstudier (talk) 17:30, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment It concerns me deeply that despite the mountain of evidence against the Jewish Chronicle (JC) editors are still attempting to find periods and categories it might be considered reliable so as to grant exemptions. This privilege wasn't granted to the deprecated Daily Mail which has a long history and covers a wider subject range. If exemptions are granted, we need to ensure exclusion of a broader range such as politics and all other religions, not just Israel, Muslims and Labour. With regard to timing the JCs more extreme lurch to the right can probably traced to Stephen Pollard. Only two years before being appointed editor in 2008, he used far-right rhetoric like “preserve Western civilisation” from the threat of “Islamists.” and “the Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy” in his blog. Fast forward to today and the JC are promoting Donald Trump. This is an endemic problem not a temporary one. Andromedean (talk) 09:58, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Surely the issues with Pollard relate to bias not unreliability? We consider the Telegraph or Wall Street Journal reliable sources, despite plenty of that rhetoric. And despite what he wrote in his blog in 2006, he still published lots of left-wing opinion in the JC. More importantly, it's not a "privilege" if a long-running newspaper that has not been accused of serious improprieties in its close to two centuries is assumed to be generally reliable; it's our default for all legacy media (e.g. regional print newspapers)unless evidence is brought against it. With the Daily Mail, the downgrading decision was based on a massive body of evidence of uncorrected fabrication and plagiarism that went back a long time. It's not comparable. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:59, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, but I notice that on the Reliable sources/Perennial sources noticeboard a comment is often made regarding bias, notability, sensationalism, propaganda as well as reliability. Isn't this the area to discuss this? Andromedean (talk) 15:45, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  I would say no. Pollard heralded in the period of reduced reliability and presided over the initial accumulation of IPSO complaints. It is obviously harder to tell how the publication performed prior to this (the 2014 formation of IPSO), but there is no particular reason to consider that it was likely any better. The paper was first successfully sued for damages under Pollard in 2010, and Pollard is synonymous with other woes for the paper. Everything from 2009 onwards deserves a sharper lense. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:58, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Your citation for "The paper was first successfully sued for damages under Pollard in 2010" actually refers to a blogpost he wrote for a different publication, The Spectator, in 2008, prior to his arrival at JC. I guess the point might still stand that this reflects poorly on him as a choice of editor (The Spectator is yellow on RSP) but not in the way being sued for damages would be. BobFromBrockley (talk) 13:11, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

  Part of that is news especially, "old news", is assumed to have ever-limited shelf life for much of what Misplaced Pages does and wants to do. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:08, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  The first draft of history, as they say. The problem is that for many Misplaced Pages topics that is all there ever is; and even for topics that scholars subsequently do write about, the scholarly sources often don't make it into Misplaced Pages as the article is full already. Andreas JN466 14:00, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  The theory is that merging or updating or replacement should occur to render the long view (not sticking to a first draft). So that, the 'British left in the 1980s' is essentially a differently useful topic than the 'British left today'. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:12, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Whilst I take on the earlier advice that this RfC isn't a simple vote count, it would be highly challenging to assess it fairly due to the multitude of categories editors have inserted. To carry out the analysis fairly and avoid double or partial counting would require a model and qualification in set analysis! Do we need technical or independent assistance or agree to stick with simpler categories? Other RfCs must go through the same difficulties. My view is that there's no need for dates, although I could be convinced to give it a pass prior to Pollard, if only for my sanity!Andromedean (talk) 18:25, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  Well, the closer generally looks to see if there is a rough consensus among the vagaries of participants differing expressions of thought, not any mathematical certainty. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:38, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• I've placed notifications at the Journalism, Newspapers, Politics of the United Kingdom, and Israel Palestine Collaboration projects to seek further input. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:28, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  I'll notify the WikiProject Judaism and Jewish history as well. Andre🚐 19:31, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

  No objection to additional notifications, the four I chose seemed to be the most generic matches to the issues involved. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:36, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Continuing the discussion with User:Andrevan from above: As User:Alanscottwalker already mentioned to you, WP:SOURCE explicitly points out that one of the four aspects of a source that can affect reliability is the publisher and its reputation. An anonymous owner creates the impression of having something to hide. This has impacted the reputation of the Jewish Chronicle, as evidenced by the media reports linked above. --Andreas JN466 22:08, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Anonymous can have no reputation. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:15, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

If such standard were applied to all sources, we'd have to mark as unreliable any source for whom we don't know all the board members. The sources you provided do list a number of people. A silent partner in any venture is not unusual or a sign of unreliability. The Companies House listing for Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd also suggests no change in its status from a private limited company. Instead, the only change that appeared to have been made was to remove Gibb as a person with significant control, replaced by Jonathan Kandel, a former tax lawyer whose LinkedIn page says he now works as a senior consultant for the Starwood Capital Group, an international private investment firm.....The Jewish Chronicle’s ownership structure, in which several key figures remain anonymous.... Since 2020, the only shareholder and director was Robbie Gibb, a former Downing Street comms director. But he was not bankrolling the loss-making paper, which according to its latest accounts required a loan of £3.5 million. In March, the paper announced it would be becoming a charitable trust. Gibb recently resigned as director, replaced by the Labour peer Lord Austin, Jonathan Kandel, a prominent lawyer, and Joseph Dweck, a senior rabbi. The shareholding was split up, too. But the people ultimately responsible for The JC’s debts remain unknown. Andre🚐 22:20, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

We should be concerned when sources say it is a concern. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:35, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

This is, again, a misread of what it means by "publisher," it means the outlet, not the ownership of the outlet; ownership isn't mentioned. If you find an article that was published in the Jewish Chronicle, that was published by the Jewish Chronicle, and it will be reputable or not based on what we decide here, but nowhere is that extended to mean the reliability of the shareholders of the company. Andre🚐 22:15, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

No you don't understand publisher. The publication is the Jewish Chronicle, either it has a separate publisher or it does not. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:21, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

As I just said, it is called "Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd." The fact that we don't know all the shareholders is not relevant. I think we're going around in circles so let's agree to disagree. Andre🚐 22:23, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The ownership does matter. It has to matter to the publisher. But more specifically, it matters to the sources that have taken issue with it. As Jayen already pointed out, this problem was not identified by Wikipedians, it was identified by sources. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:29, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The sources also say, Not all of the contributors have resigned. “For me, this incident is not reason enough to give up on a paper that’s been a powerful and essential voice for our Jewish community for 180 years,” says Naomi Greenaway, deputy editor of the Telegraph Magazine and Jewish Chronicle columnist. “But I have a lot of respect for the journalists who have resigned, and I’m glad it’s triggered The Jewish Chronicle to interrogate their editing processes. The shame is that for a paper that does give a platform to those on all sides of the political spectrum, these resignations will ironically mean it loses that balance on the Left. “From my experience, they are a tiny team, juggling a huge amount on a shoestring budget and generally the calibre of content punches way above what would be expected from their resources. But they’ve dropped the ball and they know they have massive lessons to learn from it.”....“The @JewishChron has cut all ties with the freelancer in question and his work has now been removed from our website. Readers can be assured that stronger internal procedures are being implemented. Andre🚐 22:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't know what you are responding to. That does not address publisher. It also continues a vagueness, apparently she, an editor, has no idea what went on and what the fixes are or what lessons are learned. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:41, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The question at hand is whether the publisher, Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd, and its associated publication, have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. That quote substantiates that in fact, its reputation may still be intact, though that is for editors here to determine. As to whether the company contains, among the named individuals, some anonymous individuals AFAIK is not something discussed anywhere in wiki-policy. Andre🚐 22:43, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

No. It does not. She is not a reliable source for her own employer in such a matter. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:47, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

It had a reputation for fact-checking, up until circa 2009, when Pollard took over, it was bankrupted by libel cases, and then taken over. The JC of today is no longer the JC of yester-century, but the shell of a long-cherished brand, and the point of this RFC is to make that very distinction in terms of source quality. Iskandar323 (talk) 04:02, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Has any RS reported it was bankrupted by its four libel cases or was this speculation? Lot of newspapers suffered financially in the same period, as lots of the RS commentary on this case notes. BobFromBrockley (talk) 13:20, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

An interesting quote from John Ware, part of the consortium that acquired The Jewish Chronicle in 2020, appeared this weekend in The Times. Ware told The Times:

• "I, and some others, repeatedly asked to be told who the new funders were. We were told that wouldn’t be possible. I was assured that they were politically mainstream and I trusted those assurances because I trusted who gave them. I didn’t want the paper to fold so I allowed my name to be used, having been told it would help. I had zero managerial, financial or editorial influence, control or input, nor ever have had. It was just a name."

Ware stopped writing for The Jewish Chronicle in February 2024, due to concerns over the publication's new editorial line under Wallis Simons, and defected to the Jewish News. --Andreas JN466 13:10, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

That's indeed a damning quote, but note his resignation is not due to reliability issues just editorial political position: “To be frank, I became unhappy with the JC’s political drift. Whilst it was doing new and important stuff on extremism, I felt too often it glossed over the fragmentation of Israeli society, which is accelerating and which really matters to the Jewish community here and should matter everywhere. It’s a very big and developing story.” BobFromBrockley (talk) 13:26, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

The anonymous consortium member quoted here a few months ago – who said some remarkably similar things to what Ware has now been saying on the record to The Times – also declared the JC's editor was "behaving like a political activist, not a journalist", especially in social media, and that coverage of Israel had become a case of "my country, right or wrong".

This may or may not have been a different member of the consortium – after all, the sources are saying several of its members eventually became uneasy about their involvement – but it is clear that even within the consortium that was ostensibly owning and running the JC, concerns arose whether the JC was about propaganda or journalism.

John Woodcock, Baron Walney, another consortium member, also confirmed to The Times that he has had no involvement whatsoever in any oversight structures for the JC. Andreas JN466 16:37, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Lee Harpin, a former senior reporter at the JC, left the paper in 2021 and a few days ago published a scathing piece about "Leaving the Jewish Chronicle" on his Substack. Alan Rusbridger quotes Harpin as saying that after the new owners took over, he was told they wanted more views "well to the right of the Tory party". --Andreas JN466 10:13, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

• Comment:A few days ago we seemed to be converging on a general consensus (unreliable on certain subjects after a certain date). However, since then the following editors User:xDanielx, User:The Kip, User:Alaexis, User:Fortunatesons have given the JC a clean bill of health. Their arguments are based on one or more of the following opinions: the JC has a long standing service to a minority (what possible relevance is that to post 2010/15 reliability?), unknown ownership and funding isn't as bad as state funding (yet like the BBC, Al-Jazeera claims to be independent and is only partially funded by it's government), the IPSO rulings don't look that bad did you read the bizarre examples of failed ones? , by focussing on the latest scandal, and ignoring the following lawsuits and rulings.
• falsely accusing a peace activist for harbouring suicide bombers
• disclosing details a family members without good reason
• reporting false links to terrorist activity
• making untrue allegations about their own regulator, the IPSO. Note in another case the IPSO considered the JCs conduct during their investigation “unacceptable”.
• falsely accusing a councillor of a) antisemitic comments, b) launching a vicious protest & c) interfering with a vote
• falsely accusing someone of a conspiracy to intimidate, threaten or harass Jewish activists in a meeting, when he wasn't even present.
• falsely accusing a country of repeatedly vowing to wipe Jews off the face of the earth
• falsely accusing a Rabbi of holocaust denial when they clearly knew in advance this wasn't true.

I would be interested to hear a response, particularly if they think these legal cases aren't that bad? Andromedean (talk) 11:47, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

I haven't looked into all of these claims, some seem like fair concerns, but a few points -

• Some it just seems like matters of opinion, like Suarez who takes issue with being called a "Israel hate author" (other sources have made similar claims), or claims about antisemitic comments. At best they show JC is WP:BIASED.
• Publishing info about family members doesn't relate to reliability.
• reporting false links to terrorist activity doesn't seem accurate, they stated that Interpal was listed by the US as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, which is factually accurate (albeit unbalanced without mentioning Interpal's denial).

We have to keep in mind that JC voluntarily submits to IPSO regulation, which provides a highly accessible venue for complaints, giving them leverage to extract apologies or small payouts. Other outlets like The Guardian opt out of IPSO regulation, so claims about libel have to go to real court, which is much less accessible and which involves a much stricter legal standard of libel.

JC also receives more scrutiny than most sources due to its controversial positions. If AP or Reuters made a mistake like writing banned rather than rejected, in an otherwise uncontroversial report, we'd never hear about it because noone would care. I'm not convinced that JC makes more factual errors than most news outlets. — xDanielx /_C\ 17:16, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

However, since then the following editors...The Kip...have given the JC a clean bill of health.

