The Mail vs Wikipedia: They're more alike than they'd ever admit When you live in a glass house, is it wise to start a rock-throwing competition? Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and …
Um, "...defend proud provincial values from the metropolitan elites...?"
Say what? Even a cursory glance at a political page on Wikipedia shows the slant there is decidedly left. The left is strongest in the elite metropolitan areas. It's in provincial areas where the right resides, primarily. Oh it may have been different many decades ago, but that's how it is now. Yet the left continues with the fiction that they are the provincials fighting against big city machine.
How many more years before the left admits they are the elite oppressors now? I know, I know, never happen...
Seriously, just what is "the left", anyway? Would I be considered "left"? I mean, in economic matters I'm very socialist, bordering on communist, but in social matters I'm pretty libertarian in outlook. I despise religion of all stripes and am against both Muslim and Christian world views (which actually aren't that far apart, anyway), and I also think the identity-politics crowd are a bunch of idiots who want to wrap the world in cotton wool. Where does that come on your single-dimension scale?
I've seen many of you "what is yours is mine, but what is mine is mine!". "Everything must be free because I'm too lazy to earn the money I want to spend, or at least someone else has to pay for it!" And of course "I want to be free to follow my instincts in the most egoistic way I could think of - and any substance that helps is welcome".
Usually someone in his thirty or forty still living out of some parents' money, or exploiting some poor partner.
Grow up...
@fajensen, look at you! You couldn't even create your own attack on me? Dude, if you have to piggyback on someone else's kneejerk attack, you know what that makes you? The little minion who pipes up every time the boss makes a witticism.
If you dislike what I say so much, try making up your own slams. You will 'enjoy' it more, perhaps.
They are both the same in that they've got words.
Would anyone wipe their arse with the Daily Mail, having cheaper more comfortable alternatives available for cheaper in the supermarket?
I wouldn't wipe my arse with The Register either. Too sharp, might get an electrical shock.
Does an encyclopaedia do daily news or try to use it to change the political landscape of a country? Yeah, by change I mean poison. If you disagree with me you're an enemy of the people. Get the pitchforks ready, we're going after one of the branches of government.
>I wouldn't wipe my arse with The Register either. Too sharp, might get an electrical shock.
Not to mention gorilla glass, just smears everywhere and creates a terrible mess.
Warning ! Don't try this with anything smaller than a 10 inch tablet as you could end up with an embarrassing trip to casualty, doubly embarrassing if you forgot to put your phone on silent and didn't turn off vibrate.
On a side note I'd like to complain about the waiting times in UK A&E departments, I've been stood here for five hours as sitting down is too uncomfortable on those cheap hard plastic chairs, it's a disgrace.
If you hadn't included the bit about hard plastic chairs I'd have known for certain that the joke was intended; however having suffered from having to sit on the ones in our local A&E hospital recently I can assure you that they are quite uncomfortable enough without any other "issues" to make them more so; therefore I wasn't sure if the complaint was a genuine venting based on (non-phone related) experience!
>If you tell us the number that'll help to make sure we don't accidentally dial it.
All done now, I wonder if Samsung will still honour it's return policy on the Note 7.
Still working as well, but I've 84 missed calls all from companies wanting to know if I've been mis-sold PPI.
You *still* think Wikipedians are "trying to improve their reliability"? Maybe search for and read the results of a systematic experiment that revealed that not only do Wikipedians not spot obvious errors, when the errors get fixed they may even strive to return them to the erroneous version! Do a web search for "Experiment concludes most misinformation inserted into Wikipedia may persist", then read that. Learn. Don't repeat PR pablum that's been paid for with $60 million of annual donations.
Yeah?
Pet peeve activated: "Trying" is a very popular failure mode for all of these Good People with only the best intentions and rich friends with private islands to show for it!
I mean "The Left" has been "trying" so very, very, very, hard for at least 2 decades to "do something" about things like environmental destruction, rising inequality, corporate ascension to power and Islamization. So far, worse on all parameters, but, by God they are Trying.
It supports your point, I think, that the weird forms of human behaviour, the sort we do NOT talk about at the dinner table, all seem to have names derived from Greek rather than Latin.
I'd give a few examples but owing to natural delicacy etc etc
Oh yeah. I remember very well the "Antique History" classes in high school with the semi-attractive but crazy female history teacher getting all steamy over the orgie parts of the classic texts.
No piece of pottery was left unturned in them days if it was suspected that something perverse might be hidden underneath.
"both depend heavily for their traffic on showbiz trivia"
Wikipedia lives on donations, not advertising; therefore they don't depend on page views for cash. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that their donations are not predominantly coming from people interested in "showbiz trivia".
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"Wikipedia's exhaustive detailing of sexual practices – including masturbation photos thoughtfully uploaded by contributors – is a wonder of the age."
Sex education is a necessary part of modern life.
See this chart by state in the USA. The lighter the colour the more STIs. It appears to correlate with a state's lack of sex education.
https://www.indy100.com/article/map-us-states-with-most-stis-7573761
Simply saying "dayley-mayell" is enough to get you on a BBC Radio 4 comedy. Probably for life.
