Citation definitely needed: Wikipedia is far from perfect but British newspapers *are* unreliable sources...
The British press' own methods of deciding what is notable are far more opaque and prone to unreliability than the online encyclopaedia.
There has been a simmering war on Wikipedia playing out in the British press for years, with the newspapers’ antipathy for the online encyclopaedia intensified by the Wikipedia editing community’s decision in 2017 to declare The Daily Mail (and its tits and teeth obsessed online version MailOnline) to be “generally unreliable sources”. Perhaps fearing it would be next The Times roared in a leader column:
Wikipedia editors’ fastidiousness, however, [appeared] to reflect less a concern for accuracy than dislike of The Daily Mail’s opinions…
Meanwhile, The Guardian said…
The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin-backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.
… and carried this gloriously bitchy statement from The Daily Mail:
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this move by Wikipedia. For the record, The Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability.
The paper revealed just how unbothered it was by the decision by publishing a hit job by its go-to-guy (literally) for that kind of rage-drenched feature, Guy Adams, who contributed a piece with the not-at-all-unhinged headline —
— which targeted individual Wikipedia editors and howled that The Daily Mail was “the only major news outlet on the face of the Earth to be so censored”.
That’s the same Daily Mail that — as Slate noted in an article last month on “Wikipedia’s war” on the paper — faked pages from its own archives:
In 2015, The Daily Mail published an article titled ‘Read history as it happened: Extraordinary Daily Mail pages from the day Adolf Hitler died 70 years ago this week’. The featured image in the 2015 story purported to be a photo of the front page of The Daily Mail’s print edition from that time, which boldly declared ‘HITLER DEAD’.
The actual front page from 1945 used a slightly different headline, ‘Hitler Dead, German Radio Tells World’ and included different content. “Is it just me or this extremely weird: The Daily Mail forging its own archival front pages?” tweeted Huw Lemmey, a British writer.
All the mocked up paper needed to really fit in with the modern Mail’s sensibility was a picture story on Princess Margaret declaring her “all grown up” and a competition to win a pile of ration coupons.
Other examples of The Daily Mail’s inaccurate or downright distorted reporting cited by Wikipedians included publishing the wrong verdict in the Amanda Knox case and a ginned-up tale from 2014 about residents of Beijing forced to watch the sunrise on big screens because the sun was hidden by smog. Time magazine quickly published a correction admitting that the sunrise image was actually from an ad. 7 years later, The Daily Mail story remains online and uncorrected.
The challenge faced by Wikipedians when assessing sources is also inadvertently illustrated by the Salon article on its battle with The Daily Mail. It erroneously refers to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the UK press regulator whose decisions in part inspired the verdict that The Daily Mail is an unreliable source, as “the International Press Standards Organisation”.
On any given day, the media is littered with errors, distortions and deceptions1 — both accidental and intentional — and where Wikipedia, while flawed, relies on the collective intelligence of thousands of editors, newspapers, in particular, are the product of a far smaller coterie of people and reflect the whims of an even smaller gang of proprietors.2
It takes some front then for Laura Freeman, writing for The Daily Telegraph — a paper that leans so right it can only walk in circles — to declare “Left-leaning Wikipedia is no match for my shelf of dictionaries” with a lede that claims:
The website has narrowed our knowledge, with vast numbers of people now relying on the same often dubious sources.
The Daily Telegraph publishes Allison Pearson — a writer who among other things contributed to the scare stories and conspiracy theories around the MMR vaccine, called for internment camps in the UK after the Manchester Arena bombing, falsely claimed a photo of a child on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was staged during the 2019 election campaign (she said it was “100% faked”) and has repeatedly echoed and amplified conspiracist talking points during the Covid-19 pandemic — on a weekly basis. It is an unreliable source.
The hook for Freeman’s column is an Unherd3 interview by one of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, who left the site in 2007. He said:
You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.
Sanger has been waging his own one-man war on Wikipedia since before he actually left the organisation. He launched a rival, Citizendium, in 2006 and has offered his criticisms of Wikipedia to news outlets often in recent years.