I voted virtually the exact same way as ActivelyDisinterested, Bobfrombrockley, Bluethricecreamman, LokiTheLiar, and Springee (and not far off from Selfstudier and Jayen466), which was that it was reliable up to a certain point (hence why full-scale deprecation would be a problem) and not so reliable afterwards, especially for ARBPIA. That is very clearly not option 1 akin to the others listed. What in the world do you mean by I've "given it a clean bill of health??" The Kip 03:39, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

@Andromedean, forgot to ping in initial response. The Kip 03:40, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough, not option 1 across the board for you, but that brings me back to how difficult it will be for an assessor to make a judgement with all the exceptions to this and that. I also believe that Option 2 could be used with almost any publication on non-political issues. However, it's mainly geopolitics and national politics which dominates references to the JC, and is the motivation behind many of the other controversies. Typically editors are advised to find other sources where they exist in such cases. Andromedean (talk) 08:20, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

@Andromedean, I primarily responded to the latest Eylon Perry debacle and the IPSO rulings since these were the main arguments in the Background section. I'll review the links you've shared and respond here (and possibly amend my !vote). Alaexis_¿question? 07:27, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

@Andromedean, I've looked at the lawsuits and rulings section of the wikipedia article. First of all, as you probably know England has rather peculiar laws on defamation which put the burden of proof on the defendant and (imho) have been abused by a lot of unsavoury characters. Whatever you think about the merits of this law, this means that the same article would not necessarily be considered libelous if it were published elsewhere where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff.

Second, most of the section and most of your examples have to do with IPSO rulings which is again, the system working as it should resulting in the newspaper removing content (amongst other remedies). I agree that they published a number of articles that turned out to be incorrect but since they took appropriate measures following the decision of the regulator, I don't think we need to downgrade them. This definitely confirms their bias, but that's hardly news for anyone here.

Regarding some of the specific examples you've mentioned.

• Publishing details of the family members of the defendant without valid justification has no bearing on the reliability.
• falsely accusing a country of repeatedly vowing to wipe Jews off the face of the earth - it was in an opinion column which we would not use for statements of fact per WP:RSEDITORIAL
• reporting false links to terrorist activity - if you're referring to Interpal then it's not obviously false. In spite of the court ruling in the UK this organisation seems to be still designated as a terrorist organisation by the US, Australia and Canada.

Alaexis_¿question? 09:47, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

• This finding by Independent Press Standards Organisation is concerning: "Therefore, at the time of publication, the allegations against the complainant remained unproven. By reporting these allegations as fact, rather than identifying them as unproven claims made by multiple sources, the articles failed to distinguish between comment, conjecture, and fact". There are about 12 other complaints of inaccuracy in which IPSO ruled against JC.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 23:24, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Fabrications and Resignations: A Crisis at Britain’s Jewish Chronicle The NYT has joined in the reporting round. Selfstudier (talk) 08:34, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. From the NYT article: "To Israeli national security journalists, the reports bore the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign by sources in the Israeli government. Such stories, one said, are often placed in friendly publications outside Israel because their reporters and editors are less likely to subject them to intense vetting." (My emphases.)

The NYT report also mentions that the fabrications stayed up even after the Israeli Defense Forces had debunked them. They were only retracted after columnists quit. Andreas JN466 09:04, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

• If we're going to keep pigeonholing publications into a single category, then I think we need to make space for "Biased but doesn't have a history of making things up, so still reliable within the limits of WP:RSBIASED" and possibly "Unfortunate incident". For example, Jayson Blair fabricated a lot of articles at The New York Times, and yet it's still RSP "green". One might wonder why a mass retraction at a general-audience newspaper resulted in no change, but a seemingly similar mass retraction at a Jewish newspaper is treated differently. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:46, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

  Seconded Andre🚐 22:48, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

  The difference lies in the sensational nature of the fabrications and their political context, the fact that a very obviously doctored résumé was accepted, the paper's opaque ownership, the wholly inadequate, non-transparent response of the editor to the affair, the walkouts of major, longstanding contributors, and the unanimous verdict of the mainstream press that journalistic standards at the Jewish Chronicle have severely declined. Andreas JN466 23:35, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

  I would say that all sources are biased, although some more intensely so. Israel/Palestine sources are particularly susceptible to bias, it seems, meaning there is really no perfect source on the conflict. There has been a problem with discussions on this noticeboard of editors !voting for unreliability for sources perceived as pro-Israel (Jerusalem Post, JC) and as anti-Israel (al-Jazeera) simply because of bias ("they're Zionists" or "they're pro-Hamas"). We really need to keep bias out of the conversation. (The best sources might be those perceived as biased against them by both sides...) BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:32, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

  It is your claim that appears false. They are not the same. (Nor does it make sense to believe each reputation of each publication would be exactly the same, no matter what.) Here, the JC has seemingly failed in multiple ways, and it is both the scandal which brought some of it to light, and it is their failures and continuing failures in how they have handled it which makes them doubted across RS (see also, lie by omission). They have failed to even do the job of deeply reporting the matter, and not disciplining editors. For example, among other things this scandal has highlighted that the new post-almost-closure editor is a novelist (see generally, fiction), and it gets worse from there for the JC's seeming reputation. Also, can anyone even begin to draw a comparison, which does not even consider something like ability/resource to do a job.-- Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:38, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm unsure if this case has been mentioned. In 2014 the JC claimed that a PSC Director, had said that demonstrations against the Gaza conflict “had been used by people to ‘peddle hatred and intolerance’ towards Jews”. The Chronicle published the following correction: “Ms Colborne had not said that. In fact, what she had said was: “The Palestine Solidarity Campaign opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and racism directed against Palestinians whether living in the West Bank and Jerusalem, or as citizens of Israel.”” Therefore, there are five publicised pre-2015 cases against the JC, in 1968, 2009, 2012 and two in 2014. Andromedean (talk) 13:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Is this Retracted LA Magazine Article a reliable source?

Looking for comments on the reliability of this source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200526081806/https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/shen-yun-trump/ It is an article from LA Magazine written by Samuel Braslow titled: "Inside the Shadowy World of Shen Yun and Its Secret Pro-Trump Ties". It was retracted by the magazine due to a defamation lawsuit as, according to this article on the case, it contained false claims.

It looks like there have been several discussions about whether to keep this source and the quotations attributed to it in several pages.

See the discussions here which have been going on for about a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Shen_Yun#Retracted_LA_Mag_article and apparently the "centralized discussion" from a year ago here which didn't seem to end in consensus from what I could read: https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Li_Hongzhi#Braslow_piece_in_Los_Angeles_Magazine

In all cases though it seems to me the majority of editors involved in these discussions believe it should be removed, there seems to be no clear consensus from what I can tell, as there are other editors arguing that the source and the quotes should be kept.

My concern is that, from what I understand both of those pages are about living persons, and the quotations are contentious (based on the edit history of both pages and the discussions) and the source seems (at least to me and some other editors) to be a poor source given the reasons above.

Personally, I don't think retracted articles that have been subjects of lawsuits for containing false information constitute reliable sources, and I'm confused as to why some other editors insist on keeping it up. But I am a new editor, and perhaps there is some rule I'm not aware of. So I'd like to know what everyone else thinks, and if I'm wrong maybe I can learn something new about how wikipedia works. I don't want to misrepresent the other side of the argument, but from my understanding, the argument is that wikipedia is not censored or that legal threats shouldn't be rewarded so the article should stay.

For some context, below is the content included in the articles that uses the braslow article as a source:

The Shen Yun article says:

Los Angeles–based investigative reporter Samuel Braslow described Shen Yun's background in March 2020: "Both Shen Yun and Epoch Times are funded and operated by members of Falun Gong, a controversial spiritual group that was banned by China's government in 1999 Falun Gong melds traditional Taoist principles with occasionally bizarre pronouncements from its Chinese-born founder and leader, Li Hongzhi. Among other pronouncements, Li has claimed that aliens started invading human minds in the beginning of the 20th century, leading to mass corruption and the invention of computers. He has also denounced feminism and homosexuality and claimed he can walk through walls and levitate. But the central tenet of the group's wide-ranging belief system is its fierce opposition to communism. In 2000, Li founded Epoch Times to disseminate Falun Gong talking points to American readers. Six years later he launched Shen Yun as another vehicle to promote his teachings to mainstream Western audiences. Over the years Shen Yun and Epoch Times, while nominally separate organizations, have operated in tandem in Falun Gong's ongoing PR campaign against the Chinese government, taking directions from Li." Editor Chris Jennewein of MyNewsLA wrote that Los Angeles Magazine was sued for defamation in May 2020 by the Epoch Times, referring to Braslow's news report. Los Angeles Magazine pulled the piece from their website in July, as ordered by federal judge George H. Wu, and published a retraction notice in the September 2020 issue of the magazine.

The "Li Hongzhi" article where the "centralized discussion" was says:

According to a March 2020 report by Samuel Braslow published in Los Angeles Magazine:

In 2000, Li founded Epoch Times to disseminate Falun Gong talking points to American readers. Six years later he launched Shen Yun as another vehicle to promote his teachings to mainstream Western audiences. Over the years Shen Yun and Epoch Times, while nominally separate organizations, have operated in tandem in Falun Gong’s ongoing PR campaign against the Chinese government, taking directions from Li. Despite its conservative agenda, Epoch Times took pains until recently to avoid wading into partisan U.S. politics. That all changed in June 2015 after Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, proclaiming that he "beat China all the time". In Trump, Falun Gong saw more than just an ally—it saw a savior. As a former Epoch Times editor told NBC News, the group’s leaders "believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the communist party".

(Los Angeles Magazine retracted Braslow's article in September 2020 after Falun Gong filed a defamation lawsuit in May.) Blue nutcracker (talk) 03:36, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Sidenote: I think RFC generally refers to a very structured process, see WP:RFC. And in general, if you do start an RFC, it should only be after discussion on here has failed. And arguably, an RFC for a single magazine article for a single wikipedia dispute on this page is not the best place to start it. You may want to start it on the talk page. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 04:03, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

• In general, a retraction is still a retraction, and unless there is clear information that the article was true and that the Shen Yun/Epoch Times did truly shady stuff and/or overpowered with money, we shouldn't use the article.

Bluethricecreamman (talk) 04:06, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Looking for LA Mag retraction, they have retracted other articles before for poor reporting practices as well. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 04:07, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

First of all, this editor is leaving out that our Epoch Times article in fact reports on the curious case of this retraction (Shen_Yun#History).

Second, just about all of the above quote can be cited to any number of other sources that are today readily available. It would just necessitate light modification. Media sources regarding Falun Gong and its extensions Shen Yun and the Epoch Times (among others) are very easy to find now.

Third, the fact that Falun Gong/Shen Yun went after Los Angeles Magazine for its reporting would seem notable to me. And I'm not alone: Here's for example a news report on it. :bloodofox: (talk) 08:14, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree. If there is something whose sole source is this retracted article then it probably shouldn't be on Misplaced Pages. Alaexis_¿question? 09:19, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

If elements of the quote can be cited to other sources, that would probably be ideal. My initial impression is that it's a bit of a wall of text, and sources an additional step removed may aid in summarising the most pertinent elements. Alpha3031 (t • c) 13:00, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Content shouldn't be solely sourced to a retracted article, and I don't think it's a good idea to be second guessing why an article was retracted. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:31, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Woops, thanks Bluethricecreamman for sharing about the RFC procedure. I just saw several sections titled like that and thought it was simply a title others were using! To answer bloodofox point, if you can cite the above quotes to any number of other reliable sources readily available, then there seems to be no point in arguing in favor of using this retracted article as a source. But more importantly bloodofox, can you tell us why you think this retracted article from a magazine with apparently a reputation of poor reporting practices is a reliable source? Blue nutcracker (talk) 01:10, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

I covered it all above. Other editors should be aware that Blue nutcracker is yet another WP:SPA focused on Falun Gong-aligned edits. The account's first edit was August 24 on the Shen Yun article () . :bloodofox: (talk) 01:18, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Can you stop the personal attacks and focus on the topic please? Blue nutcracker (talk)

The statement "WP:SPA focused on Falun Gong-aligned edits" is an objectively true statement. Other editors absolutely should be informed and aware that they are interacting with an account with these properties. Sean.hoyland (talk) 02:59, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

The guideline WP:CONTEXTMATTERS should be followed. The guideline tells us to examine the context. In this case, the context is that Los Angeles Magazine was accused of slander and they crumpled in the face of expensive court proceedings initiated by an aggressive, lawsuit-prone group: the Falun Gong. The magazine opted for a settlement which was cheaper and less trouble than defending their integrity. Afterward, the magazine erased all articles that they had published about Falun Gong, not just the 2020 piece by Braslow. For instance, they published a piece about Shen Yun in 2019 titled "Just How Big Is Shen Yun’s Marketing Budget?" This piece is now stricken from the magazine website, despite the fact that it was not challenged by Falun Gong as slander.

The freelance journalist Samuel Braslow is his own reliable source, cited on Misplaced Pages more than a dozen times. He performed the research, and he documented his findings in the article. His findings should stand because of context: everything he wrote about Falun Gong and Shen Yun is true and correct according to scholarly writings by Heather Kavan or James R. Lewis (both cited in the Falun Gong and Li Hongzhi articles), and similar investigative news pieces such as NBC News items "Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times" from 2019, and "How the conspiracy-fueled Epoch Times went mainstream and made millions" from 2023. The supposed "slander" written by Braslow is completely true. Nobody credible accused him of journalistic malpractice.

