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What is the reliability of Legal Insurrection for courtroom reporting of legal trials?

Mokadoshi (talk) 04:08, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

This has been discussed previously but no clear consensus was reached: Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 335#RfC: Legal Insurrection. While its blog articles tend to be political opinions, the blog also features courtroom reporting of major trials. I have found this reporting quite helpful for presenting additional information about the legal strategies used by attorneys in Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College. For example, this article makes the following factual claims:

  1. The plaintiff (Gibson's Bakery) hired an accountant to make a determination of financial damages using tax documents and other financial statements.
  2. The accountant estimated the business would be impacted for 30 years.
  3. The accountant calculated total projected damages to be $5.8 million.
  4. The defense (Oberlin College) hired an expert witness which testified that the maximum damages possible could only be $35,000.

The article was written by Daniel McGraw who was in attendance in the court room during the trial, and he has written for the NYT and some other publications that are also referenced in the Wikipedia article. Ohio Supreme Court documents confirm (1) and (2), but as far as I can tell, Legal Insurrection is the only available source for (3) and (4). Based on this information, I'm inclined to believe (3) and (4) are factually accurate. The Wikipedia article benefits from this information, particularly point (4), because without it the article is too strongly written in the plaintiff's point of view. I am trying to improve this article to GA status, and I believe it will be hard to achieve WP:NPOV without reporting of the defense's arguments in court. Not many news agencies provide this level of coverage. I have cited Legal Insurrection a few times in this article for similar reporting. As a blog, I think it's clear it cannot be considered "generally reliable." However, I'm wondering if we can have a discussion about whether it could be considered reliable specifically for its court room reporting on arguments made by a legal team during a court trial. Mokadoshi (talk) 04:08, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

because without it the article is too strongly written in the plaintiff's point of view [...] I believe it will be hard to achieve WP:NPOV without reporting of the defense's arguments in court.

As a matter of policy, that is not how NPOV works. We do not pick a predetermined point of view that we think is neutral or balanced and then go out to find the sources that can support it. We survey all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic and cover those views in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. Alpha3031 (t • c) 06:56, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
I'm just trying to address the NPOV feedback given to me on the article's Talk page. Still, the NPOV issues aside, the question here is whether these types of articles can be considered subject matter experts as they are written by professional journalists that have written about the same court case for other newspapers. Mokadoshi (talk) 07:04, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't think journalists are considered subject matter experts generally speaking, and I would not consider just being a journalist to be a qualifier for EXPERTSPS. Also, I don't know if my interpretation is anywhere close to what voorts intended, but if the two issues identified are 1) POV and 2) marginal RS in support of that POV, the solution is not usually to add marginal RS in support of the opposite POV. My recommendation would be to first try and cut down the play-by-play to what is in your top secondary RS and consider what the overall thrust is like (you can do it in your head or just as a plan, it doesn't have to be written). Other sources can then be used to fill in the gaps, but you'd want to try and adhere to the proportion set by your top RS, and not let the rest of the sources dominate (which includes the mentioned RSOPINION, any primary sources like court documents even though there is usually no question about their reliability, etc). I would suggest extreme care using primary sources when DUE is implicated (not just first-party: Independent sources may not necessarily be secondary, and secondary sources not independent), primary sources are generally too narrow to properly assess DUE, and it's unlikely you'd be able to fix a DUE problem with them. Alpha3031 (t • c) 14:42, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
My point was more about WP:RSBIAS, which is that we should be careful about the context in which we use biased RSes. I was not saying that the sources were per se unreliable, but that in context, non-biased sources should be preferred over biased ones when reporting on factual issues. voorts (talk/contributions) 14:46, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
Mmm. Caution is to be applied to the ordinary reporting of biased sources, but the editorial and opinion pieces (even in otherwise excellent sources) are also covered under WP:RSOPINION. So in general those would be considered unreliable, for statements of fact, and especially for establishing due weight. Alpha3031 (t • c) 08:25, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
  • We need to be very careful to restrict any decision to courtroom reporting. A quick search of the website's front page reveals recent (non-courtroom reporting) articles that are obviously opinion pieces and not marked as such. First example Leslie Eastman's article on lab-grown meat: I might be more sensitive to that argument were it not for the electric vehicle mandates and the ban on gas stoves I have been battling for many years Second example Mary Chastain's article on pro-Palestine protests at an American university: What a bunch of spineless cowards. Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway agreed to eight of the ten demands given to him by the pro-Hamas mob [...] This one sickens me because these people are TOTES the victims here, not Jews and Israel Third example, Mike LaChance's commentary on links on transgender swimmer: Once again, Biden is putting the priorities of the far left over real problems the country is facing. All he cares about is votes. Democrats are becoming victims of their own policies. The effort to ‘get’ Trump continues. Fourth example, Stacey Matthews' article on pro-Palestine protests at an American university: As further evidence that the lunatics are indeed running the asylum at Columbia University ... So apparently Jewish students, faculty and staff, and their families were supposed to be assured ... Yeah, right. None of these authors' articles should be used for facts. starship.paint (RUN) 03:56, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
    • Turns out that Legal Insurrection has apparently eleven regular contributions, I covered four above, leaving seven, now minus Mandy Nagy for not writing since 2014 since suffering a stroke, leaving six, let's check them for opinion articles. Kemberlee Kaye, Senior Contributing Editor: On October 7, and 8, and 9, and beyond, the putrid hate generated by these ideologies spewed forth on campuses, shocking the nation. Our readers were not shocked. I wish we had been wrong. But we were right. Fuzzy Slippers, Weekend Editor: You can’t make this stuff up. The least self-aware politician in the entire nation, Hillary Clinton (who is sometimes referred to as “Killery” for the long long list of dead bodies that float up in her wake) has just taken Democrat projection to a whole new level. James Nault, Author: Although the previous Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army General Mark A. Milley, was terrible, as we reported almost a year ago, his relief and the current Chairman, Air Force General Charles Q. “CQ” Brown, is even worse Jane Coleman, Author: You might think that after the school finally put its foot down, the Intifada campus crowd would get the message. Instead, they pushed back harder ... This is exactly the kind of mealymouthed answer that got the presidents of UPenn and Harvard ousted following their disgraceful appearances before the congressional committee investigating campus antisemitism last December. William A. Jacobson, Founder: Woke eats its own ... Oorah for that, but maybe it’s time to for woke corporate America to wake up to the monsters they have created ... Google is horrendously biased. And everyone knows it. Only one out of ten active contributors, Vijeta Uniyal, who is based in Germany and reports on international news, did not immediately appear to be writing opinion articles. I would say that the other nine can be discounted for facts. starship.paint (RUN) 04:17, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
    • @Mokadoshi, Simonm223, Slatersteven, Dumuzid, and NoonIcarus: - notifying of the above. starship.paint (RUN) 04:24, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
      Since this is seeing some activity again: Just for the record, my opinion is that it's generally unreliable per WP:BLOG, I just don't see why we need an RFC about it. Not that GUNREL means never use, and I doubt we'd need to DEPREC if it's only come up twice, but using it doesn't solve the stated issue (that of NPOV/DUE). RFC seems to me to be a bit of an XY problem, so to speak. Court room reporting is PRIMARY anyway, different content type, different level of WP:EXCEPTIONAL, different standards. Alpha3031 (t • c) 04:58, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
      Thanks @Starship.paint I agree we should hesitate to use this source. Simonm223 (talk) 11:33, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Nothing about this source distinguishes it from any random political blog. —100.36.106.199 (talk) 11:21, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I have found this reporting quite helpful for presenting additional information about the legal strategies used by attorneys in Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College. Oh, no wonder, it’s User:E.M.Gregory’s response when they were prevented from adding poor material at Oberlin College. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 11:28, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Are you suggesting I’m a sock? Mokadoshi (talk) 13:43, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I was commenting on how the article came to exist and why it's chock full of poor sources. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 00:12, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • 3, based on the helpful discussions above: Even in cases where the source may be valid, it is usually better to find a more reliable source instead. I don't see a problem with the specific use case in the OP, but it seems clear that there are ample reasons to be wary of this source, and in most cases there should be better sources available. And if this is indeed the only source that covers a particular proceeding at a particular level of detail, it may be worth considering whether that level of detail is appropriate for our encyclopedic purposes. -- Visviva (talk) 02:29, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Option 4 This isn't the New York Times, they will be of a lesser quality based on the blog-type column they use to publish. I'm hesitant to endorse them unless they have a robust fact-checking process in place. Oaktree b (talk) 17:53, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
    I think you are looking for Option 3. Option 4 is basically the nuclear option and should only be used if there are known cases of deliberately lying or a long history of being so careless as to be beyond unusable. Springee (talk) 12:20, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
  • Option 3. This is biased blog and should be treated as such. Per another editor's comments, even in cases where the source may be valid, we should look for better sources. Going to the OP's question about adding balance to an article, I think they've completely misunderstood WP:NPOV. We should always rely on the best sources that we have available. TarnishedPathtalk 12:28, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
  • Option 2-3 I would be warry of putting too much weight into material from such a site. However, if this site makes a case that some main stream source is making a mistake in their coverage I would be inclined to include it as an attributed counter point. They also could be used for in non-extraordinary claims regarding the trials they are reporting on, again with attribution. Basically I don't think we should argue for exclusion purely on this being a minor newish site (we accept crap like the Daily Dot after all) but arguments for/against it's use should be based on the specifics of what is being claimed and if relevant, the quality of the arguments in question. Springee (talk) 12:34, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
  • Option 2-3 - factual reporting with attribution seems appropriate to use while their opinion wouldn't meet the due weight threshold in most cases. Dcpoliticaljunkie (talk) 22:42, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

The Telegraph and trans issues

For a while it's been fairly clear that certain British papers aren't reliable on trans issues. The most clear example of this by a large margin is the Telegraph, which appears to still be considered generally reliable on this topic mostly because nobody has bothered to compile examples of them making factual errors.