In case you haven't seen this wonderful spearing of the panel game format
I have long been unimpressed by Mr. Orlowski's chip on the shoulder about Wikipedia, but I might have to change my opinion over this Daily Mail move. While the Daily Mail certainly has its issues, some other news organisations, for example some widely acknowledged to be little more than propaganda outlets for certain governments, are not similarly banned. I looked through the discussion they had before deciding on this ban, and while a handful of examples of factual errors on the part of the Mail were given, they were mostly on issues of low importance (celebrity news etc), and not enough anyway to say that they are systematically unreliable. I could certainly point to similar numbers of factual errors on far more important topics from a number of other news organisations.
Wikipedia has now put itself in the position of being the arbiter of what constitutes a reliable source for citations, without having a clear set of criteria for what constitutes such, or a rigorous process for considering and implementing a ban on a particular organisation. It looks bad to me, really bad. They need to step up and regularise this now, set credible criteria and procedures for deciding what constitutes a reliable source, and explain how they plan to evaluate all news organisations that are currently widely cited on Wikipedia in a fair way. But I'm not holding my breath.
You say that, but the difference is intention. The Mail strives for sensationalist bullshit to sell to the prejudices of small minded Little Englanders, and occasionally slips in something resembling a retelling of current affairs to convince them it is educating them. Wikipedia strives for independence, balance and accuracy, and occasionally makes a mistake. The two are simply not on the same level.
Did you see the Mail article recently about the poor lady who went into early labour while on a plane to London? She had an emergency delivery of quadruplets, two of whom died shortly afterwards. How did the Mail treat this woman? Well, I'll give you a hint. She was black, and Nigerian.
Show me anything in Wikipedia that compares to that, or to the "Enemies of the People" bullshit, and I'll listen.
I don't think you entirely listened to what tony72 said. It wasn't about equivalence at all - it was about the consistency of Wikipedia's judgement on reliability of sources. Which, particularly on marginal topics where there isn't much freely available sourcing, is basically arbitrary, as one or two people end up declaring for transparently ideological reasons that a minor academic source isn't reliable enough for inclusion, but some arsewipe's hatefilled hatchetjob opinion piece in a backwater press organ is.
That article was about recouping the money spent by the NHS treating that lady
Its a fair point. If it had happened to my wife over the USA we would have had to pay. Just because the NHS is publicly funded shouldn't change the fact, . I don't think colour or nationality came into it.
I am not a fan of the Daily Mail but you comment is sligjly misleading.
>a handful of examples of factual errors on the part of the Mail
There may only have been a handful in that discussion, but there are many more to be found elsewhere:-
"In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a resolution negotiated, at least partially, after the PCC’s intervention. The number far exceeds that for any other British newspaper: the files show 394 complaints against the Sun, 221 against the Daily Telegraph, 115 against the Guardian. The complaints will serve as a charge sheet against the Mail and its editor."
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/03/lies-of-the-daily-mail.html
-- shameless glitz and pop culture, and Wikipedia starts to look better. Last night, dark and dreary, I was a-googling articles on the geology of Death Valley. The molting raven on my windowsill muttering "Nevermore!" was no help. In the end, Wickedpedia had the best over-all summary, though there some research articles (most behind paywalls) appeared to give more detail on specific formations.
Yes, of course, as a crowd-sourced info source WP has intrinsic flaws. But in a big enough crowd, there are going to be geologists and geophysicists, and some may contribute. So WP also has intrinsic strengths, also due to it's crowd-sourced nature.
Miss out on that, and you've missed a huge diffy between the DM and WP.
Methinks those who compare WP with the DM have an orange in one hand, an apple in the other, and a bee up the nose.
Wikipedia don't employ the likes of Katie Hopkins (do look up here work if you've not read any of it before, it's an experience) nor Sarah (Mrs Michael Gove) Vine neither.
To return to main thrust of article though, my reading of Wikipedia discussion is that DM should not be used when there are better sources and to be treated with caution when it is the only source. The latter chiefly happening when celebrity news is involved and Wikipedia is mindful of not publishing libel. Which is where DM has had problems - and we are back to K Hopkins again (full apology, £150,000 damages).
Most of the stuff that Wikipedia publishes is clean information -- its very difficult to put a fake news spin on a RJ45 connector, for example. So trying to put a tabloid like the Daily Mail and this organization in the same category is just plain ludicrous. The real issue is how we deal with science that may be controversial or disputed. Again, there's no equivalency between fake news -- which is really editorialization, adjusting the perspective of facts to suit an already held opinion, and the Daily Mail which actually has a historical track record in this game that predates the Internet itself by many decades.
Surely the key difference is the obligation Wiki places - and polices - on authors to provide sources. Anyone doing serious research might find a good or bad summary of the current state of knowledge in a Wikipedia article but that's only ever a starting point. You then go to the sources and make your own mind up about their credibility and the overall credibility of the article. If you are not impressed, and sufficiently motivated, you can then edit the article to try to correct any errors you think you've identified. And you'll be required to post your own sources (or criticised for not)
Those features alone place them in a different universe to the Daily Wail. The only time they ever publish sources is when required to by the source and if you've ever tried to correct one of their egregious errors you'll be aware of how futile that effort can be.
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