The facts of the slander case and magazine retraction made the news on its own. Local Los Angeles news outlet mynewsla.com wrote two pieces: "Epoch Times Files Slander Suit Against Los Angeles Magazine" and "Judge Orders Los Angeles Magazine to Remove Article from Website". This means that the lawsuit and retraction can be described on Misplaced Pages. Mynewsla.com described the supposed slander as including the accusation that Falun Gong members "had furtively pumped nearly $10 million in ads through a hidden network of fake accounts and pages", which fits quite well with what is described in NBC News's investigative piece from 2019. Context matters. The context here is that Braslow's work is legitimate, relevant, useful and objectively accurate. Binksternet (talk) 03:48, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Sean.hoyland Why don't you tell us what you think about this issue? Do you believe this article is a reliable source? Why or why not? I'd be glad to hear your opinion. Binksternet when you say: "In this case, the context is that Los Angeles Magazine was accused of slander and they crumpled in the face of expensive court proceedings initiated by an aggressive, lawsuit-prone group: the Falun Gong. The magazine opted for a settlement which was cheaper and less trouble than defending their integrity." did you read this somewhere? It'd be great if you shared the source here so we could all take a look. If everything braslow wrote about is completely true according to the other sources you named, and they are reliable sources, why not use those other sources instead? I agree that the lawsuit and retraction are notable and can be mentioned in the article. But I am still not convinced that this article is a reliable source and we should be quoting from it in the manner we are doing in the article. Blue nutcracker (talk) 06:42, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

What I think about this issue is that the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct's prohibition against "Systematically manipulating content to favour specific interpretations of facts or points of view" is far more important than a question about a source. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:09, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't know what you're talking about. Other uninvolved editors in this noticeboard seem to have agreed so far that the source isn't reliable and shouldn't be used like it is in the article. As several of us have said repeatedly, if you have other reliable sources to support the content, just use those instead of this one. Would you, Binksternet and bloodofox be open to the following compromise: we can replace the above quotes with something like:

"Investigative journalist Samuel Braslow wrote an article titled: "Inside the Shadowy World of Shen Yun and Its Secret Pro-Trump Ties". Editor Chris Jennewein of MyNewsLA wrote that Los Angeles Magazine was sued for defamation in May 2020 by the Epoch Times, referring to Braslow's news report. Los Angeles Magazine pulled the piece from their website in July, as ordered by federal judge George H. Wu, and published a retraction notice in the September 2020 issue of the magazine."

The above is essentially one new sentence, mentioning the braslow article, followed by what's already in the article, which I assume everyone agrees with, describing the lawsuit and retraction. This would address your concerns of not omitting mention of the article, it's lawsuit and its retraction, but doesn't quote from article or use it as a source. Can you tell us your thoughts on this? Blue nutcracker (talk) 08:24, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

Braslow's investigation brought new information to the topic; he did not stop at summarizing the situation as previously published. We would be remiss not to cite facts from his article. Binksternet (talk) 15:10, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

The LA Mag article contains glaring factual errors, such as saying that Epoch Times was founded by Li, but it was founded by John Tang . Also there is no evidence that LA Mag retracted due to financial reasons.

Brawslow's quote as currently cited mostly concerns a living person. Even if we consider Braslow's piece as a self-published source after retraction by LA Mag, per WP:RS/SPS, we should Never use self-published sources as independent sources about other living people, let alone the factual errors. Thomas Meng (talk) 12:18, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

Editors should be aware that this is another WP:SPA that produces only Falun Gong-aligned edits in these spaces (the account's first substantial edit was in 2020 on the Falun Gong page, citing policy and stating that "associating Falun Gong with the Epoch Times is inappropriate"). This account has a long history of arguing for every Falun Gong-approved position one can imagine and will not make an edit that reads as remotely critical of the new religious movement. :bloodofox: (talk) 20:43, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Epoch Times was started by John Tang, certainly. But Tang was answering the needs of his messiah, Li Hongzhi. Braslow's assertion that Li started Epoch Times connects the dots between messiah and acolyte, with Braslow assuming that Li was the motive force, and Tang was the agent. Not an unlikely or far-fetched scenario.

It's obvious that LA Mag folded because the case was too much trouble and too much money. The case was settled before any of the facts were examined. It never went to jury trial. Note that Australian scholar Heather Kavan has described Falun Gong as extremely coercive, using street violence, personally targeted scare tactics, and engaging frequently in lawsuits. It's not unlikely that LA Mag publishers were subject to personal threats in addition to the lawsuit. They could have stood their ground, defending Braslow and the magazine's own integrity, and this path would have had a good chance of succeeding, because the article's facts are in line with previously published descriptions of Falun Gong behavior. But this path would have cost a lot of money.

Which living person was negatively affected by Braslow's article? It can't be Li Hongzhi, who has been described in similar terms by many other writers. And Braslow did not name any other Falun Gong adherents. Instead, Braslow described the Shen Yun organization and its Falun Gong DNA. Binksternet (talk) 15:10, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

Since you brought it up: actually RSes overwhelmingly describe Falun Gong as a strictly peaceful spiritual practice, including the U.S. Congress and this Pulitzer-Prize-winning series of stories that illustrate how in the face of torture, forced school expulsion, etc. Falun Gong practitioners peacefully appealed for an end to the persecution by the CCP (see last article in series, Death Trap). Scholars similarly describe Falun Gong as peaceful, including David Ownby, Benjamin Penny, and Andrew Junker. There is not one single instance where Falun Gong practitioners resorted to violent means to counteract persecution.

Regarding Braslow: actually per WP:BLPSPS, it's not about whether a living person is affected negatively or not; rather, it's about Misplaced Pages's quality standard for sources about livign persons in general—it doens't allow self-published sources. Thomas Meng (talk) 13:38, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Note the account's insistence on Falun Gong-approved terms like "spiritual practice" and not what WP:RS overwhelmingly use: "new religious movement". Tread with caution regarding how this account presents or summarizes sources. :bloodofox: (talk) 20:46, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

You would appear to be using this noticeboard to advocate for Falun Gong, please keep your commentary contained to what is relevant to wikipedia and abstain from promoting or advocating for Falun Gong. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:42, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

• I'm no fan of Trump but if a magazine retracts an article then we can't say it is a reliable source for the article. The reason does not matter. All that would matter is if another reliable source stood up for it in its place. So a fairly straightforward no would be my answer. NadVolum (talk) 15:23, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

My first thought is that since the article got retracted, it’s not a “published” article anymore for Misplaced Pages’s purposes since it requires “reliable, published sources.” WP: RS.

I thus don’t know if it’s necessary to analyze the possible reasons behind the retraction. There could be many considerations like financial, reputation, or actual inaccuracies. Additionally, as reported by Mynewsla.com, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction enjoining the magazine from publishing the article. Defamation cases for public figures and entities usually require a higher threshold, such as actual malice. So if we were to get into all the reasons, we would have to analyze all possibilities and considerations, including why the magazine agreed to removing it even though they could recover litigation costs if they won. Thus my take is that absent a report by a reliable source stating the real reason for the retraction to be one unrelated to factual accuracy, we shouldn’t get into the context and should just treat it as an unpublished source. 23impartial (talk) 02:31, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

The problem with that stance is that Misplaced Pages would be letting Falun Gong game the system to remove negative publicity. They should not be allowed to decide which sources must be suppressed. Braslow's investigation was legitimate and relevant to the narrative about Falun Gong. This is a case where we must push back against Falun Gong's manipulation, and accept the word of an honest career journalist. Binksternet (talk) 21:44, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

This is an interesting point @23impartial, I think Misplaced Pages:Published says archived material seems to be ok to use. So in principle if the article can be accessed from a web archived link it might be still considered published. But I don't know for sure if a retracted article actually counts as published or not. It would be an interesting question for the talk page of the Misplaced Pages:Published page. I might ask there at some point if time allows. But I did see Retraction in academic publishing which seems to indicate that, at least in the context of academic papers: "it may be necessary to remove an article from publication..when the article..is the subject of a court order". This seems to equate retracting with "unpublishing" but I could be wrong. Blue nutcracker (talk) 17:49, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

This article doesn't appear to have been the subject of a court order. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:08, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

• Given that so far all uninvolved/uninterested editors seem to have unanimously agreed that the LA Magazine article is not a reliable source, do we have consensus at this point? Or do we need unanimous approval from all involved editors for a consensus? If there is no consensus yet, I am happy to continue the discussion to reach a consensus, but given that both pages seem to be about living persons, should we remove the contentious material while we continue our discussion? It seems to be in line with WP:BLPREMOVE. Also, looks like this discussion might be archived in a few days. To continue our discussion, should we continue it on the talk page as before, or can anybody suggest any other avenues we could use? Thank you everyone for your participation so far. Blue nutcracker (talk) 00:03, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

I think your interpretation of BLP is wrong (or at least as its expressed in this edit summary is ) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:47, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback. Do you think this LA Magazine article is a reliable source? and can you tell us why or why not? Looking forward to your input! Blue nutcracker (talk) 17:31, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

You appear to be mocking and ignoring my input. I think the context is worth examining and examining your claims about the applicability of BLP is part of that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:26, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Not at all, I assumed you posted here because you were interested in participating in the discussion and was inviting you to give us your take on it. Blue nutcracker (talk) 20:36, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

I am participating and giving my take... You appear to be mocking and ignoring my contribution thus far. I think that you are overplaying the BLP angle, I also think that the concerns raised about FG effectively gaming the system are legitimate. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:27, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

As you may have already noticed, it has been really hard to keep this thread on topic (The topic is: Is this Retracted LA Magazine Article a reliable source?), and it's starting to devolve into walls of texts littered with accusations, and I'm trying my best to hear everyone's opinions to see if we can have some sort of consensus or reach a compromise. So while I appreciate your contributions so far, how can I help count your contribution toward a consensus if you haven't provided it so far? I am just confused at this point. Thank you for providing your input so far, but if you don't have a particular answer to "Is this Retracted LA Magazine Article a reliable source?", I won't be able to continue this particular conversation we are having. Otherwise it will be very hard for any other editors in the noticeboard who may want to participate to catch up with the thread Blue nutcracker (talk) 23:38, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

None of this is off topic, FG apparently gaming the system is part of the topic. In that context I lean towards some sort of useful reliability. What is your opinion on whether or not FG is gaming our system? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:11, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

• The thing to do in this case is to cover everything in the article via secondary sources, using the tone and focus of those secondary sources (ie. if there are things they still treat as fact, we should treat them as fact; if there are things that they attribute, we should attribute.) The retracted article can still be cited as a courtesy link but probably shouldn't be relied on as the sole source for anything significant; however, conversely, the fact of its retraction should not be used as a rationale to remove anything from the article when other sources cover it. And in particular, if a secondary source, especially one written after the retraction, chooses to rely on the retracted article, they are still usable as long as they are not retracted. I think it is extremely unlikely that the key points lack secondary coverage at this point, so there should be no serious removals from the article, just minor rewordings and potentially attributions to reflect the new sources. The lawsuit has, realistically, produced a Streisand Effect and our article should reflect that in the sense that the massive number of sources covering the lawsuit inevitably mention the things that sparked it and we can and should cover those things via those sources. --Aquillion (talk) 02:57, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

  Agreed. Just don't use the retracted article and look for other sourcing. if enough folks are covering the retraction of the article, we could possibly include info about the retraction in a wikipedia section too without relying on the retracted article as well. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 05:01, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

  Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I would just ask Binksternet and Bloodofox to please provide all the sources they're aware of that repeat the claims so we can use them. In the absence of that, I can try to rewrite the paragraph in question citing the NBC articles provided by binksternet above. We can probably also move that paragraph into the Media Reception section as it seems a little odd to be in the History section in my view, but that's beside the point for this thread I suppose. Blue nutcracker (talk) 09:58, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

  Hey, I am trying to rewrite the section above using the sources:

  https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121

  and

  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epoch-times-falun-gong-growth-rcna111373

  But they mainly seem to be about "Epoch Times", and mention, somewhat briefly, that there is some financial connection between Shen Yun and Epoch Times. But I don't see that Li founded Shen Yun there, and I am not entirely sure how to connect Li to Shen Yun and then bridge into the alien teachings in the braslow article. It does say that Shen Yun is an outreach effort of Falun Gong, I could include that, and maybe we could link to the Falun Gong wiki page? That should have more info for people who want to know more? I havent looked at the Falun Gong page so I can't comment yet on whether it has the controversial teachings or not. But it seems a safe bet for now?

  How about this to replace the contentious paragraph:

  -

  Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC and author of the articles: "Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times" and "How the conspiracy-fueled Epoch Times went mainstream and made millions" says that "Shen Yun and Epoch Media Group make up the outreach effort of Falun Gong". The article "Inside the Shadowy World of Shen Yun and Its Secret Pro-Trump Ties" written by los Angeles–based investigative reporter Samuel Braslow echoes similar claims. Editor Chris Jennewein of MyNewsLA wrote that Los Angeles Magazine was sued for defamation in May 2020 by the Epoch Times, referring to Braslow's news report. Los Angeles Magazine pulled the piece from their website in July, as ordered by federal judge George H. Wu, and published a retraction notice in the September 2020 issue of the magazine."

  -

  The proposal above includes what we can support from Brandy Zadrozny's articles from braslow's article, and then a link to the Falun Gong wiki page for whoever wants to learn more about Falun Gong. And then also mentions braslow's article echoing similar claims which gives the statement more credibility, and also includes the lawsuit and retraction which I understand is important for everyone to be here. It doesn't quote from the article as if it were a reliable source, but is used to support zadrozny's claims, and at the same time includes braslow's article which I understand is important for some editors. This is a draft of course and would include all the links and references.