I finally sat down to do it over the past month and I found some real whoppers:

  • The Telegraph ran the following five stories on consecutive days asserting that a secret recording at a school was evidence that the school let students identify as cats. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
We have a whole article on this general style of dubious claim in right wing media, it's called the litter boxes in schools hoax. Naturally, it is not true in this case as well. See the following evidence: [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
What appears to have happened is that a student compared another student identifying as trans to identifying as a cat to score a rhetorical point. There was a whole government investigation on this which completely cleared the school and the Telegraph has not retracted or corrected any of their articles. Indeed, if you look at the latest one you can see the Telegraph attempting to imply that the school's denial of the claims is false.
  • The Telegraph regularly quotes a man named James Esses as a proxy for Thoughtful Therapists, which they describe as a group of counsellors and psychologists concerned with impact of gender ideology on young people or similar. ([11] [12] [13] [14] [15]). They rarely make it clear that James Esses is not and has never been a therapist: he was kicked out of his program for expressing largely the same anti-trans sentiments that they keep quoting him for, and is clear about this on his very own website: [16].
  • The Telegraph recently released this article that is in part about a group called Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia. Note that for one, they describe TACTT as "trans activists" despite also being a professional organization with an agenda; contrast to their treatment of Thoughtful Therapists above. But more importantly TACTT released this response criticizing essentially every factual claim in the article about them. The most clear errors in my view are that the Telegraph called the Cass Review a report on the dangers of gender ideology when it is in fact a systematic review about trans healthcare; they describe the UKCP, a voluntary professional organization, as a regulator; and they describe calling a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the UKCP as a "coup" and "bullying" instead of a fairly ordinary parliamentary procedure. Oh, and they weren't contacted by the Telegraph before the article.

And there's tons more to be clear, I don't even have all of it on my page assembling the issues. I've mostly been ignoring factual claims made in opinion pieces, for instance (except for a truly wild claim that Joseph Mengele was transitioning children). Loki (talk) 21:37, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

I would like to add some context. In 1978, Glad to Be Gay was released, known colloqually as "britains national gay anthem".
It contained the Stanza

Read how disgusting we are in the press
The Telegraph, People and Sunday Express
Molesters of children, corruptors of youth
It's there in the paper, it must be the truth

What they are referring to is Section 28, a proto-Don't Say Gay bill, which the Telegraph repeatedly platformed homophobic support for and was criticized by LGBT rights groups for.[17][18][19][20] Here's some sources that investigate their opposition to LGBT marriage[21][22]

This non-exhaustive historical context is to drive the point home: The Telegraph has been recognizably anti-LGBT for over 4 decades now. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 22:36, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
There's also a variety of scholarly sources that bear out that the Telegraph is a biased source on trans issues, such as this one this one on coverage of the organization Mermaids and this one on the British press in general.
They were also reprimanded by a regulator a few times for inaccurate statements about transgender issues. Loki (talk) 23:02, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
I looked at many of the cited articles, and some listed here, but almost all the examples have nothing to do with the "reliability" of the Telegraph. They simply show that the Telegraph can be biased when it comes to coverage of trans/lgbt topics. It is well-established here that biased sources =/ unreliable sources. The few examples of where the Telegraph may have been factually incorrect is not enough to argue for deprecation/unreliability. Re cat: The Telegraph ran a article (not listed above) about the government clearing the school's name. And the original Telegraph article just seems to be an accurate transcript of the purported video. Re regulators: this example has almost nothing to do with trans coverage. It also deals with an opinion article. And the regulator even acknowledged that the publication had shown it was willing to correct the record promptly once it had become aware of the inaccuracy. Therefore, on balance, it considered the remedial action was offered with due promptness. So that's really a point to the Telegraph for making prompt corrections in their (opinion) articles. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 04:45, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that even in the article you linked, there is no mention that the Telegraph got it wrong the first time and no student ever claimed to be a cat. So that's now six articles without a correction or retraction, after directly claiming that the student in question identifies as a cat several times. Loki (talk) 04:53, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I see nothing in those articles that state the Telegraph claiming that factually, simply reporting that claim made by others as central to the news story. — Masem (t) 15:42, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I mean we wouldn't get away with repeating lies (even with attribution) on Wikipedia and I don't think a newspaper should be considered reliable if it repeatedly does the same. LunaHasArrived (talk) 16:00, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
The very first line of the very first article I linked is A school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat.
Furthermore, see the following quotes:
  • Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat.
  • The incident at Rye College, first reported by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour.
  • A teacher at Rye College, a state secondary in East Sussex, was recorded telling a pupil who refused to accept her classmate was a cat that she was despicable. [...] The Telegraph has revealed that at other schools teachers are allowing children to identify as horses, dinosaurs and even moons.
  • Sir Keir’s comments are the most outspoken by any party leader over the issue since The Telegraph revealed that two children were reprimanded by a teacher for questioning a classmate’s cat identity.
Just so we're clear, that's an explicit statement of the false claim in the paper's own words in every article but the last one. And what appear to be several other extremely dubious claims in the same vein in a few. Loki (talk) 18:25, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, these are pretty unequivocally examples of The Telegraph saying in its own voice that there are students really identifying as cats (and as dinosaurs and moons, apparently). The claim that all The Telegraph did was report what people said is off the mark and obfuscates the depth of the paper's promulgation of misinformation. The Telegraph has told the world in its own voice that The Telegraph says teachers are allowing children to identify as horses, dinosaurs and even moons—how much more in its own voice can one get? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:35, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
To go through those one by one:
  1. That isn't saying that a student identified as a cat, it is saying that a teacher told a pupil they were "despicable" for refusing to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat. That is true, and supported by a recording - whether the student actually identified as a cat is a different question.
  2. Same as #1
  3. That doesn't say the student identifies as a cat, that is saying other students at other schools identified as various animals. Have these claims been established as false?
  4. Same as #1 and #3
  5. Same as #1
At no point does the Telegraph say, in their own voice, that a student identified as a cat. BilledMammal (talk) 23:08, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
What part of "a students decision to self-identity as a cat"(2) means the telegraph isn't saying a student identifies as a cat. LunaHasArrived (talk) 23:17, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
The full context is children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat. In this full context, we see that it isn't saying the student identified as a cat - only that the teacher told students off for not accepting it. BilledMammal (talk) 23:48, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Sorry, this isn't saying "a student was deciding whether to identify as a cat or not". It's saying "a students decision to self identify as a cat". If I said "the UK's decision to vote conservative at the last general election" I am saying that the UK did in fact vote conservative, there is no other way to read this. LunaHasArrived (talk) 23:55, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I only saw your edit after posting. To amend my comparison, if I said "Labour party members were reprimanded after refusing to accept the UK's decision to leave the EU" what am I saying about the UKs decision about leaving the EU. LunaHasArrived (talk) 23:58, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict) You keep omitting the first part of the sentence, which changes the meaning of the second part. Without that first part, you would be correct - but because the Telegraph includes the first part, you're not, and the Telegraph is only saying why the teacher reprimanded the students, not whether the reason the teacher reprimanded the students was factually accurate. If this doesn't clarify things for you I'm not sure anything will, so I'm going to back out of this conversation now. BilledMammal (talk) 00:00, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
I agree with Dr. Swag Lord; possibly biased, but no evidence that they are unreliable. In fact, I would point out that this is one of the most reliable sources in Britain.
The fact that British media has a different opinion on this topic than American media doesn’t make British media unreliable, and attempting to paint it as biased or unreliable because of that difference in opinion would reduce the neutrality of our coverage of the topic by omitting positions that differ from the American position. BilledMammal (talk) 05:02, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Just a note that speaking in terms of dichotomy between the UK and US is potentially misleading: there's the rest of Anglophone media (and indeed, non-English language media) as well. Remsense诉 05:04, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I've listed specific false claims made by the Telegraph. What's your defense of the Telegraph falsely claiming a student identified as a cat five times without any retraction or correction? What's your defense of the Telegraph repeatedly quoting a non-therapist for the position of therapists on trans issues?
I have more examples:
  • the headline of this article claims that Belgium and the Netherlands called for additional restrictions of puberty blockers when that's not true and not even close to true. Neither of those countries nor any government agency of those countries has said any such thing in an official capacity.
  • this article has an "expert" claim that a tweet supportive of trans lesbians violates the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which it very much does not.
  • Here's an article, which is part of a whole series like this, where the Telegraph just asks its readers for cases of "wokeness" and then repeats whatever obvious nonsense they give back. I wouldn't even mention it except it's clearly labeled "news", and it's yet again another example of the litter boxes in schools hoax.
Loki (talk) 05:31, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
One by one:
  • Per WP:HEADLINES, headlines are unreliable regardless of who they are published by. The fact that the Telegraph's headlines are no different is not a cause for concern or a reason to consider the publication unreliable.
  • That's an attributed opinion; She said the tweet contravened the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. It isn't an indication of unreliability.
  • Those are opinions attributed to readers. Again, it isn't an indicator of unreliability.
BilledMammal (talk) 06:18, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

