cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599
Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.
While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.
To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.
Thanks for this.
FYI: The Tesseract UI puts MBFC badges on posts with their bias/credbility ratings and provides a short report and link to the full report on their site.
I wonder how hard it would be to pull this list into a JSON file to use as an additional reference?
Thanks to your support in sharing this method, it is being employed by the moderation team. A bot scans for new posts and notifies the mods if there is a low credibility rating. We do not currently use bots to take any direct action on this basis.
A bot scans for new posts and notifies the mods if there is a low credibility rating.
Could it leave a comment visible to the general community on the article in question alerting the rest of us to low credibility sources?
For those worried about blocking certain viewpoints, it’s important to note that the sources on the list aren’t there for the unpopularity of their opinions, but rather the frequent publication of misinformation. For instance, Fox News, despite its frequent bias, is not one of the publications on the list.
As others have noted, the list can essentially be summarized as state-sponsored, tabloid, and extremist media outlets that, intentionally or not, have editing standards that result in misinformation on a regular basis.
Interesting to see last.fm, am I missing something?
In that case the issue is that it’s user generated content. Just as you’d cite the references listed after a Wikipedia article for the source of that information rather than Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia policy favors references to established publications over those compiled by users in a manner similar to Wikipedia itself.
For the information to be verifiable, its original source has to be both clear and reputable.
According to the linked RFC it’s due to the site’s user generated content. I guess that’s an understandable policy for Wikipedia.
Banning from this community won’t make them disappear from site like facebook and twitter that have millions of more visitors, but it will keep people in this community from seeing the kinds of things facebook and twitter users see.
Bad articles from bad sources are a problem that should be solved by an intelligent and active community that downvotes and leaves comments pointing out the article and/or source’s weakness. If the moderators don’t think we have a strong enough community for that this might be necessary, but I don’t think it is.