  We could also put it in the Media Reception section as it seems strange to be in the "History" section? Also the fact about the finances is actually already covered on the second paragraph of the introduction, so is this being needlessly repetitive?

  What does everyone think? Happy to keep refining this to include everyone's input and welcome alternate proposals to see how to include everyone's input somehow. Please take this in good faith, I don't see anybody making proposals, or trying to reach a compromise and I'm trying my best to make it happen. Blue nutcracker (talk) 05:20, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

• I don't think the redaction shows that the article is unreliable. The article was redacted because of mounting legal pressure, not because LAM believed that it wasn't factual. There was a settlement i.e. no court of law actually determined whether any of the article content qualified as slander. Since we have articles reporting on the lawsuit, we should simply mention that in the article as well when the article is cited. Cortador (talk) 05:52, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Summary of the Discussion so far

To make it easier for anybody who might still be interested in contributing to the discussion, and to aid in determining consensus, I will attempt to summarize the discussion so far. If you feel I have misrepresented your take, please feel free to clarify.

Editors from the Notice Board

From Bluethricecreamman, Alaexis, ActivelyDisinterested, NadVolum and 23impartial, it seems that the general sentiment is that the article is not a reliable source as it was retracted by the magazine.

Alpha3031 seems to believe the quotes are too long and more sources are necessary, but I am not sure if that means we should not use it as a source.

Editors from the Shen Yun Talk Page

Is a reliable source: From :bloodofox: and Binksternet, the general sentiment is that there appear to be other sources readily available that support the claims in the retracted article.

Binksternet has provided two articles from reporter Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News that appear to contain similar claims:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epoch-times-falun-gong-growth-rcna111373

Is not a reliable source: From Thomas Meng and I, the article is not a reliable source because it was retracted by the magazine as a result of a lawsuit for containing false information according to this article on the case and the fact that the article is no longer publicly available in LA Mag website.

Thomas Meng has provided some evidence that the article actually contains false information. To cite Thomas Meng: "The LA Mag article contains glaring factual errors, such as saying that Epoch Times was founded by Li, but it was founded by John Tang "

Editors who's contribution is currently missing or unclear

From what I can tell: Sean.hoyland and Horse Eye's Back have yet to provide input on whether the article is a reliable source. I appreciate your interest in the thread so far and it would be helpful for us to have your input. I hope this summary makes it easier for you to see where you might fit in the discussion so far.

Suggested Compromises

So far I have suggested the following compromise, I quote:

we can replace the above quotes with something like:

"Investigative journalist Samuel Braslow wrote an article titled: "Inside the Shadowy World of Shen Yun and Its Secret Pro-Trump Ties". Editor Chris Jennewein of MyNewsLA wrote that Los Angeles Magazine was sued for defamation in May 2020 by the Epoch Times, referring to Braslow's news report. Los Angeles Magazine pulled the piece from their website in July, as ordered by federal judge George H. Wu, and published a retraction notice in the September 2020 issue of the magazine."

The above is essentially one new sentence, mentioning the braslow article, followed by what's already in the article, which I assume everyone agrees with, describing the lawsuit and retraction. This would address your concerns of not omitting mention of the article, it's lawsuit and its retraction, but doesn't quote from article or use it as a source.''

If you agree with this compromise, or if you have other ideas please let us know.

Where to go from here

Given that these threads get archived in 5 days and it's been almost 5 days, I would like to know:

Based on the above, do we have consensus on the article not being a reliable source?

If not, should we remove the contentious material while we continue the discussion as per WP:BLPREMOVE?

Also, once the thread gets archived, where should we continue the discussion? The Shen Yun talk page? The "centralized" discussion in the Li Hongzhi talk page? Or is there some other avenue we could use? Thank you everyone for your interest and continued participation so far. Blue nutcracker (talk) 08:00, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

"appear to contain similar claims" — we really need a crackdown on these Falun Gong-aligned WP:SPAs. There are two unabashed examples right here. :bloodofox: (talk) 08:24, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but why should we mention Braslow's article in the articles on Li Hongzhi and Shen Yun? If the facts reported in this article are confirmed by other sources (like the NBC links above) then let's just report them citing NBC. Why do we need this discussion at all?

Braslow's article should be mentioned in other articles if it's notable by itself, that is, there are secondary sources that discuss it, but this is a different matter. Alaexis_¿question? 09:41, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

We should cite Braslow because he connected more dots than previous work, and he updated the situation several years after previous work. None of what Braslow wrote is significantly out of line with previous publications, but he is valuable because he researched the topic further than previous publicatons. Binksternet (talk) 00:37, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Can you provide an example of a specific claim that cannot be found elsewhere? Or point me to one if it has been provided already. Alaexis_¿question? 19:29, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Claims that cannot be found elsewhere include that "Li founded Epoch Times", but it was John Tang who founded ET . That is a factual error, among others.

Also, Brawslow's quote mentions Li 7 times. Even considering Brawlow's article to be self-published, per WP:RS/SPS, we Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about living people. That's not about whether Li was negatively impacted by Braslow either; it's about Misplaced Pages's source quality standard about living people in general. We shouldn't quote Braslow on Li.Thomas Meng (talk) 14:05, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Li clearly controlls the Epoch Times , you appear to be splitting hairs to an extent which isn't due... Its clearly not a factual error but a difference in opinion, you think that Li controls the Epoch Times and that it was founded by followers of Li independent of him... They think that Li controls the Epoch Times and that it was founded by followers of Li not independent of him. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:47, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

mynewsla.com and parent company CalNews, Inc

mynewsla.com doesn't appear to be a reliable source, its part of CalNews, Inc which is a web scraping and republishing company... Not a media company. I can't see anything which suggests reliability, their About Us and Staff pages strongly suggest the opposite. The specific article which was brought here "Judge Orders Los Angeles Magazine to Remove Article from Website" appears to have been supplied by Falun Gong. Its also possible that CalNews is just a FG front... Their editorial line appears to be the same as the Epoch Times' and FG/ET has a long history of using front organizations. A sampling of the editorial line CalNews shares along with other people's stories "Jack Smith's story gets more unbelievable by the day. Still no Epstein list, still no Diddy list. It's little wonder no one trusts the federal government." "The @POTUS has been a vegetable for 3 1/2 years. The @washingtonpost once again gaslights America with this moronic lead story." "Make no mistake, Gilead Sciences (@GileadSciences) is using sub-Saharan Africans as guinea pigs to test their vaccine. No matter how many people they murder, they will make millions." "Violent Progressive Leftists have but one core value: Hate." "The people in Washington DC making these decisions really do hate Americans. They exist to destroy the country and ruin the lives of everyone here. There is no other viable explanation." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:31, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Good catch. Definitely not a WP:RS. :bloodofox: (talk) 20:42, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

agreed. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 21:22, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Huh, yeah that site does look a little fishy, as if its not a serious news source. In fact, the articles about the case didn't even provide a link to any court documents. I also looked in the Epoch Times website and, maybe I didnt search hard enough, but I did not see a mention of the case. So I started wondering if the lawsuit even happened at all or if it even happened as reported. Managed to find the court documents after a while of searching. At least they got the Judge's name and the general details right. I can see the pdf of the dismissal and retraction order there, but looks like you have to purchase the settlement documents from the us gov. pacer system, so I don't know what the settlement was about in the end. They do provide for free the initial lawsuit filed by epoch times, and the dismissal by the judge though. FYI @Thomas Meng looks like they complained about more than who founded the epoch times. In fact, if I understand, that wasn't even their main complaint. Looks like the lawsuit was mainly based on braslow claiming that Facebook revealed epoch times pumped millions of dollars in ads through a hidden network of fake accounts, and that Facebook removed a bunch of accounts tied to epoch times for some deceptive behavior, and that epoch times claimed in the lawsuit that this is false and damages their brand. Well, that's more or less what I understood. You guys can take a look and tell me what you think. Blue nutcracker (talk) 02:03, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

• Hello everyone, not sure how @Thomas Meng feels about this, but after thinking it through, now that we have the court documents and based on them can know what parts of braslow's article are contentious, I don't feel so much against using it as a source. If we're quoting something contentious from braslow article, we can just add the epoch times claim. I dont know if its necessary, but i will try to work on adding to the paragraphs in question the counterclaim from the epoch times (if any) and cite the pdf, and can put the proposed paragraph either here or in the Shen Yun talk page so you can tell us what you think. Would be nice to get your input on that.Blue nutcracker (talk) 18:29, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi, it's my first time reading the lawsuit itself. Good to know that the complaint wasn't on who founded ET but rather on other claims Braslow made. I'm not against citing Braslow's claims related to ET and ET's counter-claims. But for Braslow's quote that mentions Li 7 times: Misplaced Pages has a high standard for source quality on living persons. Per WP:RS/SPS, we should Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about living people. If we cite this retracted source based on Braslow's own reliability, it is equivalent to citing a self-published source. Thomas Meng (talk) 05:02, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

MassLive

Is MassLive reliable? I am unable to find a defined fact-checking policy anywhere or anything that can help me determine its overall reliability, but they are owned by Advance Publications which also owns Wired, a reliable source as per WP:RSP. Jurta /_he/they 19:20, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

MassLive is the website of The Republican, so I'd assume so. Seems like a fairly standard city/regional paper. The Kip 20:19, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

According to WP:RSP, "Wired magazine is considered generally reliable for science and technology", so I wouldn't assume that Wired is reliable for all types of information. I would thus not assume that MassLive is reliable because they're both owned by the same company. Based on the company's profile, I would say that MassLive is reliable for local events and issues. 23impartial (talk) 02:12, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Of course, should've been obvious two websites with different topic coverages wouldn't share the same mutual reliability. I figured the relation would've been worth mentioning, though. Jurta /_he/they 13:42, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, absolutely. It is important to consider the relation 23impartial (talk) 18:09, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

There has been a trend towards discounting discussions with few participants so I will note that I agree with what has been said about MassLive's relationship with The Republican and that it is reliable for local events and issues. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:08, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Horse Eye's Back that MassLive should be considered generally reliable for Massachusetts and New England news. I also want to say that sources should not be evaluated based on what other media outlets their parent companies own. After all, News Corp owns the Wall Street Journal, a generally reliable source, and the New York Post, a generally unreliable source. Cullen328 (talk) 18:22, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

RfC: using photos of record labels from Discogs?

Please consider joining the feedback request service. An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following list: Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

Discogs is entirely deprecated as a ref. But should the text in photos of record labels and album jackets (only) be made an exception? Herostratus (talk) 20:34, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Survey (Discogs images)

• Yes. Lets think this thru: works are their own refs, and the photos are accurate representations of the actual work to a 99.9% level of confidence. The label text is not user-generated absent an elaborate hoax, so who uploaded it is immaterial. It is as impossible to mislabel these photos as it is for a movie title screen etc (you can't pass off the label of record X as being the label of record Y). The alternative is continue our current practice: assume the article editor has not made a mistake, and to verify the reader has to get a copy on eBay or whatever. This is not better.
• Yes. How would anyone ever know that an editor is using Discogs vs. a copy of the album that they own? voorts (talk/contributions) 20:43, 28 September 2024 (UTC)
• Primary sources are reliable about themselves and users can include courtesy links for the aid of verification. This is true in all case. As to Discog it's not deprecated, it's unreliable as it's user generated. The primary images it hosts don't make it anymore or less unreliable. This is the same as with the primary documents that ancestry/com hosts, they are reliable in a primary way even if the rest of ancestry/com isn't reliable. None of this changes anything, the references aren't to Discog they are to the primary object (the album in this case), any link to an image on Discog is just an aid for verification purposes. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:13, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

I discussed this below. Herostratus (talk) 02:47, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

My points still stand, see my response below. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:13, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

To be clear I'm not bold voting in this RFC as Discog is not deprecated or prohibited, it's unreliable as it's WP:UGC. Nothing in this RFC will change that, and nothing about it being unreliable prohibits the use of a courtesy link to an image of a primary object. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:20, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

• The source is the physical record itself, so Discogs only has to accurately convey the contents of the records. This isn't something it's guaranteed to do, since anyone can upload a photo claiming to be of the record. I agree with ActivelyDisinterested that Discogs should only be treated as an aid for verification purposes, not as a guaranteed accurate representation of a work. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:51, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

I discussed this below. "not as a guaranteed accurate representation of a work" just isn't so, if one thinks it thru. Herostratus (talk) 02:47, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Anyone can also upload a scan claiming to be of a book, or upload a picture claiming to be of the subject of the article, and yet that is widely done too. Cortador (talk) 05:53, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

• Yes. As of now, we rely on some editor just using the information from a copy of the album they presumably have at hand. I support this provided this is limited to actual scans.
• Is that even making an exception? If you find a photo of an album on ebay, amazon, or Jeff's Music Blog, we don't need consensus that those are reliable sources to use it, right? — Rhododendrites \\ 13:25, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

  This point was repeatedly raised in the discussion prior to this RFC, see WT:RSP#Could we talk some horse sense re Discogs?. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:17, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