That's an attributed opinion

Attributed to simply a representative from a women's group. It seems truthfully introducing Women's Declaration International could arguably require additional description. Remsense诉 06:27, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I assume you believed they should have included criticism of that organization? Failing to criticize a organization when attributing to it doesn't make a source unreliable; if it did, I don't think we would have any reliable sources. BilledMammal (talk) 06:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
You're correct, of course. This one straddles the border between ontology and epistemology, and is borderline in any case. Remsense诉 06:38, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
WP:HEADLINES is not a defense because the false claim is also repeated in the first line of the article. And attributing false claims to other people is not a good defense if you make no attempt whatsoever to fact-check them. Loki (talk) 13:48, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
The first sentence contains a different claim than the headline; as far as I know, the claim in the first sentence is true? BilledMammal (talk) 15:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
The first sentence of that article says Belgium and the Netherlands have become the latest countries to question the use of puberty blockers. Is it true? The parliament of the Netherlands passed a motion[23] which notes the caution being expressed in other European countries and calls for additional research. So the Netherlands part seems true enough. The Belgium claim is more tenuous - it appears to refer to this paper[24] published in a mainstream medical journal by an affiliate of the Belgian Center for Evidence Based Medicine[25], which was commissioned by the Federal Government[26]. Now, I'm not for one minute going to claim that that chain of association amounts to this being an official action of the Belgian government, but synecdoche is common in reporting about countries, so it's not a smoking gun of falsehood. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:36, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The evidence shared, both in this thread and in OP's link to the much longer userpage list of examples, persuades me that The Telegraph is generally unreliable for trans topics, and if it comes to an RfC I would there say as much. This isn't down to a difference of opinion. This is about a periodical repeatedly making errors of fact and misrepresentations in this topic area. It's true that biased sources aren't necessarily unreliable, but our tendency to be okay with expecting editors to parse through biases doesn't become a shield for a biased source that is also unreliable. I'll add that an editor's claim that this is about how British media has a different opinion on this topic than American media is not what OP is saying. Although OP wrote, British papers aren't reliable on trans issues, that claim was not framed as being because they report different things from U. S. news sources (for that matter, the very American news network Fox has propounded the "litter boxes in schools" hoax too). And for evidence of the errors of fact of the The Telegraph, the OP has included non-U. S. sources, such as The Guardian. And this rightly shouldn't be reduced to being a difference between national newspapers; this is also about contradicting academic consensuses in trans healthcare and more. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 05:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Co-signed. Concerning the judgment that there has been insufficient evidence presented for The Telegraph's frequent factual errors on this subject to consider an RfC, I would ask what would suffice? We're capable of deprecating a source based on a sufficient collection of individual incidents in context. Remsense诉 05:35, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Given that the Telegraph is a newspaper of record and a quality press, you would need high-quality third-party sources demonstrating that the Telegraph is consistently unreliable in this topic area. Sources simply portraying the Telegraph as biased is not sufficient. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 07:19, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I think it's highly arguable whether the Telegraph is still quality press. Their coverage has been declining substantially in the last few years, with controversy around commercial influence over editorial integrity since 2015. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 08:19, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
    Yes, to be clear, I said "certain" British papers are unreliable on trans issues because I meant only certain British papers. The Telegraph is by far the most egregious and I'd also probably include the Times, but not the BBC or the Guardian (and that's even though I do think they're still both to the right of most American papers on trans issues). Loki (talk) 05:37, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The important question here is whether the Telegraph reported at any point that the school had denied any pupil identified as a cat. If they did report this denial, then I don't think there is a problem here. If they have covered this up, then I would suggest there is a serious problem, a new RfC is warranted, and I would reconsider my previous opposition to downgrading the source on trans issues. Given paywall issues, I can't check it myself...Boynamedsue (talk) 06:02, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    It seems you put significant emphasis on later retractions. In my view, an outlet's later retraction is simply insufficient for the example's total removal from consideration for reasons that seem obvious: temporary errors are still errors that existed in print, and a frequent pattern of retraction calls into question the de facto editorial policy prior to publishing. It seems altogether too cute to treat the pattern of publishing one article saying one thing, and another later that includes a vital, previously ignored dimension as anything but retraction in a different format. The question is whether we can treat individual articles from the Telegraph as reliable to support claims: those are incomplete like this as less reliable, full stop. Remsense诉 06:10, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I think you've misinterpreted the cat stories - the focus of those stories doesn't appear to be that the student identified as a cat, but that a teacher defended their right to identify as a cat - and there is a tape supporting the claim that a teacher defended that right. I don't think that at any point does the Telegraph say that a girl at Rye College did identify as a cat in their own voice. BilledMammal (talk) 06:25, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
I do think that it is very important that, once the school clarified that nobody was actually identifying as a cat, the paper clearly states this.Boynamedsue (talk) 06:48, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
They do; The school now says that no children at Rye College identify as a cat or any other animal. BilledMammal (talk) 06:53, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Read the very next sentence: However, the girls and their parents claimed it was their understanding that one did.
In context this is clearly not actually a retraction or correction by the Telegraph but an attempt to defend their original reporting even as it's clear that it's false.
Also, I think that the "focus" is also clear from them feeling the need to say this. Loki (talk) 13:54, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
As BilledMammal pointed out, the Telegraph did point out the school's denial of the incident. They did so again in this article ("The school said, five days after the row broke, that no child identified as a cat or any other animal...) And, in this article I linked to above, they included the inspector's report that there were "no concerns" over the school's handling of the issue (plus they include a lengthly statement from a spokesperson of the school). Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 07:05, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
@Remsense:The article is factual though, the recording is pretty clear. The questions are whether the school was contacted for comment and whether its denial was published.Boynamedsue (talk) 06:54, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Agreed. I seem to have misread the first and second articles linked, apologies. Remsense诉 06:57, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • By way of comment on the discussion as it's developing, my view is that 'giving the impression of circulating a transnationally debunked hoax by prominently featuring it but technically refraining from expressing it directly in editorial voice' is a low bar to set for reliability, especially for a topic considered contentious. (In any case, the Rye College matter is just one of the examples; there are also the obfuscations/misrepresentations of Esses/Thoughtful Therapists and TACTT and related, as well as the evidence in the userpage list.) Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 07:14, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Strong disagree. This is another example of confusing bias with reliability. A good case is made for bias, but not for unreliability. Detailed rationale follows:
    • The cat story issue has been covered by others. In short, it appears that they reported a reasonable interpretation of a recording, focused on the teacher's behaviour more than the cat claim, and then later reported the school's denial. One of the cited examples is about other cases of pupils identifying as other animals[27]. It's unclear whether the accuracy of this has been questioned or not.
    • Quoting someone who isn't a therapist isn't a factual error. It's worth noting that the "anti-trans sentiments" for which James Essess was kicked out of his programme are essentially the same position that the recent Cass review (a WP:MEDRS of the highest quality) has concluded, i.e. that affirmation is not necessarily the only answer. This suggests that the Telegraph is not publishing unreliable information, rather that it is publishing a POV (other POVs are available).
    • On TACTT. You say they describe TACTT as "trans activists" - but they are, and their own website[28] is clear on this: TACTT is an activist group, rather than a learning space.. Looking at TACTT's complaints, they seem to relate to statements made by Dr Christian Buckland, not statements made by The Telegraph in editorial voice. In this respect, The Telegraph is reliably reporting them. Regarding a report on the dangers of gender ideology, this is a strongly opinionated but not strictly unfactual description, since the report does directly criticise ideological behaviour as detrimental to the interests of children.
    • I looked at some of the examples in the "tons more" link. They're long on bias, short on factual errors.
    • I looked at the Joseph Mengele claim. It's an opinion piece, not The Telegraph's editorial voice. And you say it's a wild claim, but it appears to be factual, based on the testimony of holocaust survivor Eva Kor[29]: Cross transfusions were carried out in an attempt to "make boys into girls and girls into boys"..
    • The IPSO rulings are put forward as evidence of unreliability, but they demonstrate that corrections were made promptly and in duly prominent positions. This is exactly what we ask of a generally reliable WP:NEWSORG.
    • In short, The Telegraph projects a strong POV due to its strong bias, but we don't exclude sources for bias, and it would be a violation of NPOV to do so. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:22, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Things like the cat box incident demonstrate that the bias of the Telegraph is so severe that it deleteriously affects the paper's accuracy. We should not be using it as a source for establishing notability of a given incident, should attribute any statements it makes explicitly and should seriously consider whether statements of the Telegraph are WP:DUE prior to inclusion. Simonm223 (talk) 11:21, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    gender ideology was a term coined by the Catholic church and then borrowed by the GC movement which RS all agree is a meaningless buzzword.
    Thoughtful Therapists is a WP:FRINGE group that opposes conversion therapy bans and recommends organizations known for promoting conversion therapy [30]. Here's a statement[31] where he makes such claims as Schools should never socially affirm a pupil or enable them to socially transition, Self-ID should never become law (self-id is considered a right by the UN), hospitals shouldn't have pride flags, it should be ok to misgender schoolchildren, etc. His FAQ[32] says conversion therapy only applies to gay people, not trans people. He was removed from Childline because he kept publicly complaining about respecting trans kids and why conversion therapy shouldn't be banned.[33][34]