His examples of ‘bias’ include editors stating that clearly incorrect statements4 by Donald Trump were false (in an interview with Fox News) and complaining in an interview with The Sunday Times just yesterday that Wikipedia saying homoeopathy is pseudoscience and “ineffective” is a failure of neutrality.
Freeman treats Sanger as a reliable, unbiased source — despite his long-running feud with Wikipedia’s other co-founder Jimmy Wales5 — because his views chime with her own beliefs. She continues:
As for bias, fake news and misinformation... A lie may get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on, but a lie or even a leaning one way or the other on Wikipedia can become as good as law.
You know where you are with Penguin, Oxford, Collins and even Arthur Mee. Sturdy hardbacks, solid ground. There is, of course, no such thing as infallible. I admire the Oxford English Dictionary’s honesty when next to etymology it gives a shoulder-shrugging: “origin unknown”.
I also love reference books and have a huge pile of them within arm’s reach of the desk where I’m typing this very sentence but the way they are produced is much less transparent than Wikipedia. Of course, we can see where Wikipedia’s biases and problems lie, it is the Pompidou Centre of public debate where anyone can peer at the shit flowing through its pipes.
In a 2018 study that compared 4,000 Wikipedia articles to their counterparts in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu attempted to measure the slant (Democratic vs. Republican) and degree of bias in each contribution. They concluded that Wikipedia entries on civil rights, corporations, and government tended to be slanted towards Democratic views while entries on immigration trended toward Republican positions.
Greenstein and Zhu also concluded that while Wikipedia articles tended to begin more left-wing than their counterparts in Britannica, “the difference in bias between a pair of articles [decreased] with more revisions”. Over time, differences in terms of bias between Wikipedia and Britannica became statistically negligible as revisions continued.
The decisions that lead to what appears (and does not appear) in newspapers are opaque and taken by a small number of people. Many newspaper editors never speak publicly about how their product is assembled. We’re just expected to take on trust that the sausage is made of good wholesome ingredients rather than blood, guts and sawdust.
If you analyse the British newspapers as I do on a daily basis, it quickly becomes apparent that Wikipedia’s “citation needed” warning could be sprinkled all over their pages. Newspapers are partial, partisan, propagandistic things. That would be okay if more people knew that and consumed their stories with a cynical eye but we’re told over and over again that papers give us the facts and that they are far superior to the “cesspool” of social media or the “unreliable” Wikipedia.
That’s not really true. The trolls of the British press simply benefit from the power of a byline and the advantage of professional photographers to take their profile pictures. They can be no less cruel than the most vituperative of online voices, but their cruelty is excused as debate, while criticism of them is condemned as unacceptable abuse. I come neither to praise Wikipedia nor to bury it, but let’s not pretend that papers provide some Platonic ideal of truth.
Nor do I think that the words of Larry Sanger should be treated as interventions from a philosopher-king. Consider this quote from the Unherd interview:
If you look at the articles that Wikipedia has, you can just see how they are simply mouthing the view of the World Economic Council or World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organisation, the CDC and various other establishment mouthpieces like Fauci — they take their cues from them…There’s a global enforcement of a certain point of view, which is amazing to me, a libertarian, or a liberty-loving conservative.
The phrases “mouthing the view of the World Economic Council or World Economic Forum” and “other establishment mouthpieces like Fauci” could as easily have been spoken by sentient binbag and Infowars frontman Alex Jones, another figure who can be described as an “unreliable source”.
Freeman concludes her Telegraph column by saying:
I know I’m a dinosaur (“figurative. Someone or something that has not adapted to changing circumstances; also, an object, institution, etc., that is extremely large and unwieldy”), but I stand by my dictionary shelf. In the OED we trust.
Did you know the OED recently changed the definition of “gullible”?
As is this newsletter! Always read multiple sources. And never trust anyone who claims to be neutral.
Three billionaire families — the Murdochs, Rothermeres, and Barclays — control 68% of the UK’s national newspaper circulation. (source)
… speaking of unreliable sources.
Commonly known as “lies”.
Wales and Sanger first started working on Wikipedia after arguing online about Ayn Rand. Wales is still a big Rand fan. His daughter Kira is named after the protagonist in Rand’s anti-communist novel, “We the Living.”