• Yes, but as a URL within Template:Cite AV media. A point that nobody here has mentioned is that the physical music release is its own reliable source, just like a book. It has a catalog number, a title, a publisher, a date. If we add a URL pointing to a scan of the same material, it would be a welcome convenience, assisting others with verifiability. The likelihood of someone uploading a false scan is very low; we can address such instances as they arise by comparing to other scans of the same release. Binksternet (talk) 03:51, 1 October 2024 (UTC)
• No. Seems like I'm in the minority, but it's unnecessary and a bad precedent. I use Discogs every day--it's riddled with errors. Misspellings, typos, track listing misorder, bad translations, etc.--thousands of mistakes across the site, I imagine. It's appropriate only as an EL. As mentioned above, the album itself is the source; we don't need an inline citation to "help with verifiability". If an editor really wants an image for an inline citation, they can take the time to find one from a source without Discogs' problems. I'm also not sure that it's necessary to turn something that takes 3 seconds (scrolling to the EL, Googling outright) in to something that takes 1 second. And Discogs as an inline citation is constantly abused, with editors using it for exact release dates, genres, album sequential number, etc. Caro7200 (talk) 13:43, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

  Misspellings, typos, track listing misorder, bad translations are all relevant to text hosted on the site, not the text legible in images of release packaging. ꧁Zanahary꧂ 01:09, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

  Exactly. Let's not compound the issue by using such a flawed site for an inline citation when there are much better options. Or again, simply cite the liner notes. Caro7200 (talk) 10:14, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

  What "better options" are there, and what makes their scans preferable? Cortador (talk) 05:43, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

  Right, if the Discogs photo has the wrong songwriter or whatever, the actual record label is going to have the same error.Herostratus (talk) 06:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  For what purpose? Again, it's totally unnecessary to use an image to "verify" or "prove" any credits, at all. Cite the liner notes and use Discogs as an EL. Given Discogs' thousands of UG errors and how it's misused as an inline citation, take the second to scroll to the bottom of the article page. No burden whatsoever. Caro7200 (talk) 14:48, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

• Yes. Editors might easily add an edit summary such as "this discogs photo matches the record in my own collection". If the photo is uploaded to Wiki or Commons, that same explanation would also be useful. The textual contents of sleeve notes / liner notes are already permitted as a valid source for album credits, this just adds secondary validation. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:21, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
• Yes - The images only. The images are just an easily accessed record of the primary source, which is usable as a citation for itself. There should be nothing wrong with this, just be careful to keep it limited ONLY to direct images of the primary source itself, not to any user generated content. User uploaded primary sources should be fine as primary sources. Fieari (talk) 06:20, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
• No If somethings need to be sourced to an image uploaded to an unreliable UGC website then it very likely isn't worthy of inclusion. I don't even understand what exactly is being proposed here, using images of an album to determine who wrote it...? If no reliable sources that Johnny Doe wrote some album then we won't write that Johnny Doe wrote it. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:16, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  Even RS sources don't always give all the information on a label or don't always accurately report it. I'm not sure why any discogs editor would ever want to falsify what's printed on a label e.g. by photoshopping it. Yes, a label image would be a primary source, but it seems it would still be very reliable. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:35, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  Yeah, the rule that "works of art are their own reference" is actually horrible and way way outside our usual comfort zone. For obscure works especially we are effectively saying "OK editor, we'll take your word for it". That's not a whole lot better than "something I saw on the internet" as also a usable source.

But if we didn't -- if we required published reliable secondary sources for material on works of art as we do for most other articles -- our coverage of works of art would be very very much less that we do have. Very few movie and book articles would have Plot sections or would have short incomplete ones, which would leave the reader blind. In fact, most of our movie and many of our book and record articles would have to be destroyed or stubbed -- they don't have any secondary sources. You can't get a cast list etc for most movies, really you can't get anything, if you're sticking to secondary sources. Very few album articles would have track listings. And so on.

It's a problem and its a big problem. Why pretend otherwise. But what else can we do? Cut our coverage of films and books and novels by 75+%? Not going to happen.

I mean c'mon, a reader saying "wait, I thought that song was written by Smith not Jones" is not going to hunt down a copy of the actual record (which for many would be quite difficult or expensive) to verify that. Get real. For a lot of these records -- 78's and records from 1930 etc -- there is, basically, no way for the reader to verify the text. Unless they to go to Discogs or someplace like that -- which I guess they shouldn't -- they'll have to be like "oh well, I'll never know I guess".

Here's one method we could employ to cut that back some. Why would we not want to do that. Herostratus (talk) 04:47, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Why do we need to know what is on the label? If you cannot find a reliable source to cover who wrote/performed it then the work is almost certainly not notable unless it is notable for something non-typical. Traumnovelle (talk) 07:02, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Discussion (Discogs images)

N.B.:earlier discussion was here: Misplaced Pages talk:Reliable sources/Perennial sources# Could we talk some horse sense re Discogs? Headcount was 3-2, maybe 4-2.

N.B.:The RfD is not proposing that these photos be required to ref, just that the editor is allowed to use them if she wants to without another editor deleting them as disallowed.

• We kind of do this already a lot, we include a link to Discogs in the "External links" section, in fact we even have {{discogs release}} etc. to facilitate this. Problem is this removes the link down away from the the material being ref'd -- bit less than excellent. And if the editor doesn't include that, the reader is usually going to go to Discogs anyway if she wants to verify; it's just more work. Second, c'mon: hella editors are using Discogs to get their info anyway (I know I do) and that can't be stopped. So the current situation is kind of kabuki, and that also is sub-excellent. Herostratus (talk) 20:34, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

NB: if an editor provides a proximate link to a Discogs photo -- attached directly to a line of data-- just as a courtesy, whether as a bare URL or using a citation template, it will be indistinguishable from a ref. Other editors will see them as refs, and possibly tag them for {{better reference}}, but far more probably delete them, and perhaps the material also as being now unref'd while they're at it I believe we can count on this. (it still wouldn't be unreffed, but it might seem so to the casual editor not knowing the rule for works). And in fact since using Discogs as a ref is clearly prohibited at Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Perennial sources, you might be in for a scolding. So I wouldn't do it.

As I said, an external link at the bottom of the article is extra work for the user and just more mediocre. Why do that. But that is currently the only use allowed by Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Perennial sources.

Re "anyone can upload a photo claiming to be of the record" and " a guaranteed accurate representation of a work", that just isn't true. A photo of the label for "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" can't actually be a photo of the label for "Love Me Do". It's flat impossible. Of course, as anywhere in the 'pedia, we are indeed subject to be fooled by an elaborate hoax using photoshop skills. But we assume no elaborate hoaxes absent some indication of such, and to do so regularly would be kind of paranoid... And for instance photos (putatively) taken and uploaded without modification by Misplaced Pages editors are far likelier to to hoaxes or just wrong and for good or ill we accept those. I guess we would accept a photo of a record label taken by an editor to be shown in an article to be sufficiently reliable, why can't she upload to Discogs and use it as a ref.

Re "The primary images it hosts don't make it anymore or less unreliable. This is the same as with the primary documents that ancestry/com hosts". I did not know that birth certificates or whatever that Ancestry hosts are considered unreliable, that is a different issue -- I suppose the birth ertificates for two different Joe Smiths might be indistinguishable etc. This doesn't apply to the matter at hand.

Vetting reliable sources is tricky if you drill down. Most sources are reliable for some things, and not others. But if the Daily Unreliable were to host material that -- by some magic -- we were certain was true to 99.99% confidence, yeah we could use it I'd think. The label photos are 99.99% sure of being accurate, n'est-ce pas?

Sure our rules have to be blunt instruments ("Do not use the Daily Unreliable, period"), we can't get overly nuanced. but if it is possible to make a rule less blunt by logical proof of an reasonably broad exception, and an editor has bothered to do it, it would be mediocre to just be like "enh whatever nah". Herostratus (talk) 02:47, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

How will this RFC change this in anyway? Discog will still be an unreliable source in general, so anyone blindly following the colour applied by a script will still see the same colour. I would suggest making sure the title of the reference is something like "Courtesy link to image of the album reverse showing the song listing". If you add a bare url it may get reverted, the same happens to edits without summaries, if other editors don't know why you're doing something they might revert you in mistake. Clearly explaining goes a long way to mitigate that.

Nothing at RSP "prohibits" the use of Discog, the specific wording is The content on Discogs is user-generated, and is therefore generally unreliable. That is routine wording, all user generated content is considered generally unreliable.

It's prohibited for refs I believe. I want it usable for refs. Your quote basically makes the argument "We can't use any Discogs material for refs, because we don't use any Discogs material for refs" which is circular. Look me in the eye and tell me that you truly believe that these photos are not accurate to a sufficient level of confidence for a ref. You can't because they are. How can that not matter. Herostratus (talk) 06:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

It's not prohibited, and if you think my argument bis circular you have misunderstood it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:20, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

My point about ancestry/com is that it is unreliable, but that the primary documents it hosts are considered reliable (rather than the other way round). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:13, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

As to hoaxes Discog is as likely to be hoaxed as any other place that are user edited, Misplaced Pages included. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:15, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Hoaxing the Misplaced Pages can have ideological advantage in many places. Making a hoax record label is pointless and also requires some photoshop skill. There probably are hoaxed images on Discogs (altho their hivemind would catch lots of them eventually you'd think). However, surely it is way less than one in a thousand. A 99.9+% confidence is way more than sufficient for a ref. Herostratus (talk) 06:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Most of the hoaxes on Misplaced Pages are not ideological, see Misplaced Pages:List of hoaxes on Misplaced Pages. The main reason people create hoaxes is basic trolling. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:22, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Summing up, to this point anyway

So, seems to have died down a bit. So let's see.

So, my goal here was to add text to the effect that "Except that images of record labels and jackets are OK" at the Discogs entry at Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. That page is for "sources that have been repeatedly raised for discussion are listed here... it is a summarization of discussions about the listed sources" to avoid having to go over some sources over and over. Discogs is rated as "Generally Unreliable" With the circle-slash "prohibited" icon. This represent the consensus of the various previous discussions, and is mainly used for answering editors who aren't sure, but could also be used to quell pointless local discussions on the matter. And that is fine. (I was told that here rather than there is place to have this discussion).

So, let's see -- by headcount, its 7-4 in favor of "yes" (most people from the other discussion voted here, but one didn't, and was a "yes" so 8-4 Yes). As to strength of argument, well, not for me to say, but... I didn't find the "no" ones very convincing, to say the least. You can't pass off a photo of record X's label as being record Y, no matter how many people don't get that, you still can't. The photos themselves are technically user created, but I mean so is "I have the album right here, take my word for it man" and that's less reliable and the reader sometimes can't check it at all without unreasonable effort. "We can't use Discogs at all because we don't use Discogs at all" is not a strong argument; "We don't use Discogs at all and that works OK so let's keep doing that" is better, but pretty weak IMO... could be used against any change anywhere... "works OK" is arguable and "works better" is a worthwhile goal. But that's just me, and I'm biased, so make your own conclusion about strength of argument.

Anyway, for the purposes of Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Perennial sources, a "a summarization of discussions about the listed sources" has to include this thread, and with more weight than something from say 15 years ago. So it's most probably not true that a summarization of discussion can be said to reveal a consensus against Discogs label photos as refs, anymore. More the opposite. (If there are a number of fairly recent, well- populated, and decisive discussions that might be different -- but since label photos as a separate thing were discussed little or not at all (I'll betcha), most probably not even then.)

And the nutshell at that page does say "Consensus can change...". So...

Make sense? I will talk to the Perennial Sources people, OK? They will probably agree to the change.

But here is the thing. So far we are talking about if a fact (is there consensus) was or was not established.

But... for rules its different. At WP:USERGENERATED (part of WP:RS, which is technically just a guideline but has the weight of a strong rule) it says "Examples of unacceptable user-generated sources are... Discogs...". Well is 8-4 and (if you think so) weight of argument enough to change a rule? Mnmh... well the at WP:RS it's just one example. Removing it doesn't change any rule, at all. And dollars to donuts that the people writing that list of examples gave zero thought to Discogs label photos specifically, and we're not "originalists" bound to exact text.

So yeah I'd say changing that text (most probably just removing it, since its only listing some examples, and less confusing) would be appropriate.

But suppose we would have to have a discussion over at RS tho. We'll see. Herostratus (talk) 03:22, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

As someone involved in the RFC I would suggest leaving it to whoever closes the discussion.

As to UGC as I said above this would change nothing, at best it would add a sentence at RSP that links to images can be used because if other pre-existing policy considerations. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 10:35, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Grenada

There has been a debate with User:Lord Dim 1 regarding Grenadian honours system, in particular whether King Charles III is sovereign of Grenada's orders or not.

They initially cited the claim to the Grenada Monarchist League's site , but being a WP:SPS the League's site is not reliable. I removed the source , but they quickly re-added the content this time citing it to "www.gg.weboffice.gd", which claims to be the website of the Governor-General of Grenada.

Now, per the official website of the Government of Grenada (and the League website - see their contact section), the official website of the Governor-General is "www.gov.gd/index.php/government/governor-general". That weboffice site initially copied content from Canadian GG's site and has now plagiarised content from the League's site. I challenged the source , but they reverted the edit saying: "Been in contact with the GML, who gave permission to the GG’s Office to utilise sections of their website on a provisional basis".

This has been going on at articles: Order of the National Hero (Grenada), Order of the Nation (Grenada), and Order of Grenada.

The same user changed the website of the Governor-General from the official one to that weboffice one at the GG's article.