    This man's positions are ridiculously fringe and it reflects very poorly on the Telegraph they went they to him for anything - it's like using the Flat Earth Society as a source for astrophysics news. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 16:04, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    It's pretty common for newspapers to get quotes from activists/ non-experts (see here). Does that mean that the newspaper is fundamentally unreliable? No. Does that mean WP is required to quote these activists/ non-experts as well? Also, no. News organizations aren't required to follow polices like DUE--but we are. So if someone tries to quote some random activist using the Telegraph as a source, just direct them to this: WP:UNDUE. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 18:10, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Okay but the problem isn't that they cite activists, the problem is that they cite activists and fail to mention it. Nobody here is going to be mad at a newspaper for citing activists. --Licks-rocks (talk) 18:24, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    So what I’m hearing is that the only issue is that the Telegraph didn’t use the word “activist” when introducing James Essess. It’s true, using proper descriptors is good journalistic practice but this has almost nothing to do with reliability. Should we also admonish Forbes for failing to label Essess as an activist? [35] Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    the forbes article you cite describes his organisation as "an organization campaigning against “the impact of gender identity ideology on children”", which I think does a good job of delivering that information. I also don't recall ever saying that this was the only issue. Could you link me to where I said anything like that so I can correct the record? --Licks-rocks (talk) 11:38, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Well you said: "Okay but the problem isn't that they cite activists, the problem is that they cite activists and fail to mention it." So I took that to mean you're fine if they quote Essess but you want the Telegraph to be explicitly clear that he be labeled as an activist. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:28, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
    Yes, and the forbes quote satisfies that requirement, while the telegraph one doesn't. Forbes also does a better job of separating him from the therapists he claims to represent, where the telegraph lumps those two together, thus implying by omission that he is a therapist, which he very much is not. --Licks-rocks (talk) 21:39, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
    So if omitting the word “therapist” is enough for you to deprecate the Telegraph, how do you feel about the very anti-trans[sarcasm] Washington Blade referring to him as a “British Therapist”? [36] Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 01:15, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Technically they say contradictory things, that he's a therapist, and that he was expelled from his training institute. So one is confused over his status. Also one offs from random publications does nothing to the fact that the telegraph repeatedly refused to label him appropriately LunaHasArrived (talk) 01:23, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    I don't like that phrasing very much but in context they make his actual credentials very clear. And it's also only one article. The Telegraph repeatedly lets the reader assume he's an expert without clarifying either way. Loki (talk) 04:13, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Not sure if you linked to this article yet, Loki, but the most comprehensive article I found on Esses from the Telegraph is this. It puts his expulsion right at top. Do you think that article is an accurate representation of him? (also other Telegraph articles label him as a “writer and commentator”[37] and as a “social campaigner [38].) Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 06:22, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Is one expected to read every article from the telegraph to know his full story for accuracy. Either way if anything the fact that the telegraph continues to mislabel him after doing that peice means it can't even claim ignorance. LunaHasArrived (talk) 15:56, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Also the fact that the telegraph has opinion peices written by him should be of note here as well (4 in the last 10 months) LunaHasArrived (talk) 16:01, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    @Dr.Swag Lord, Ph.d, regarding that article you linked:
A breakdown of issues in it, partly through comparison to the daily mail, who broke the story in a more non-partisan way months before the Telegraph re-hashed it poorly
    • It was the second article on him in a major paper, the first being the dealy mail a few months ago about the same story[39]
    • Somehow, the daily mail is actually better reporting in some ways[40]...
    • The Telegraph does not actually mention A) how he treated kids who wanted to transition and called childline or B) how young these too young kids were, the daily mail at least admits he says he noticed an 'increase in the number of young people coming through who said they were in the wrong body. The youngest was about ten or 11. and He said he became increasingly convinced that 'exploration' of their problems was a better way to help. 'I spent hours with them exploring the underlying causes and other ways of looking at things.
    • The Telegraph mentions conversion therapy once to say legislation banning conversion therapy will not extend to gender identity, the daily mail somehow has the decency to use the real definition He was further motivated after learning that the Government was planning to ban conversion therapy, which attempts to change a person's sexual orientation and gender identity.
    • While the telegraph saves most of his employer's rebuttals at the end, the daily mail interweaves them more and gives more statements about the opportunities he was given to not get fired for this.
    • The Telegraph says Last year, he was ejected from his psychotherapist training course – three years in – for openly discussing his fears that young children expressing discomfort in their bodies were being actively encouraged to transition; weeks later, Childline removed him from his volunteer role as a counsellor on the same grounds.
    • Now, much further down it notes Four weeks before his expulsion via email, he had petitioned the Government to “safeguard evidence-based therapy for children struggling with gender dysphoria”, which received more than 10,000 signatures. Esses had also set up Thoughtful Therapists, a collective of clinicians who are “deeply concerned” about the current stranglehold on public discourse. (The petition was calling for the government not to criminalize gender exploratory therapy in its conversion therapy ban, TT are, as we covered above, conversion therapy advocates)
    • It also notes He spoke with senior management, yet nothing changed. As his online advocacy around safeguarding continued, he was told not to refer to the charity or his role there. In July, Esses received a call dismissing him with immediate effect.
    • Please note, he was expelled from the psychotherapy program for publicly campaigning against a ban on conversion therapy, with the institution dropping a not so subtle parting note[41]. Childline dismissed him because he refused to stop identifying himself as a childline member when campaigning for conversion therapy and told not to, and offered the opportunity to come back on assurances anyways. The Telegraph hides and distorts these reasons as openly discussing his fears that young children expressing discomfort in their bodies were being actively encouraged to transition for the former, and on the same grounds for the latter.
    • The telegraph makes claims about this in it's voice that showcase it's fringe
    • It seems mind-boggling that someone could be ejected from much-needed counselling work and therapy training for questioning how best to help vulnerable children; - is it mind-boggling that somebody publicly campaigned for conversion therapy, says QUACKy stuff all the time, and his first job found that bigoted and the second gave him the opportunity to stay if he just stopped publicly saying he worked for them as he advocated conversion therapy? And he didn't "question" anything, questions are open-ended, he asked why trans kids are affirmed by childline instead of being made to "explore".
    • For adults who have exhausted all the options, namely exploratory therapy to get to the root cause of their discomfort, he believes gender reassignment surgery can be a reasonable last resort - this is an option that is known not to work and to be harmful (denying transition care at all until adulthood). It's a little unclear to what extent this is the telegraphs voice or Esses' - I think that's a feature not a bug. Imagine if they interviewed a anti-vaxxer and said for adults who have exhausted all the options, namely healing crystals and homeopathy, he believes vaccines can be a reasonable last resort in an article where it's clear the paper thinks he's being treated unfairly.
  • Summarizing the above in short, that article is an UNDUE and fringe platforming puff piece derived from the fact someone at the telegraph thought "this dude was fired for campaigning for conversion therapy a few months ago - let's interview him to talk about how oppressed he is and how conversion therapy is actually a normal practice" and wrote an article on it that somehow 1) omits more details than the daily mails reporting on the topic, 2) presents a more partisan stance on conversion therapy than the daily mail, 3) somehow mentions his campaigning wrt conversion therapy less than the daily mail, 4) sanitizes his FRINGE statements through their own voice, 5) misrepresent why he was fired and 6) is literally just re-sensationalizing the case of a dude fired for being a bigoted quack that had been old news when it was written. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 19:05, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
    You're moving a bit fast there, friend. In my main comment here below I explicitly ruled out deprecation, and instead said: I don't think this needs deprecation or anything, but I do think there are some major risks to using this paper uncritically on LGBT issues.. In other words, had this been an RFC I would have probably voted "additional considerations apply" based on this evidence. --Licks-rocks (talk) 10:06, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Yes it is, but not to platform WP:FRINGE activists that heavily. If almost everything they publish on trans issues is undue because they almost only quote quacks and often get stuff wrong, at some point we should acknowledge the paper is the issue and not have to discuss the due-ness for every quack they quote. If a newspaper had for 40 years the clear POV the earth is flat, and was publishing hundreds of articles a year claiming the earth is flat and quoting the flat earth society and questioning what the shadow lobby at NASA is hiding from everybody about the earth's topology, I think we'd all quickly recognize how unreliable that makes them (at least, for the subject of the earth's topology). When they do it for trans people, somehow perpetually churning out FRINGE nonsense (and attacking a minority) becomes a different POV.
    Here's an article targeting a transgender teen (and misgendering them) while fearmongering about how awful it is the school didn't misgender them because the parents asked them to. [42] They constantly use the term gender ideology in their own voice all the time[43], which our own article explains is a moral panic. If almost everything they publish on trans issues is undue, we should mention that somewhere. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 19:27, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    “Targeting”? “Fear mongering”? What you may consider targeting and fear mongering is leaps and bounds away from what I—and many other editors—would consider targeting and fear mongering. The Telegraph simply reported on the incident. They quoted the child’s mother. They quoted the school and they quoted the LGBT charity the school works with. It’s actually a pretty balanced news story, more-or-less. The Telegraph even did the smart thing by not naming to “protect the young person’s identity”. It’s a difficult position to argue you’re being “targeted” by a newspaper when the newspaper doesn’t even name you. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 22:05, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    This is a school with approximately 2400 students (by looking at their website) anyone at the school or who knows people at the school could probably have a good guess at who the student is given that they would have left recently and would other obvious details (not including possible social media OSINT). If the telegraph had named them I think it would have been far far worse. Also one has to dig very far into the article to know that the school never got any actual confirmation about the supposed clinical advice. And the fear mongering is obvious, it's an extremely common tactic for people to say that schools are taking kids away from parents and even that some schools "trans" kids behind the parents back. This article plays into all of these beliefs. LunaHasArrived (talk) 22:26, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Yeah, when you consider the cat articles were about a specific living person it gets even worse. It doesn't matter how identifiable they are, the claims in these articles would be an obvious WP:BLP violation. Loki (talk) 23:11, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Newspapers aren't expected to adhere to Wikipedia's policies on privacy. XeCyranium (talk) 01:09, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
