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 more objective and factual 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.
First time I’ve had to use this on a post instead of a comment but here we go.
Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.
Apologies; fixed it in the main post, so the crossposts should be fixed as well now.
Thank you very much, I see that happen all the time so I like to have that message ready as a copy-paste. It’s actually really interesting to see the variety of reactions I get from people when I post it. I also want to add it left me really confused this one time since I really wasn’t expecting a mobile link so I thought something had gone wrong with my account settings and changed it back to the newer vector skin.
Yeah, prohibiting extremely biased sources is probably a good idea, and that list sounds like it has a sound basis.
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.
I think it’s a good idea in principle. It will likely upset a subset of people no matter how you slice it. If someone’s favourite source is on the list, they’ll decry the list as being “anti-chosen world view”
The reason the list is relatively short, in comparison to how many websites likely fall under its scope, is because adding entries to it requires the consensus of dozens or hundreds of Wikipedia editors, and only if that unreliability is consistent. Notably the list doesn’t exclude some questionably reliable sources, such as Fox News, as its purpose isn’t to remove sources of bias, rather sources of misinformation.
The list is pretty short. And mostly includes:
- State sponsered propaganda outlets: Russia Today, Global Times etc
- Very Low quality news that might aswell just go find the same story with a better source: Daily Mail, The Sun
- Far Right Super Biased News: OANN, Breibart, National Enquirer etc
Nice to see Epoch Times in there
Completely Agree