So, I'm interested in knowing whether https://grenadamonarchist.org/ and https://www.gg.weboffice.gd/ are considered reliable sources on Misplaced Pages or not. Peter Ormond 💬 17:56, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

For some added context on the Governor-General’s Office’s website gg.weboffice.gd: it was previously listed on the Misplaced Pages article Governor-General of Grenada and removed 15 February 2024 (by myself) because the website had been taken down (evidently for remodelling). When the website was brought back online, I re-added it, as that was the previously listed official website. Lord Dim 1 (talk) 23:05, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Regarding the Governor-General of Grenada article, here is a partial timeline of the website parameter: Changed by InternetArchiveBot in October 2017 with this edit to go from gov.gd to web.archive.org; Changed by CaribDigita in March 2022 with this edit to go from web.archive.org to gov.gd; Changed by Lord Dim 1 in June 2022 with this edit to go from gov.gd to gg.weboffice.gd; Changed by Lord Dim 1 in February 2024 with this edit to go from gg.weboffice.gd to gov.gd; Changed by Lord Dim 1 in September 2024 with this edit to go from gov.gd to gg.weboffice.gd which is the current link. It was the 'previously listed official website' because of your 2022 edit. --Super Goku V (talk) 06:47, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Back track. The official government is always : www.gov.gd. Usually the OPM's page has a list of links to the official government sites whenever parties switch. It appears the monarchy has since removed their separate kingdoms sub pages. Grenada's was "royal.gov.uk/grenada" In terms of whether the Kingdom of Grenada vested their national honours in the Monarchy, two spots usually clears that up. The Constitution may state status on 'national symbols' vestment. The other spot is many Caribbean nations logged their national symbols into the www.WIPO.org in the E.U. so that it's legally protected under international patent in case of war or invasion(s). CaribDigita (talk) 10:13, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. My point was that it was at gov.gd until InternetArchiveBot attempted to fix the link, which went unnoticed for years until your fix in March 2022, which was then changed in June 2022 to whatever gg.weboffice.gd is. --Super Goku V (talk) 22:46, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

gg.weboffice.gd was linked to directly by the official gov.gd website as late 10. October 2023. This was around the time the first iteration of the website was taken down, as by then it was outdated and in need of major changes. The website was brought back online some months ago, now updated. Grenada’s embassy in China continues to link to gg.weboffice.gd. There is no doubt that this is an official Grenadian government website belonging to the Governor-General’s office. Lord Dim 1 (talk) 13:11, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

So the current justification is that because the Grenada Embassy in China links to gg.weboffice.gd and because the link was used in the past more often, it should be the link at Governor-General of Grenada despite that now being the only appearance across the whole website? --Super Goku V (talk) 07:06, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

The Grenada Monarchist League website should be considered generally unreliable given that it is a WordPress.com site.

The gg.weboffice.gd site does seem to be an unusual, in more than once sense, official website. The homepage of the Web Office of the Government of Grenada at weboffice.gd/index.php apparently manages 36 Government entities, but requires a log-in to access most of them. Except gg.weboffice.gd and cbi.weboffice.gd/index.php which is the Citizen by Investment portal.

As for if the Web Office of the Government of Grenada can be counted as a source in this case when it uses text copied from a WordPress article... Presently, I am unsure. Generally, when a reliable source covers an unreliable source, we can cite the coverage by the reliable source. But this is wholesale copying of text from an unreliable website. I am concerned that using this would be in violation of WP:SPS. --Super Goku V (talk) 07:31, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. The https://www.gg.weboffice.gd/ website is copied word to word from https://grenadamonarchist.org/ (, , ), rendering both the sites unreliable. Peter Ormond 💬 20:40, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

The copying comes from the fact the GG's office reached out to the GML and specifically asked to use sections of their website on a provisional basis, a request which was granted, as per my contact with the GML. Considering gg.weboffice.gd is an official website of the GG's office and only certain, not all, pages have been copied from the GML's website, with consent, I'd contend the GG's office website is reliable on account of them seemingly having picked out only specific paged to copy and differentiated between which sections were fitting to copy over. Lord Dim 1 (talk) 14:19, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Car brochures

Are car brochures and spec sheets published by the automaker themselves reliable sources, or are they primary sources and should generally be avoided? Note that they often tend to be some of the only information for options, trims and packages, especially if a car hasn't had a lot of press coverage. Cutlass 17:22, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Although secondary sources are preferred, primary sources can still be used. Spec sheets and such would be reliable sources, as long as they are for facts not the interpretation of those facts. Also as it's the car manufacturer talking about their own products you may want to be careful with any exceptional claims, they may include promotional language that wouldn't be appropriate for an encyclopedia. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:32, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

@Cutlass: I think WP:CONTEXTMATTERS is a big consideration here:

The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Misplaced Pages article and is an appropriate source for that content.

If it's something subjective on a spectrum that manufacturers have a vested interest to exaggerate such as gas mileage, electric range, or top speed, the claim should probably be attributed to the manufacturer. If it's something straightforward and objective such as tire size or the number of seats for example, that's probably fine to use in wikivoice. Left guide (talk) 07:33, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Not even sure how you would cite a brochure. Perhaps another option is to link the instruction manual (for say a car model) on the further reading section. Ramos1990 (talk) 18:16, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

There are several big issues with brochures, at least in the U.S They sometimes show options and colors that weren't actually available, they aren't always forthcoming about what combinations of options or colors could be ordered, they are not conclusive evidence that an option or color didn't exist, and they may show dealer-installed equipment without being entirely forthcoming about it. I was heavily involved in the SCCA Solo community in the past, where it's mandatory for competitors in the Street (formerly Stock) classes to use a car with a combination of options available for purchase new from a dealer, i.e., if the carmaker always bundled the most powerful engine with the heavy power seats and T-tops, sorry, you gotta run the power seats and T-tops if you want the big engine. Over the years, this has led to some deep dives into what dealers could actually order, and these fact-finding expeditions have uncovered some notable instances where brochures were inaccurate—and keep in mind, these investigations tend to take place only if the subject vehicle is a potential "ringer" in an autocross, which is not true of the vast majority of new vehicles. Bottom line: I would explicitly cite any information from a brochure in the article text, not just in a footnote, and I would heavily disclaimer anything highly detailed, such as color or option combinations. Carguychris (talk) 14:07, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Status of the Burji people according to self-published book by Gollo Huka Liben

In his self-published book 'A Deeper Look into Booran Oromo Culture' Gollo Huka Liben according to a number of IP editors and the new user @Abel94B makes the claim that the Burji language is a variety of Boorana Oromo, and that the Burji people are not an independent ethnic group, but a clan and subsection of the Boorana Oromo. I so far twice reverted such edits with the remark that Gollo's book represents a fringe opinion in the face of contrary writings by Sasse, Amborn and Wedekind, plus the Ethnologue, which are all amply cited on the Burji language claim. But the editors so far always reinstated their claim, with many formal problems, and protesting that Gollo must be more acceptable than the cited sources, because he is a PhD from the area. I therefore see no other option than to bring this question here: Is Gollo's book a better source than the other sources so far cited on the page? LandLing 18:32, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

self-published sources are reliable if the author is a subject matter expert who has been previously published by other independent reliable sources, see WP:SPS. Having a PhD would not be enough, but if they have been published for their work it would point towards them being a reliable source. Abel94B do you know if they have published any other works? I could not find any.

As to inclusion of this and other opposing positions, they are a matter of NPOV not reliability, see WP:DUE and WP:BALASP. Because something can be verified doesn't necessitate it's inclusion, rather anything include must be verifiable. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:41, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

This book discusses the relationship between the broader borana community and the Gadaa.this book is a reliable source.He is a known ethnologist in the Booran,Burji and Konso culture .I bet you never knew that a lot of booran oromos have their heritage from konsos .There is a reason why their called Konso Boru.Your whole sources are wrong.Youre talking about 83000 native speakers?I urge you to go there and look for the speakers.Furthermore the burji live in Marsabit a town in Kenya which was named after Marsa a burji person.You have so many informations that are not included or are wrong.You talked about amborn.What about the 1991 Ethiopian studies by Michigan University. There are to many misinformation on your page .The other book Gollo wrote is in 1996 called Booran Gumii Gaayyoo. You’re using sources which are incorrect and second of all do not have any substance. Why is Lake chamo mentioned but not Liban. Its mind blowing how ignorant someone can be . There is a reason why the burjis and konso rule by the gadaa.And even the burjis can use the booran prerogative in the community between boranas and burjis.Their is no mentioning where the burjis have their origin or the interactions with the other ones .The burji district in the Snnp is a political based construct which was never there in the DERG era,Haile Selassie era or Menelik era .

And even in the Menelik era most of those places belonged to the borana before it was annexed .

Before deleting facts try to verify it by first hand sources.This book takes it so seriously by naming every abba Gadaa for instance by the year in the boorana society.If you’re trying to say that a PhD has no value in Misplaced Pages.I would have a genuine question.How the hell could someone achieve to be a professor at a university communityand is a known ethnologists in the Borana/Burji/Konso/Gabra/Guji Abel94B (talk) 21:02, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

This noticeboard is a place to ask for a second opinion about the reliability bog a source. The content of article should be discussed on the articles talk page and you just should make comments about other editors, particles negative comments.

Could you give some more details about "Booran Gumii Gaayyoo"? I can't find anything about it. Knowing who it was published by, or any other details would help.

The self-published work of someone with a PhD would be a reliable source if the it can be shown the have previously been published by other independent reliable sources. That way we look to other sources for judgement, rather than relying on the judgement of any particular editor.

Professors may have ideas that stray from the mainstream, so they are not immediately reliable just because they are a professor. Especially if other reliable sources disagree with them.

If think the other sources in the article are unreliable or being misused you should discuss it on the article talk page, remembering that assuming good faith and civil discussion are not option. Finally remember that what you know is not a valid source of information on Misplaced Pages, content must be verifiable to a reliable source and no editor is a reliable source. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:54, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

The book "Booran Gumii Gaayyoo" talks about the Gadaa system of the Borana Oromo, which is a traditional governance and social structure.

Your concern is valid but If I may ask .How can a foreign researcher know more about the Ethiopian especially so called rare ethnic groups in this region than a Professor at the same country and who lived in the same area.Evaluate the book and the data.Most of his work is specialized in this field especially in the Oromo culture .

he is a known expert .

I urge you first and foremost to check his credibility in his field than asses his works .

He is associated with the Addis Ababa University and and graduated his PhD in anthropology.

Just check his credentials . 196.191.61.194 (talk) 05:42, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

The book "Booran Gumii Gaayyoo" talks about the Gadaa system of the Borana Oromo, which is a traditional governance and social structure.

Your concern is valid but If I may ask .How can a foreign researcher know more about the Ethiopian especially so called rare ethnic groups in this region than a Professor at the same country and who lived in the same area.Evaluate the book and the data.Most of his work is specialized in this field especially in the Oromo culture .

he is a known expert .

I urge you first and foremost to check his credibility in his field than asses his works .

He is associated with the Addis Ababa University and and graduated his PhD in anthropology.

Just check his credentials . 196.191.61.194 (talk) 05:59, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't need to know what the work is about, I need to know who published it, when it was published etc.

What the ethnicity of a researcher is has absolutely no weight in whether they are reliable.

You saying he is a known expert is completely irrelevant, no-one knows who you are and you are not a reliable source. What we need is published sources that show he is an expert.

I'm trying to assess his work, you are giving nothing to do that assessment with. Simply being an associate of a university or having a PhD is not enough to be a reliable source when it comes to self-published works. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:02, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Read the book first and not a glimpse of the back page.The book talks about the engagement between the different groups .And even talks about the history of the Burji and the separation .Why do you think that the American Research journal and Gollo are phrasing them both as cousins ?Read the whole 200+ pages before saying you have a clue .

He discusses all the topics with every Oromo and neighboring group 196.190.62.154 (talk) 17:50, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Your discussing content, not reliability. And stop with the snide comments. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:26, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I do understand not being able to find academics in niche fields. For example, I can't find the current affiliation of Alexander Kellner, cited in the article, nor can I figure out where to find his book The Lazy Baboon (although maybe I need to be searching in German?) -- although he is coauthoring with Hermann Amborn at Munich, and writing mainstream stuff, so it's not really a problem.

I would suggest that if you want to pursue this further, you contact someone established in the field of East African linguistics, if they can provide something to attest to Liben's credentials or not, or to the general rigor of his publications or not. A librarian may be able to assist you in this. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:47, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

It does not matter what the book discusses, what matters is whether it is self-published, was it published by a recognized expert, and if not it is to an RS. Slatersteven (talk) 10:02, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

He is a recognized Anthropologist.it is a verified source 196.190.62.30 (talk) 10:04, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Furthermore he was a Professor at the Addis Ababa University teaching ethnology and anthropology especially the Oromo history in particularly the Booran/Konso/Burji/Gujii group . 196.190.62.30 (talk) 10:06, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

And I repeated twice he is an expert who’s living was teaching it at a University . 196.190.62.30 (talk) 10:10, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

I am having trouble finding conformation of this, all I can find is "Former director Liben was the director of the DASSC South Ethiopia Unit and later coordinated the DASSC coordination office for the 6 Southern " no mention of any university post. Slatersteven (talk) 10:12, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

His book is listed on the Stanford library

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?per_page=50&q=%22Boran+%28African+people%29%22&search_field=subject_terms

what are you guys talking about .

are you guys now saying that Stanford is not using reliable source .

and second you read the back page and not the whole book.