    Yeah, this is all starting to sound like “this article is bad because the Telegraph reported on it, and I don’t like their reporting.” I don’t actually see any evidence of falsity. This is not some hoax incident—these are real events that transpired and a major national newspaper reported on it. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 23:40, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I mean, read the paragraph by yfns beneath for a much more information but in general one can lie by omission or suggest an idea without lying. Either way I was just supporting the idea that they were targeting and fear mongering. LunaHasArrived (talk) 23:48, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Sentence 1: A leading private school in Scotland had parents investigated by social workers after they fought teachers’ attempts to “affirm” their daughter’s transgender identity.
    • scare quotes around "affirm", which is a red flag considering affirming a trans kids identity is a pretty straightforward thing for a school to do - just don't misgender and deadname them. They do this multiple times in the article.
    • A quote from later in the article: The child later said she identified as male, and the school adopted male pronouns in a move the mother said was kept from her.
    In the very first sentence, they've misgendered a teenager (the first of many times) and questioned through quotes the school's respect for him as nefarious (the first of many times). How is it not targeting and fearmongering to write an essay about a teenager just trying to live their life framing the parents who are bigoted towards their own child as the victims and endorsing their bigotry?
    One paragraph down: the parents, acting on advice from psychologists who had assessed their child, asked for the school to adopt a “watchful waiting” approach. ... “Watchful waiting” is an approach in which a child’s view of their gender is closely observed but without social or medical intervention. Evidence suggests that many children with gender issues will revert to identifying as a member of their biological sex as they become older.
    • "watchful waiting" was invented by a FRINGE activist known for practicing conversion therapy, Kenneth Zucker, and involved refusing to allow children to socially transition until puberty[44]. without social or medical intervention is doublespeak - it has always involved active intervention to deny transgender identity until a set age.
    • Evidence suggests that many children with gender issues will revert to identifying as a member of their biological sex as they become older is based on long debunked studies from Zucker. He saw kids who were gender noncomforming in any way without identifying as trans, he actively tried to discourage them all from being gender noncomforming anyways just in case, and when the kids continued to not identify as trans he passed it off as saying most grow out of being trans.
    In the first three paragraphs, they've misgendered the teenager and questioned the school supporting him, they've tried to appeal to authority (the psychiatrist, unnamed) to recommend disrespecting him, whitewashed the form of conversion therapy they recommended for him, and presented misleading information about how many trans kids "desist". These are factual inaccuracies and promotion, in their own voice, of FRINGE nonsense. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 23:19, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I know this a contentious topic, and I’m not trying to engage in any meta-debates about this, but does misgendering equate to source unreliability? The way a newspaper decides to use gendered pronouns is more of a matter of editorial preference/style. When Chelsea Manning announced their transition, CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, and the Washington Post all used different pronouns to refer to Manning [45]. And if we’re going to deprecate the Telegraph for misgendering, we would need to do the same for the Associated Press [46], NY Times [47], and CNN [48]. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 02:23, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Considering that those article about the AP, NYT, and CNN are all about them issuing corrections for incorrect pronouns, I think your example undermines your own point.
    Like, I don't think this is the strongest point here either, which is why I didn't lead with it, but the reality of trans people is enough of a fact that we were able to form a clearly sourced consensus around the first line of trans woman, A trans woman (short for transgender woman) is a woman who was assigned male at birth. That it's politically controversial in some circles doesn't mean that reliable sources have no opinion on the issue: the effectiveness of COVID vaccines is also politically controversial in some circles but we don't tip-toe around that. Loki (talk) 03:10, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    I just used those examples because they were really easy to find. The reality is misgendering in the media is quite common (see) and I doubt most outlets issue corrections. I don’t think I disagree with your last two points? Sources make political claims all the time. But the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine is purely a medically-based claim (even if some political partisan sources disagree with consensus). However, to say something like “transgender people deserve X” or “transgender people don’t deserve X” are purely political claims that we are allowed to insert (with proper attribution) into WP. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 04:04, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    However, to say something like “transgender people deserve X” or “transgender people don’t deserve X” are purely political claims that we are allowed to insert (with proper attribution) into WP.
    There is an overwhelming medical consensus that conversion therapy does not work and is harmful. Whether or not it works is not a political claim, it is a medical one. Same for the claim "the majority of trans kids grow out of it" - FRINGE.
    The Telegraph discussing a type of conversion therapy, framing it as neutral while not accurately describing how it works, and presenting debunked statistics to make it look like the majority of transgender people detransition is flat out medical misinformation, not a purely political claim.
    Even if we ignore the fact that the Telegraph, through misgendering, consistently shows hostility and an open lack of respect for a demographic - the FRINGE misinformation remains. It's as if they consistently said the earth is flat in their own voice while interviewing members of the flat earth society and introducing them only as scientists Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 16:44, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    I wasn’t making a reference to conversion therapy at all. That is absolutely a medical claim. Before you were saying that Thoughtful Therapists were the ones pro-conversion therapy. Now the Telegraph is explicitly pro-conversion therapy? Regardless, if the Telegraph is pro- or anti-conversion therapy that wouldn’t be relevant for us per MEDRS. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 18:27, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Sorry, you want evidence that this RS is unreliable. They are completely whitewashing conversion therapy with the "watchful waiting" angle and going against medical consensus. Whilst we would never use the telegraph for medical claims per MedRS that doesn't mean a source going against medical consensus isn't notable. What would you think of this was instead promoting antivax theories. LunaHasArrived (talk) 18:35, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Yes to both, though the telegraph is a little more discreet - here I laid out Thoughtful Therapists' ties to conversion therapy and FRINGE lobbying. In the above comments, I was referring to an article in the Telegraph where they present a form of conversion therapy as a neutral therapy, give a false definition, and present debunked statistics (ie, the majority of trans kids "desist") to support its efficacy.
    Regardless, if the Telegraph is pro- or anti-conversion therapy that wouldn’t be relevant for us per MEDRS. - Yes and no. If a paper routinely targets a minority and often (but not always) uses pseudoscience to do so, and publishes hundreds of articles a day on the topic, there is a clear reliability issue in general.
    What is the goalpost for unreliability, or even an acknowledgement of bias? If it's not enough they've been known to target a minority population for over 40 years, if it's not enough they still openly fearmonger about the minority, if it's not enough they routinely turn to groups known for attacking that minority with pseudoscience and in the courts for quotes and present them as neutral, and it's not enough they present medical misinformation about the minority on a regular basis - how far do they have to go before we acknowledge they are unreliable on the issue (or, at the barest euphemistic minimum, biased) Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 18:55, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Whatever your opinion about misgendering and source reliability here, one has to admit that factual inaccuracies and promoting fringe theories about conversion therapy has to count towards source unreliability. LunaHasArrived (talk) 18:39, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • A past discussion can be found here (from late 2022/early 2023). That outcome was pretty clear, but it wasn’t a great RfC either. Do you think that it is probable that reopening it could plausibly change the outcome? FortunateSons (talk) 11:07, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Just as a note, even the Telegraph's defenders concede that it's strongly biased - but per WP:BIASED, when citing a biased source we must make its bias clear, ie. if we're in agreement that the Telegraph has an anti-trans bias (one that is not obvious from its name), then we must at a bare minimum require that it be given inline attribution that specifically makes that bias clear. People IMHO often forget about this aspect of WP:BIASED; but we cannot present them as a neutral source of information. Given how frequently and aggressively it tends to get cited in this topic area, it might be worth coming up with a standard attribution (though, also, WP:BIASED sources of course shouldn't be used in a lopsided manner, per WP:BALANCE; if we're in agreement that it's biased then that means we ought to avoid sections or articles cited overwhelmingly to them or to sources that share their bias, something that I don't think we're doing currently.) --Aquillion (talk) 13:10, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Just noting that I’m not convinced it is biased, rather than just having a different POV from some other sources.
    I also think you misread WP:BIASED; it says inline attribution may be required, not that it is. BilledMammal (talk) 13:16, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Does the word bias have some other distinct meaning for you here? Remsense诉 13:18, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    If we’re going to interpret "having a POV" as "having a bias", and attribute inline on that basis, then we’re going to have to consider virtually every source on this topic as biased and attribute inline. I don’t think that would be useful. BilledMammal (talk) 13:25, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    Every source is biased. I'm not convinced myself that the Telegraph is biased to the degree to require attribution in all cases. Remsense诉 13:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    1) It's not policy (or even guidance) that we must attribute information from a biased source. We can use common sense and editorial judgement to extract wikivoice-grade factual information even from biased sources. I refer to my comment in the RFE/RL thread about how bias works in practice: not (usually) through publishing outright fabrications, but by being selective about what is reported. We need to be careful when handling biased sources, but all sources are biased in contentious topics (none moreso than this one), and we have to work with that.