Many thesis of amborn are either not completely or wrong leading .

He is neither an expert in the diverse ethnology in Ethiopia

And he is contradicting himself with the Ethiopian studies in 1994 where if you read that if you look it from the scientific perspective that the burjis are not an ethnic group. 196.190.60.86 (talk) 20:05, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Libraries are depositories of books, no more. Do you have a wP:coi? Slatersteven (talk) 13:06, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

What you say is irrelevant, we need proof, for someone who only seems to have one published work (not even any published papers). Slatersteven (talk) 10:14, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

I found the self-description of this book on the Amazon webseite (see the picture of the backpage), and it does not strike me as an academic resource, and one that is not primarily concerned with Burji people, culture or language. I don't see how it can supercede the published evidence provided on the Burji language page. LandLing 14:15, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Which does not mention they were a Profesor, at any university, in any subject. Slatersteven (talk) 14:32, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Go to the Stanford library and search it .are you now saying that Stanford is using unverified sources .

Funny how you found it on Amazon but didn’t do you’re homework looking for libraries in on of the world renowned universities.First of all he teached at the Jimma University and the Addis Ababa university .That was decades ago.You have to contact the universities to look up for the files manually 196.189.95.214 (talk) 20:15, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

A book being cataloged in a library means very little, even the Stanford University library. Hopefully, it is fairly clear what the difference is between this and, for instance, a professor at Stanford using the book in a syllabus, or the book being published by Stanford University Press. Remsense ‥ 论 20:20, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

One of the main dimensions we look at when considering whether a work of scholarship is reliable is whether it's been reviewed, referenced, or otherwise engaged with by other scholars working in the field. If no one's ever cited this book, or written a review of it, or done those things with any work by this author, that is a likely sign it is not a work of any consequence within the body of literature about a given subject, and probably shouldn't be cited in an encyclopedia article on said subject. Remsense ‥ 论 20:27, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

(For comparison, the Stanford library has over 3,000 items published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, a predatory publisher notorious for its polite conflation with Cambridge University Press and scant-to-none editorial oversight. Remsense ‥ 论 20:35, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

LionhearTV

A few days ago, @Royiswariii raised a concern regarding using LionhearTV sources in Bini (group), saying that the source is unreliable. I have started a discussion on the article's talk page to ask for preliminary feedback before raising it here in RSN. LionhearTV was used as a reference in the article, mainly for supporting statements or events that are not largely covered by other sources, though factually accurate.

For a short background about the subject of concern, LionhearTV (established in 2008) is a blog tackling entertainment news in the Philippines. It is used in more than 300 Philippine entertainment articles here on Misplaced Pages.

The concern with LionhearTV is whether it is accepted as a reliable source here in Misplaced Pages or not. As I mentioned above, the source is a "blog", though it is unsure whether LionhearTV is a personal blog (failing WP:UGC) or a news blog (which may pass WP:NEWSBLOG). AstrooKai (Talk • Contributions) 23:21, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

It appears to be owned by eMVP Digital who run several different sites in a similar vein. However searching online it appears likely that eMVP Digital has only one employee. It's difficult to discern anything more than that. It may come down to how it's used, it maybe unreliable for contentious statement or comments about living people, but reliable for basic details. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:33, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

It's quite surprising to learn that eMVP Digital might be run by just one employee, considering the multiple sites it manages and the fact that LionhearTV has the RAWR Awards, which both GMA Network and ABS-CBN have recognized in their last annual awards (with both networks nominating works for the awards).

I agree with your point that LionhearTV could be fine for basic details, but not for contentious info about living people. I’m still open to comments from other editors. Thanks for sharing your insights. AstrooKai (Talk • Contributions) 18:30, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Unicode Discussions on Nivkh alphabets

I am mediating a dispute about the Nivkh alphabets at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard. It appears that there is one main content issue. That is whether the letters Қ қ Қʼ қʼ Ң ң Ҳ ҳ and the letters Ӄ ӄ Ӄʼ ӄʼ Ӈ ӈ Ӽ ӽ are interchangeable (allographs) or are different letters. The question is whether a series of discussions on the Unicode discussion board are reliable sources. One of the participants writes:

Participants include linguists who specialize in the Siberian languages that use them. An example is here: L2/23-015 Comments on CYRILLIC CHE WITH HOOK’s use in Khanty and Tofa (Tofalar) (L2/22-280).

Is this a reliable source, and other related documents reliable sources?

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:37, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't see any reference to Nivkh in the document you linked. In general, I think that such documents have some weight, especially if the feedback comes from experts. Alaexis_¿question? 11:03, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I didn't see any reference to the Nivkh language in the document either. One of the parties said that it was about the Cyrillization of Siberian languages in general. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert McClenon (talk • contribs) 15:45, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I'd think it's straightforward that these public discussion documents from named academics are WP:ExpertSPS at face value (that is, absent judgement of quality), right? SamuelRiv (talk) 17:16, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

In general no the forum posts on the discussion boards are not reliable sources. However if they are by a verified expert (WP:SPS) then they might be. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:45, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

www.ace.hu

Is used by 11 articles. I am concerned both because of this discussion from 2020 which implies that it copies content from Misplaced Pages and because of a conversation I had with Elisabeth Bik on X, where she said it might be predatory. Is that really a source we should be using? JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:24, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Noting that I have mentioned this discussion in a conversation with her, too. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:26, 3 October 2024 (UTC) JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:26, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

This is a bit complicated. Half of the uses are for a book, Hungarian Archaeology at the Turn of the Millennium, published by Hungarian Ministry of Cultural. It appears ace.hu is just hosting a pdf copy of the book. Most of the other uses are also to pdfs. If ace.hu is hosting pdf's of other reliable sources then that would be separate from its own reliability. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:41, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

National Football Teams

I noticed this being used in a featured list, I was going to remove it because it is just some random person's website: and is obviously not within the definition of a RS; however, this source is used on more than 8,000 pages which leads me wondering what on earth to do about it.

It also used in BLPs for information beyond just soccer itself which is concerning. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:06, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

From the FAQ "Your criteria are dumb and you should include Catalonia, Jan Mayen and Puntland right away. Sorry, my site.", yes it looks like a blog, not an RS. Slatersteven (talk) 09:58, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Seems just a person's pet project. No evidence of any reliabilty. Yes some of it will be right, but we don't know what. Not a reliable source. Canterbury Tail talk 17:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I've found another one:

I'm aware these are not reliable, I'm more wondering how to deal with it. The amount of pages citing National Football Teams has actually gone up whilst this thread has been here. Traumnovelle (talk) 04:42, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Could potentially be deprecated or added to the spam blacklist if it's a massive issue. Get a few examples of a few of the most problematic uses, start an RFC, and if it it's successful it could be added like WP:HEALTHLINE. Alpha3031 (t • c) 12:12, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Yep, if it is being overused, and is just "some bloke on the internet" it may need depreciation, but at the very minimum any content sourced to it should, be removed. Slatersteven (talk) 12:16, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

As an example see the Universe Guide RFC about a similar issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:18, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I guess I'll compile the worst examples (BLPs) and include them here in preparation. Traumnovelle (talk) 21:35, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

It is used in featured lists

It is used in many BLPs, mostly for soccer statistics but also for some BLP info such as height, date of birth, and place of birth.

There is even a template for it which allows and encourages one to cite it: Template:NFT player. Traumnovelle (talk) 21:53, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Zoom Earth

I recently reverted an editor who changed information on 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, changing Beryl's MSLP from 934 to 935. No inline citation was present, however the summary did contain a reference to Zoom Earth. Apparently, Zoom Earth () is a live weather map, and checking their about page states they get their data from satellites including the GOES array, as well as local and national centers such as the National Hurricane Center. The figure for Beryl's 934 MSLP was from the NHC, but apparently on Zoom Earth never got to 934. I wouldn't think Zoom Earth is a reliable source, as it is nothing more than an aggregate of other sources, and the 935 MSLP figure was synthesized by the software if I'm not mistaken.

Zoom Earth is otherwise cited only once on Misplaced Pages, on Grandstaff Canyon. That citation is to satellite data which backs up the claim that a notable bridge is inside the canyon, which might be a bit of WP:SYNTH, but either way the satellite and map data is taken from GOES and OpenStreetMap.

What is the status of Zoom Earth in either context? I'd say it's not a good source as it's a mirror of other reliable or semi-reliable sources that should be cited instead. GeorgeMemulous (talk) 12:57, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I think in this case we should use the NHC value directly. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 14:33, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

The labels come from OpenStreetMap, which is WP:UGC, so they're not reliable. So in the context of the Grandstaff Canyon it's not reliable.

In the other case I would agree with JoJo, they are aggregating other sources so just use the original source. It's sidesteps any errors produced by copy and aggregating the data. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:16, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Seeking opinions on thepostrider.com

We have an article on history professor Allan Lichtman and a daughter article on his most notable work, The Keys to the White House. Both articles have been edited by the additions of citations to a website called thepostrider.com, specifically to this piece. As best I can tell, The Postrider is the sole product of two nonnotable people, who post on their own website and offer podcasts on several subjects. Its inclusion violates WP:SPS, especially when used in the WP:BLP context.

Further elaboration of my criticism, and the responses from the blog’s defenders, can be found at Talk:The_Keys_to_the_White_House#Unacceptable_source. That discussion has failed to produce consensus, so it would be helpful to get opinions from uninvolved editors. JamesMLane t c 01:02, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks to JamesMLane for referring back to the discussion, which fleshes out some of the disagreement (I posted a little late today, so this was already posted) but am trying to do some more research on the journalistic independence and standards of the publication. For this piece, there is some valid reason to think it need not be cited for some things (though some of us feel it provides independent context that is useful), but should be cited in that it is being offered as part of the wider criticism of Lichtman's prediction system. It is not being offered for biographical reasons, but because it is often cited by critics of the 13 keys system, including on these articles in the New York Post, Newsweek, and Washington Times. The full discussion on the page also includes some relevant information concerning Lichtman's explicit targeting of this site and appeals to his supporters (and a user with a name matching that of his wife) to edit his pages to remove critical material. I'll continue to look into the qualifications and publishing standards of the site but we are looking forward to getting some additional input! Caraturane (talk) 01:49, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

The pair are apparently legit political journalists, but not so universally long-term-well established that they can be expertsps; as founding and managing editors of the blog their own written piece is without oversight, and thus a straightforward WP:SPS, and not usable imo, especially in the context presumably to criticize this work.

Of course, the blog piece actually makes some good points that one might try to search around for, whether they are made elsewhere. In particular, it does eventually get around to citing a very good RS critical articles -- a [2016 NPR piece.

Additionally, one can very plainly note the editorial comments of whether he claims to predict the actual winner or the popular vote winner (because that matters more than anything to anyone who pays the slightest attention), and one can also note at the very end, if true, whether the 2016 election is in fact omitted in the book. Both of those facts are plain, relevant, and would be damning. SamuelRiv (talk) 01:51, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

yeah this. the bar for using SPS should remain high and wikipedia should wait for RS to publish criticism instead of relying on a blog post Bluethricecreamman (talk) 14:25, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I want to pushback on the postrider and the article just being a "blog post". The article is extremely heavily sourced and reviewed, the publication in question has a wide span of other related content such as models and podcasts. They platformed and published a letter from Lichtman after they published their article. And their about page lists their journalistic standards. Reasons like this are why it's making an impact and has been getting some media coverage itself.

Now perhaps this isn't enough to establish reliability, perhaps not, but I think the tendency to call it a blog is overly reductive, these are not typical things for blogs. Apprentice57 (talk) 18:04, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

As well as the other points raised their 'about us' promotes their election forecasts, caution should be used when using a potential rival in a WP:BLP. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 08:44, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

This isn't pushback on the warning of caution itself, that's fair. But I do want to note that it's hard to get criticism/insight on Lichtman without running into another modeler. Nate Silver is also mentioned on the page extensively, and is one of the most famous modelers. Even someone like Julia Azari (also now mentioned) isn't a modeler but has collaborated with articles with those who are, like Nate Silver. Apprentice57 (talk) 13:14, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

If another modeler has made comments in a reliable source, the best option is intext attribution. So make clear it's Nate Silver commenting rather than a fact in wikivoice, and question whether their opinion is due. Also remember that self-published sources can't be used for BLP details, so they can comment on the model but not the person. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:16, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

This is a good point. I think this is in line with the compromise suggested below, which would seem to balance the interests within the rules. I think this is probably the best approach because the Postrider is not being offered for its publication of sources (we can use the sources themselves) but because of the role it played in the critique and commentary. It's not being offered as commentary about a biography or for biographical information, just about the 13 keys.

I do want to add that I have emailed the site's management to ask about their publication and editorial standards. I just asked today so it may take some time but I will post here when I have a response. Caraturane (talk) 18:08, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I think a compromise along the lines of:

1. Use the sources found in The Postrider source for it's factual reporting (like SamuelRiv said), the NPR article, the October 2016 paper, etcetera (I can see why the piece itself is useful but maybe not stricly necessary).
2. Use The Postrider source in the criticism section. They are among the most prolific "critics" and are often referenced for that work, like Caraturane said.

is workable? Tomcleontis (talk) 12:57, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

1. On the Talk page, I pointed out that the blog post included hyperlinks to reliable sources. To the extent that those sources support a particular assertion, we can include the assertion and cite it to the original source. That the source was also cited elsewhere (i.e., Postrider) is not a fact worth including.