    2) Is this actually a real problem on enwiki? Sections or articles on trans topics cited overwhelmingly to The Telegraph? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:09, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it's a real problem. Mermaids (charity), for instance, still has an entire section devoted to a piece from the Telegraph and a response to it. --Aquillion (talk) 17:03, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
That doesn't look problematic at all. The Telegraph instigated an investigation into Mermaids which led to an investigation by the Charity Commission (thus demonstrating that it wasn't just some fabricated nonsense), and as the following sections demonstrate, this was widely reported on in many sources including the Guardian, the BBC, The Times, and Pink News. We use multiple sources in those sections and we seem to have had no trouble extracting factual statements and quotes from these sources, despite The Telegraph's bias and despite Pink News's equal and opposite bias. This is how it's meant to work. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:42, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • From loki's records, I don't get the impression that it's just bias that is the problem. Consistently misrepresenting a guy with no medical background as some kind of expert witness seems like it goes beyond bias to me, as does failing to do due diligence on what is very obviously a hoax story. Correcting the record when you make a mistake is obviously fine and even a sign of a good editorial process that cares about getting things right. Correcting the record because you failed to verify your story before hitting post, however, does not qualify for that kind of understanding. If a news source posts stories without verifying what the people involved in those stories have to say about it, that news organisation is acting as a glorified content mill, and we don't treat content mills as reliable. That aside, I don't see how an obvious bias isn't an issue for a "paper of record". I don't think this needs deprecation or anything, but I do think there are some major risks to using this paper uncritically on LGBT issues. ----Licks-rocks (talk) 15:57, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The Telegraph is a news source that has long shown its unreliability in this topic area, purposefully putting out misinformation and false claims and rarely retracting them. And even their retractions are more in the line of "group said this isn't true, but..." with always the indication that the false thing could still be true. It's the same sort of nonsense that the Daily Mail has long pulled with their misinformation. It's just that, in this case, rather than doing that to anything political like the Daily Mail does, we have The Telegraph doing that specifically to LGBT topics and having done so for decades. They are one of the definitive UK pieces of misinformation media when it comes to LGBT subject matter and are willfully misinformative on the topic to suit their agenda. (And, as usual, the defenders of this anti-LGBT media show up relatively quickly, much like the defenders of sources like Fox News and Breitbart did when those were up for consideration.) SilverserenC 15:45, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Yes, the Telegraph has major form for printing stuff like this which is aimed at transphobes (I know we're supposed to call them "gender-critical" these days, but we don't call racists "skin colour critical", so sod that). Now, if it was just biased reporting, that's one thing, but there is genuine misinformation here, much like the issue that the paper has with climate change. Repeating obvious nonsense is misinformation, even if you do a Daily Mail and print a correction in 8pt font at the bottom of Page 25 three weeks later. Black Kite (talk) 17:18, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I agree entirely. And there is the question of WP:DUE. The only reason we would ever need the Telegraph as a source is to reflect the increasingly fringe opinions of transphobes. Why bother? Transphobic opinions are not worth including in a neutral encyclopedia except as a description of transphobic views. Simonm223 (talk) 17:41, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    This is also a strong point. WP:BESTSOURCES should guide us away from a biased newspaper and toward citing academic sources that represent medical/sociological/historical/etc. consensuses. I am aware some editors have said The Telegraph simply has a 'different POV'. But I would hazard that if this 'different POV' entails The Telegraph frequently framing coverage of trans topics in an alarmist way that stokes opposition to the mainstream academic consensus on the legitimacy of trans experience and healthcare, then The Telegraph is not the best source for the topic and its coverage will often be undue. And I think that in the case of The Telegraph, the matter has gotten to the point that it so muddles fact and fiction it is more useful to the project to consider the source generally unreliable for the topic area. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:32, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
    I do think a lot of this thread is indicative of the contempt many Wikipedia editors have for humanities and social sciences as academic disciplines. Like, sure, there's an evident and obvious academic consensus among sociologists, psychologists and academic social workers about issues like gender affirming care, sure, transphobic academics in the space, like Jordan Peterson, have career trajectories very similar to other WP:PROFRINGE academics like parapsychologists, but, have you considered that a newspaper thinks this is alarming? Totally worthy of use as a counter-balance source. Just like we need to cite Uri Gellar as an expert in telekinesis. Simonm223 (talk) 01:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I'm very reluctant to state any source is unreliable on the basis of our independent analysis of the accuracy or inaccuracy of its stories, as opposed to the analysis of RS on the accuracy of inaccuracy of its stories. Content analysis is a methodical activity that requires adequate sampling (generally, a stratified sample of two constructed weeks for every six months of content is considered a best practice for daily newspapers) and a process of independent coding. That type of research is outside the capability of a Wikipedia noticeboard discussion. In a previous comment Dr. Swag Lord explained that, since the Telegraph is a newspaper of record, we need high quality sources affirming it's not a RS, a position with which I'd tend to agree. Chetsford (talk) 08:11, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
    Remember:original research done to determine source reliability is very explicitly the exemption to WP:OR, we can in fact as users do our own research as part of determining whether a source is reliable, that research is even required! It's part of your due diligence as an editor under WP:RS. The relevant sections for this discussion are WP:CONTEXTMATTERS and WP:CONTEXTFACTS, which states that source reliability can vary depending on topic and a bunch of other factors. Neither "paper of record" nor "quality press" are qualifications that get special treatment in Wikipedia policy. --Licks-rocks (talk) 11:26, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
"original research done to determine source reliability is very explicitly the exemption to WP:OR, we can in fact as users do our own research" I'm well aware. And, similarly, there's also no proscription on an editor expecting a second editor engaged in source evaluative OR to meet some minimal standard of research quality. And convenience sampling articles for a cross-source lexical comparison is the shoddiest kind of research. Chetsford (talk) 15:38, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
We're a collaborative volunteer project, so if you feel the amount of research done is unsatisfactory, and you have something to contribute in that regard, you should absolutely feel free to. That said, I think it's also a bit unfair for you to expect one guy to do an entire PhD in Telegraphonics when that is well beyond the amount of effort this board normally operates on. And judging by your comments to loki below, I'm not even exaggerating about the PhD part. --Licks-rocks (talk) 16:35, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
"if you feel the amount of research done is unsatisfactory, and you have something to contribute in that regard, you should absolutely feel free to" It's not my responsibility to prove your position. "I think it's also a bit unfair for you to expect one guy to do an entire PhD in Telegraphonics" Simple solution is point to what RS say. If no RS support your position and you want me to rely exclusively on internet user "Lick Rocks" original research then, yes, I will expect it meets a reasonable quality standard. Sorry! Chetsford (talk) 17:20, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
This whole "paper of record" argument is no more valid here than it would be to argue that this article would be an appropriate source for an astronomy page. 18:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC) Simonm223 (talk) 18:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
Multiple reliable sources have already been provided, though. And again, "what RS say" is not the only standard applicable here. --Licks-rocks (talk) 20:29, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
Multiple reliable sources have already been provided" ... and most don't say what they're being alleged to say. They're framing studies, not inquiries into the Telegraph's accuracy on baseline facts. Chetsford (talk) 03:15, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • As documented here, we do have significant secondary coverage of the Telegraph making errors, including a few scholarly sources which examine the whole British media. And plenty of other reliable news sources documenting particular mistakes.
    But also, this has never been how WP:RSN has worked before. In other cases, even for major newsorgs like Fox, simple aggregation of mistakes was enough. It's very rare that scholarship will call out a newsorg like this, so the fact that we do have some sources doing it is somewhat exceptional all by itself. Loki (talk) 11:56, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
I read the first two studies which are fairly rote, paint-by-numbers, comparative analyses of second order agenda setting in media outlets; the kind that every media studies PhD grad produces as their first journal article. I have no basis on which to doubt their accuracy, however, neither of them make the conclusion the Telegraph is inaccurate or unreliable. Rather, they merely count and compare the presence of specific frame packages which is a different question entirely. As deductive framing studies, they both are disciplinarily grounded in the constructed nature of social reality which posits the total absence of objective reality. To use framing studies to try to categorize outlets at RSN would then require we make an original conclusion that there is objective reality. And, once we do that, we've invalidated the usability of the very studies we're trying to source. Chetsford (talk) 16:01, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • As Chetsford explained, the linked academic studies do not question the general reliability of the Telegraph and other British media. I have also looked at the articles you have listed under “Secondary Coverage”. Practically are all PinkNews articles getting comments from pro-trans people about how awful a Telegraph article is—does that seem a wee bit familiar to you? So is it fine when PinkNews does it but not the Telegraph??
  • Also re: It's very rare that scholarship will call out a newsorg like this —it’s really not. Look over Breitbart News, The Grayzone, Natural News, Palmer Report, InfoWars, OpIndia, etc. Do you notice the depth of ultra-strong academic studies calling out those sources—in clear terms—for their utter nonsense? Could you provide a similar compilation of academic sources for the Telegraph?
Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 19:33, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
I can't see how 4/8 sources being from pink news counts as "almost all". The other sources are: ipso, CNN, the guardian and vox. As for point 2, perhaps make comparison to other large news corporations older than 25 years for an alt comparison. Also remember UK libel law could be influenceful here. LunaHasArrived (talk) 19:42, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