2. The internet is full of people who are prolific. That a person is prolific isn't enough to show that that person should be quoted in Misplaced Pages. As an example, Michael Moore draws a lot of criticism from bloggers and other WP:SPS-type commentators, but the sources in Michael Moore#Criticism are only those from notable people and independently edited media like the Wall Street Journal. (Incidentally, I would incline to retitle the "Criticism" section to something like "Issues with applying the Keys". The current subsections would fit under that title, as would any discussion of the issue of predicting popular vote versus electoral vote, one of the points addressed by the Postrider. But that's a question for the article Talk page, unrelated to whether Postrider meets Misplaced Pages's standards. I mention it only to make clear that my objection to this one source isn't an attempt to scrub all criticism.) JamesMLane t c 14:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I think @Tomcleontis proposed compromise is a fair and balanced approach. Using the Postrider source in the criticism section as an established critic, seems like an effective way to ensure both accuracy and fair representation (the Newsweek article uses the Postrider critics to frame the overall criticism).

The suggested compromise avoids unnecessary redundancy by focusing on the direct use of reliable sources for factual assertions, while acknowledging the Postrider's (or the two authors: Lars Emerson and Michael Lovito) critique in the criticism section. This way, the article maintains both editorial quality and a comprehensive perspective. Caraturane (talk) 14:56, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

My objection to the current state of the articles is that we're using a WP:SPS, especially wrong in the context of a WP:BLP. The proposed "compromise" uses a WP:SPS in the context of a WP:BLP, so it would still be a violation of policy. JamesMLane t c 02:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure why there's scare quotes thrown on compromise as it would be removing a citation from the source you object to in line with an objection you have.

But anyway: arguing in the alternative (we still have not thoroughly looked into whether the source has independent verification, a sticking point from the other talk thread that I haven't seen you address; I look forward to Caraturane's investigation on that): the proposition is to use the SPS only to enhance the criticism from noted critics/experts, which is given as an exception to SPS. Apprentice57 (talk) 05:21, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

You write that "we still have not thoroughly looked into whether the source has independent verification, a sticking point from the other talk thread that I haven't seen you address; I look forward to Caraturane's investigation on that)...." I wish that people would comment in only one place, namely this one. I get sucked into responding on the article talk page and then the discussion is split. On the talk page I stated, "The burden is on whoever wants to insert or restore the material." This isn't just my personal opinion. I'm citing relevant policy from WP:BLP. If you consider this "lecturing" per one of your comments on the other page, my response is that this discussion needs more lecturing, i.e., more attention to actual Misplaced Pages policies.

The nature of the burden is established by another policy, WP:SPS: "Self-published material is characterized by the lack of independent reviewers (those without a conflict of interest) validating the reliability of the content." If Caraturane receives an email from the Postrider guys, claiming to have a 23-member board of distinguished experts who independently review every word, I for one will be dubious.

Finally, you repeat your opinion that these guys are experts. As you know, I think they aren't. There's no point to our endlessly reiterating our views. There's already been too much bludgeoning in this dispute, by me and by others. JamesMLane t c 13:52, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

We've moved over to this thread at your request once you created this, so I don't understand the frustration. As per lecturing, I would distinguish between arguing based on the wikipedia policies and citing+restating the wikipedia policies without arguing why they apply. The latter is what I've taken issue with, and will continue to take issue with. Apprentice57 (talk) 17:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

While a bit out of scope on the literal point of whether the source is acceptable in and of itself, I do think this would be acceptable and it does seem to sidestep the issue at hand. Apprentice57 (talk) 05:24, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, just trying to give us an easy win here but that's easier said that done! I do not believe there is a BLP violation in including their work criticizing the 13 keys model, I understand that it is indirectly critiquing what Lichtman is notable for, but there's a gap to me between Lichtman and legitimate/notable criticism of the keys (they are genuinely among the most notable critics of the system, as the articles Caraturane linked to indicate). I am hoping that the compromise (use sources and then reference The Postrider in criticism section) can just take the temperature down and be a workable solution, but I'll also wait for Caraturane to get back to us with some more information. Tomcleontis (talk) 14:12, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Addendum: JamesMLane decided to unilaterally go ahead and remove the citations across both pages. I was hoping that the compromise many of us suggested: to rely on the citations to direct sources in most parts, but keep the citation to The Postrider source in the Criticism section would have let us put this aside and move on while adhering to policies. I am hopeful that getting more information from them about their editorial independence is helpful but I would like us to avoid making unilateral movements, especially when so many of us are suggesting good faith proposals that comply with Misplaced Pages rules and serve the best interests of the page. Tomcleontis (talk) 17:17, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

To charge that I acted “unilaterally”, in light of the discussion right here, is preposterous.

But, if you think I’ve acted improperly, you don’t need to confine yourself to your criticisms of me here and in the Talk page thread. You have recourse. Misplaced Pages has an Arbitration Committee. It doesn’t adjudicate content disputes, but it does review charges of user misconduct (inappropriate unilateral action, bullying, undue lecturing, etc.). You might want to begin by familiarizing yourself with the dispute resolution policy. If you then conclude that arbitration, considered to be a last resort, is nevertheless in order here, a good place to start would be Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Introduction. You can then go to Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Case request to see how to file the case against me.

I’m providing these links just for your convenience. I recommend against attempting to begin an arbitration, but it’s your call. JamesMLane t c 21:52, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Preposterous? It's literally the definition of unilaterally to act on something that others haven't agreed to. That you initiated a discussion two days ago and *then* acted unilaterally does not change that it's unilateral. This opinion seeking thread literally gained the light agreement (on the unacceptable source) from two users and the three of us who have been editing that page for much longer still remain opposed to it.

You are not automatically correct here because you are familiar with wikipedia policies and can link to meta pages. I really object to the way you've handled yourself in this whole matter.

I recommend we revert the changes while we wait for others to weigh in on Tomcleontis' changes and/or for Caraturane to hear back. Perhaps JamesMLane will end up being right as per the wikipedia policies, but there's no rush here to make changes while we are working through this all. Apprentice57 (talk) 23:24, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

What is the reliability of Ground News?

In case you do not know, Ground News is a news aggregator that puts individual news stories on a political spectrum, based on how left- or right- or center leaning they believe the story is. Could this potentially be used when discussing the reliability of other sources? Or is it something like MBFC/NewsGuard and the like that without further context they should not be used? Awesome Aasim 04:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

The Ground News factuality score is an assessment of the reporting practices of a news publication. The score is based on the average rating of two rating systems: Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias Fact Check. (about page). So Ground News is about as usable as MBFC because they are MBFC (and WP:ADFONTES). Alpha3031 (t • c) 06:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Just another MBFC or AdFM (just someone's opinion), and much more importantly political leaning has absolutely nothing to do with reliability.

There is no valid answer to "Who watches the Watchmen?" Who checks the biases and political leanings of MBFC, AdFM, Ground News, or similar sites? Anyone set to watch the Watchmen becomes a Watchman. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 08:55, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

+1 Bluethricecreamman (talk) 14:26, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I wonder if it is possible that no possible combination of news rating systems can be used at all to discuss the reliability of sources. That or maybe all news content rating systems are inherently unreliable on their own, unless if they base their information from reliable sources such as scholarly journals and the like. However, if all the major news content rating systems claim that a source is reliable or not reliable, then it probably can be raised as an argument against using a source. Like for something like InfoWars, where NewsGuard, MBFC, and Ad Fontes Media all claim is unreliable, and Misplaced Pages has deprecated and blacklisted here. Awesome Aasim 16:21, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Not really, these sites use their own measures for judging sources while Misplaced Pages has it's own. So the fact they come to a particular judgement isn't really useful, editors should instead look to the relevant policies and guidelines.

That's not to say that the consensus here might not end up being the same as theirs, but that it might be reached based on different criteria. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:40, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

And who wacthes the Wkipedians? It always makes me laugh that a revolving, nebulous panel of non-experts (us) collectively thinks we know better than professionals and journalists who devote their work (sometimes even getting paid!) to analyze and rank sources, while clearly partisan sources are accepted without a second's hesitation (although lip-service is paid to beware of "partisan sources"). I predict no end to the beard-stroking and silly gatekeeping. Amateurs, rise up! --Animalparty! (talk) 00:29, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Because that's how Misplaced Pages works. That reliable sources are required is made up, and how we judge them is made up. But those things are generally agreed upon by editors, so that's how it's done.

Paid professionals and journalists are no less biased than any editor, other than by being paid they have an additional area of bias. Also their views of a source tend to be very entrenched in their own socio-culture norms, at least Misplaced Pages editor have some diversity.

As to partisan sources you should read WP:RSBIAS, the "Beware 'partisan sources'!" point is not one of reliability but NPOV. As relying on those sources alone gives a lopsided presentation of details.

As to who watches the Wikipedians, other Wikipedians. It's not a real solution, as I said there isn't one, but again it is the way Misplaced Pages works. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 10:46, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Reliability of Channel NewsAsia

Channel NewsAsia, or CNA, is another major news outlet in Singapore. How should we consider its reliability?

• Option 1: The source is recognized as being generally reliable.
• Option 2: There is no consensus or additional considerations apply.
• Option 3: The source is recognized as being generally unreliable in most cases, though it can be used under certain circumstances.
• Option 4: The source is recognized as being not reliable at all and should be deprecated.

If a few might find this familiar, that's because I took it from a similar discussion over The Straits Times. However, CNA might be more reliable than The Straits Times, given it's been promoted as a "pan-Asia" outlet, and isn't as afraid to give thinly-veiled criticisms of the Singapore government such as its recent analysis of POFMA (Singapore's fake news law).--ZKang123 (talk) 06:09, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Why is this an RfC? Has this source been challenged before, have editors expressed legitimate concerns?

The only thing I can see is that it has a pro-government bias according to the criticism section of it's article, but that is not an issue of reliability. Traumnovelle (talk) 06:36, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Seems premature to have this discussion. APK hi :-) (talk) 04:05, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Reliability of Qobuz for music credits

I am reviewing Wrap Me Up (Jimmy Fallon and Meghan Trainor song) for Good Article, and it uses Qobuz to source song credits. On the Qobuz website, I can see a link to "Improve album information" where users can submit requests for changes. I can't see any previous discussion here. What is the reliability for sourcing this information? Thanks in advance. Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 10:00, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Being able to request changes is a good thing, as it shows they are open to corrections. It would only be a problem if you could create an account and chnage the details yourself (see WP:User generated content).

They are a commercial company, and this would fall under the area of what they do, so I would expect them to be reliable for these details. They also have a magazine which should probably be discussed separately if it's necessary. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Are these reliable sources for Baalbek

Specifically this edit. Sources are . Thanks. Doug Weller talk 10:15, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I would say yes. Not familiar with voanews but Reuters is certainly reliable and Haaretz tends to be. Jeppiz (talk) 10:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Reuters and Haaretz would be reliable for it being a strong hold. Foreign Policy has an article from a decade ago saying the same. Neither Reuters or Haaretz mention militant, but it's from the Misplaced Pages article that says "political party and militant group". So militant group on its own could be changed to "militant and political group", but that's a content discussion. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:07, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Voanews is Voice of America, which is generally reliable. John M Baker (talk) 15:06, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the sources are pretty clear on this. APK hi :-) (talk) 04:03, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

CNET and ZDNET are now under Ziff Davis ownership. Should they get a new chance or continue be considered too unreliable?

Ziff Davis completed its acquisition of CNET and ZDNET on October 1, 2024 as seen in https://investor.ziffdavis.com/news-events/news/news-details/2024/Ziff-Davis-Completes-One-Acquisition-in-Q3-2024/default.aspx . Do we need to revisit their downgrades to unreliable status or not? Jesse Viviano (talk) 06:54, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Has there been a change in its editorial content in such a brief period? APK hi :-) (talk) 06:58, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Also, hasn't this been the case for a while? ZD owned both of those, just maybe not 100% of the stake. Andre🚐 07:02, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Ziff Davis started owning both on October 1, 2024. Both were owned by Red Ventures before then. Ziff Davis did sell ZDNet several years ago, and just bought it back. Jesse Viviano (talk) 07:07, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, ok, that's a long turn around, but CNET once owned ZDnet. Anyway, I agree too soon to see if they will change. Andre🚐 07:17, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Arab Humanities Journal

I'm doing the GA review for Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, and came across this journal as one of the references there. Looking at its and its publisher's websites, I got the impression it may not be a serious journal, but there is a huge language and cultural gap here, so I thought I'd ask here in case someone can judge this better than me. I'll paste my original review comment below.

The article cites the Arab Humanities Journal, (al-Zaeem 2022) which I have some doubts about. Looking at the journal's website through Google Translate, the "International classification" section has a bunch of random logos like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, etc. The only journal indexer I can glean from these is "International Scientific Indexing", a Web of Science impersonator. The publisher's website also doesn't arouse much confidence. On the FAQ page, about half the questions are about all manner of fees they charge, and they have this strange English "about us" page. Do you have any information on the reliability of this journal?

-- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 18:34, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Any journal that advertise fake impact factors and indexing services is shit. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:45, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages noticeboards
• Misplaced Pages dispute resolution
• Misplaced Pages requests for comment