CNN, the guardian, and Vox all relate to the Times—not the telegraph (if we’re going to deprecate the Times too we would really need a separate discussion for that). I guess more comparable examples would be Fox News, daily mail, and Sputnik. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 20:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
This paper outlines selective quotations and dubious press standards in how they handled Kathleen Stock, arguing they helped spread misinformation[49], here's one on how they were providing "evidence" used to support section 28[50], here's a thesis that extensively covers the Telegraph's promotion of negative stereotypes and myths about trans people[51], here's a paper on IPSO's standards for discrimination being lax when applied to demographics instead of individuals[52], here's another noting how the telegraph frames trans people in negative terms[53], here's another (in italian) comparing independent media to papers such as the Telegraph which push negative stereotypes about trans people[54], here's another commenting on their stereotyping of trans people[55]
These were found from the first two pages of google scholar results for "transgender" AND "daily telegraph" and are varyingly weighty. There are about 1,800 results, from sampling a few pages it seems to be 1/3 about their bias/misinformation/negative stereotyping of trans people, 1/3 about them doing that to LGBT people in general, and 1/3 just happening to cite or mention the Telegraph. IE, in not acknowledging the Telegraph's unreliability (or at least, open bias against a demographic), we are actively ignoring the majority of scholarly sources on the topic. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 20:20, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
I just read the Liverpool thesis. As with the other studies presented, it never makes the case of the Telegraph publishing erroneous information, it merely notes frame packages and ruminates on the frame effects of those packages. Outlets aren't unreliable because they produce different frame packages from the social consensus. They're unreliable because they propagate erroneous baseline facts. The arguments against the Telegraph here seem to be mixing up the two. Chetsford (talk) 03:15, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for providing new sources to look at. I looked at a couple of them and I'm afraid you either misinterpreted the study or it has nothing to do with the topic of reliability
1. This study: This has nothing to with reliability. All it's saying is the phrase "trans activist" may be used in a negative context when referring to trans people. The study uses this Telegraph opinion piece as an example. That's it.
2. This study: So a footnote in this study states that a Telegraph headline was inaccurate about Allison Bailey "winning" her case (it turns out she did not). You can find more information from the IPSO complaint. But as the IPSO complaint notes, the Telegraph "identified the headline error within 30 minutes and amended it promptly prior to any complaint being received...the Committee appreciated that the publication had recognised the error almost immediately...The correction which was published – and the subsequent proposal to publish a homepage reference to the correction – clearly put the correct position on record, and was offered promptly and with due prominence". So 1) we don't consider headlines accurate anyways and 2) the Telegraph fixed their mistake within 30 minutes. People, news sources engaging in basic error-correction is a hallmark of a reliable source.
3.This Master's thesis: This quotes Labor MP Allan Roberts (politician) saying Conservative Members used papers like the Telegraph and Evening Standard to support the clause. If this is true or not is not relevant. The media will frequently announce their support or disproval of various laws, bills, parties, and candidates. This does not make the source unreliable--even if the proposed law is abhorrent (see: Presentism (historical analysis).
4. Liverpool Thesis. It seems like Chetsford has already disputed this source.
5. This article. Please note that this is actually an opinion piece--hence "Viewpoint" on the top--but no matter. It doesn't actually state the Telegraph spread misinformation. It says: I want to consider Stock as a totemic figure for a trans-hostile media, and discuss the way her case has been used to spread misinformation around universities, and trans people". Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 21:12, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Why would that be "outside the capability of a Wikipedia noticeboard discussion"? Such discussion originally determined that The Telegraph is generally reliable, and they can likewise determine that this is no longer the case. Cortador (talk) 06:21, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
I feel like looking at the "There's more" really gives a far more comprehensive view of the issue than just what's posted here. I believe the Telegraph should be deprecated on GENSEX topics. Snokalok (talk) 12:58, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, but there's so much more that I felt it would be not as impactful to list everything, so I tried to only list the handful of strongest examples. That may have been a mistake. Loki (talk) 15:34, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I do not see any compelling evidence to remove The Telegraph as WP:RS generally or for transgender related topics as per the last RfC [56]. It is longstanding reliable newspaper and a newspaper of record in the UK. Yes it is biased, but that is completely allowed per WP:BIASEDSOURCES. The three specific things highlighted in the start of the discussion do not indicate factual reliablity, but bias. In the first case, Tele reported on the leaked audio / video and months later a report came out by ofsted saying the culture of the school was fine. In the second case, regarding James Esses it seems they just say he is the co-founder of the organisation. In the third case, it just appears to be simply bias. Regards  Spy-cicle💥  Talk? 18:59, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Is this going to be an RfC at some point? I don't think RSP is going to change without one, and honestly I'd probably save my energy looking into it unless and until there is one. I would also suggest to OP that only one outlet be considered at a time (since the userpage you link refers to two), since if both are done together, I think there will be a lot of confusion, and realistically one is probably worse than the other. Also, more generally about the discussion above, any criticisms of the form "they covered X topic in a slanted way" and not squarely about false facts are best left out since (1) one biased source's facts can be combined with other biased sources' facts for a well-rounded article and (2) this argument usually takes up a lot of space and convinces few. If the bias extends to stating outright falsehoods, then it's a serious problem and we should be squarely focused on that. Crossroads -talk- 00:32, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I don't think that the suggestion here is in any way outlandish. The Telegraph has clearly gone far beyond simply being a biased source in the normal, legitimate, sense. A Tory broadsheet paper would traditionally be biased towards the concerns and opinions of the Conservative Party while remaining firmly grounded in truth when covering factual matters. The Telegraph has lost that grounding on this subject. It has printed many stories about trans people, and related issues, that turned out to be substantially untrue. It has done this enough times that this, at best, shows a complete lack of interest in whether those stories were correct. It opens a very reasonable suspicion that they might well have been printed knowing them to be false.
For me, the "litterbox" stories look like evidence of bad faith. How does a national newspaper print stories that could have been debunked as obvious meme based hoaxes with as little as a 20 second Google search? I'm just a private individual and I've done more research before pressing the Retweet button! They have staff employed to check this stuff! Sure, reliable Sources can be hoaxed. The fake Hitler Diaries prove that. These are rare events typically leading to a tightening of fact checking procedures to prevent further embarrassment. They are not day-to-day happenings, yet the Telegraph keep on printing this stuff and not retracting it. There is credulity and there is reckless indifference to truth. I detect the latter in the Telegraph's recent behaviour.
I don't see how we can continue to consider them reliable on LGBT or gender issues. --DanielRigal (talk) 01:55, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I don't see this as sufficient to make the source unreliable for the topic in general. It seems at least some of the pushback comes from sources that have taken claims out of context. It may be valid to say a specific story is not reliable but to say the paper as a whole is unreliable on the topic as a whole hasn't been sufficiently supported. Springee (talk) 03:26, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
It's clear that it has gone beyond bias in this topic and in to unreliable. Most notably whencer they talk about children they seem to promote fringe medical ideas about what's happening, including whitewash conversion therapy or claims about the Cass review that I would get laughed at for putting in the article. LunaHasArrived (talk) 15:00, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Loki is correct here - I wasn't aware of the Telegraph being reliable or unreliable on this topic, but looking through their exhaustive research has convinced me. As another editor said, it goes beyond opinion and bias, because there's a lot of flat-out misinformation there. The Telegraph should be considered unreliable on any transgender-related topics, broadly construed. Fred Zepelin (talk) 15:13, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Most of the evidence indicates bias rather than reliability (like calling someone trans activists or "rarely mak[ing] it clear that James Esses is not and has never been a therapist." If we're going to have an RfC I'd recommend the initiator to focus on the examples that clearly demonstrate the unreliability. I've re-read the paragraph about the cat girl twice and did not understand what exactly the newspaper said that turned out to be false. Alaexis¿question? 21:27, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
    Honestly, the complaint that I was a bit vague about what they said appears to be fair considering you weren't the only person who was confused. Does this list of quotes where they directly claim a student identified as a cat make it more clear? Or are you instead not satisfied that this claim was sufficiently proven false? Loki (talk) 21:39, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
    Was the Telegraph’s initial reporting really that different from the rest of the media?:
    • A 13-year-old girl was reportedly called "despicable" by her own teacher on Friday after she began questioning how her classmate could identify as a cat at a Church of England school. [57]
    • The conversation, secretly recorded and posted on TikTok, appears to show a teacher defending a pupil’s right to self-identify as a cat, while two other pupils vehemently disagree with her. [58]
    • A teacher at an East Sussex school called a student’s opinion ‘despicable’ in a discussion about a classmate’s claim that she ‘identifies as a cat’. [59]
    The Telegraph later did make it clear that according to the school, no student identified as a feline (quotes are up above somewhere). Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 22:31, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
    The first one is clearly relying on the Telegraph's reporting. The second and third one both make it clear that they're not saying the student identifies as a cat in their publication's own voice. All three are minor local publications that reported this story once.
    Compare to other big name publications:
    Again, the Telegraph reported this fake story five times, hasn't corrected or retracted any of the articles, and even attempted to contradict the school's denial. Loki (talk) 04:24, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
    Thanks for providing the quotes. I think that your version of the events ("a student compared another student identifying as trans to identifying as a cat to score a rhetorical point") is likely to be true. I wouldn't say that the it's "proven", since essentially we have the school's statement versus anonymous "girls and their parents" with whom the Telegraph supposedly spoke.
    Having listened to the recording, I guess one could have interpreted it the way they did it, but as a major newspaper they should've investigated the story properly rather than rushing to print a sensationalised story.
    One more question, has the Telegraph's coverage of this particular incident been used on Wikipedia? I'm asking since the deprecation would only be necessary if the normal mechanisms and the editorial discretion have been insufficient. Alaexis¿question? 08:36, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
How many angels can meow on the head of a pin? I really don't think the precise number matters -- it's preposterous to imagine that we have only two options here, with one being "they're biased which means that their claims are factually incorrect" and the other being "their claims are factually correct which means they aren't biased". Neither of these claims really make any sense. Can't we just put up a post-it note somewhere saying that they're somewhat biased on the issue and move on with our lives?
Parenthetically, it may be noted for the record that there is a Wikipediocracy topic about this thread. jp×g🗯️ 01:04, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
I was actually thinking of proposing an amendment to its WP:RSP entry to read something like: Some editors believe The Telegraph is biased or opinionated for matters relating to transgender rights and LGBT topics. Statements may need attribution and considered for WP:DUEWEIGHT. We could also include another sentence to remind editors that the Telegraph shouldn’t be used for anything remotely relating to medical claims, as per MEDRS. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 01:26, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
That certainly sounds like a good start, even if many of us might consider that to be inadequate overall — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 08:22, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
I think that it's good to acknowledge their bias on the issue but I also separately think their bias is so extreme they often report clear falsehoods about trans topics. I've already listed what I think is a clear example of them breathlessly reporting a falsehood every day for five straight days without ever doing basic fact-checking like asking the school if it's true. And also while apparently making up other related falsehoods in the process with zero evidence.
And this is very much not the only example, only the most egregious. there's several cases in the evidence page I linked where they say things that are either clearly false or very dubious, and many more cases where they solicit clear falsehoods from an anti-trans activist they frame as some sort of expert.
Like, if this was just about bias, I could have gone with a lot of other papers. The reason this is only about the Telegraph is that it was clear after even a relatively small amount of background research that the Telegraph specifically is way worse on this than even other papers with a similar bias. Loki (talk) 04:38, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
His remedy may sound a bit old-fashioned to some, but it involves reasserting the importance of some reportorial values that are under threat. “The fact that ideology-led nonfiction storytelling is happening everywhere feels worrying, because a society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen. I think the way out of it is to treat people as complicated grey areas, rather than magnificent heroes or sickening villains. And to stick to the nuanced truth, rather than flattening it to make ideological points.”
He’s quick to add a qualification: “That doesn’t mean I’m against activist journalism – it’s obviously done a lot of good. But the old rules of journalism – evidence, fairness – still need to apply.”
I don't think that on trans issues, the Telegraph demonstrates any of the reportorial values of evidence, fairness and fact checking that we require of a "reliable source". For us editors dealing with a complex multi-faceted report like the Cass Review, we need sources that "stick to the nuanced truth".
More generally, I think Wikipedia has a problem when newspapers are used to determine WP:WEIGHT and WP:BALANCE. We get a bunch of dubious stories published by an extreme press (think, the WPATH eunuch story, or the cat litter story above, or the scare about breast binders being child abuse) while more neutral press simply don't report these nonsense stories at all. We can't weigh shit on one side of the scale and thin air on the other side of the scale and claim we're being neutral. If anyone has ideas for a solution, let me know, but I think there's a danger Wikipedia ends up pushing misinformation and being non-neutral because we haven't figured out how to balance this kind of problem journalism. -- Colin°Talk 11:18, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I'm glad we're actually discussing this properly instead of the thought-terminating cliche of "it's reliable because it always has been". As has been pointed out, the Telegraph has had a reputation for bias so strong as to call into question its reliability for, well, half a century. Given the issue has now been a matter of actual academic analysis, I'd go so far as to put the majority of British traditional broadsheet media as "additional considerations apply" when it comes to GENSEX — that's what that category is there for, after all – but as far as the Telegraph goes, it's plainly unreliable in this topic area. Sceptre (talk) 18:55, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I think the threshold for a note of deprication for the telegraph as a reliable source on trans issues has been more than exceeded, and this discussion shows a lack of respect for the social sciences. Transgender care is largely a settled science, especially for adults. If the telegraph was doing this for vaccinations, we'd swiftly deprecate it. I would support a motion to deprecate. However - I would note that the telegraph is generally reliable on all other coverage. Carlp941 (talk) 01:50, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Reading through the examples and sources in this discussion, I come to the conclusion that the source is not reliable for the topic area. At the very least, it's biased to the point that its coverage would be undue in most instances, i.e. it covers incidents and minor controversies that other reputable publications do not. --K.e.coffman (talk) 19:33, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The evidence presented is convicing - The Telegraph is uneliable on trans issues, appears to have a lack of editorial oversight, either through negligence or deliberately, and presents fringe voices as authorative. I support marking The Telegraph as unreliable regarding trans topics. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cortador (talk • contribs) 06:19, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
  • From what I've seen I would support "no consensus on reliability" or "extra considerations apply" or something like that for the Telegraph's coverage of this topic area. I think some of their reporting on this topic is already not reliable according to WP:MEDRS. Excluding that, their reporting on this topic area seems questionable but maybe sometimes usable. --Tristario (talk) 10:16, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
In order for you to see that we would require a properly formatted RfC, which this isn't. You can't vote "no consensus", it is a summary of users' consensus. The last time this happened, there was a clear consensus for "Reliable".Boynamedsue (talk) 16:03, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
this is WP:RFCBEFORE, so it makes sense to discuss what a desired or expected outcome would be. --Licks-rocks (talk) 18:35, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
I think this is a contentious topic that requires the best quality sources, and its most technical aspects should be covered by WP:MEDRS. While I think that the Telegraph is on the whole a generally reliable source (stronger on international issues, weaker on UK politics), I think we would lose absolutely nothing by avoiding ever using it as a source on trans-related issues, or indeed on gender and sexuality issues more broadly, per the evidence presented here by Loki and the arguments of Hydrangeans and others. BobFromBrockley (talk) 18:05, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I think this evidence is strong enough to justify downgrading The Telegraph on trans topics. Colin also makes a great point about WP:WEIGHT, though I don't really see any realistic solution to that, beyond exercising our editorial judgment and arguing things out on talk pages. DFlhb (talk) 11:23, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
    I'd agree. Hell, they're currently going on a bender over David Campanale trying to define his homophobia as Christian values, and then putting out desperate warnings about how "Christians are now the most despised minority in Britain". They're downright tabloid in their coverage of LGBT issues. This is a clear case of "reliable on most subjects, not on certain specific ones", though. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs. 12:28, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
  • It seems odd anyone serious would consult a newspaper on "trans issues", at all. Surely, there is a body of academic literature on "trans issues", even the politics around it, per WP:CONTEXT. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:19, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
I agree that the issue is BIAS, not RS. While some publications may print fake stories to promoted their bias, the more typical way is in the choice of stories or which facts and opinions to report. Note also that headlines and opinion pieces cannot be used as rs. And when a source attributes a claim made, it is not making the claim itself, nor should Wikipedia articles.
Furthermore, news organizations are reliable sources for news only and not for analysis of news or social sciences. By its nature, news reporting will contain inaccuracies.
The way to deal with BIAS is to ensure that the facts and opinions presented in articles are done so in proportion to rs. A story that only appears in the Telegraph would therefore lack weight for inclusion in any major article.
TFD (talk) 16:58, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I have no particular love for the bias of The Telegraph, but I would like to see, as a counterbalance, a list of factually accurate and significant stories on this subject that are principally sourced to The Telegraph.
That is: what would we lose? I'm fine with saying use with care, especially with spin and phrasing, and favour better sources wherever possible, but nowhere near "generally unreliable".
I take issue with this description of the catgender fiasco:
What appears to have happened is that a student compared another student identifying as trans to identifying as a cat to score a rhetorical point.
The story is that audio emerged of a student being called despicable by a teacher in the classroom for saying it was ridiculous to say someone could identify as a cat and that you can't actually change sex.
The Telegraph misreported it, consistently, as about an actual student identifying as a cat, and the "debunkings" focused on the fact that no-one actually identified as a cat, and claims and counterclaims and ridiculous school inspections escalated from there. I think a plague on everyone's house on this particular story, which reflects badly on all the supplied sources, none of whom gave a decent account. Void if removed (talk) 12:39, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
@Void if removed the Telegraph reported the cat story as though it were factual news, where the whole truth was unimportant (or tossed out the window along the lines of it being too good a story for its readers). What "debunking" occurred, didn't AFAIK feature as news reporting. There may well be opinion columns about how awful the Telegraph or how stupid the people who believed the cat story were, and various blogs and podcasts, and maybe some of them got aspects wrong or misled in some way. But the important thing is that the kind of article we rely on as a source just avoided the cat story for the steaming turd it was.
More generally, it appears the Telegraph has a problem with "fact-checking and accuracy" for any topic in which its journalists are campaigning with zealotry. Another example is cycling. See 52mph in a 20 zone a claim featuring in bold red on their front page and continued in the article here. The subheading "Lycra louts are creating death traps all over Britain". The reality (source), which the Telegraph won't tell you, is a pedestrian is killed on average every single day by a vehicle. So many that it isn't even news. But a pedestrian being killed by a cyclist is so rare, it is news for days. Spot any comparison with trans women and violent men and how they are reported by some press? That sub-heading is screaming out to me "Wikipedia, treat this newspaper for the tabloid trash it is". Many pointed out that 52mph is faster than Olympic athletes achieve in a velodrome. The correction at the bottom of the amended article states that they took the data, which is user-generated by Strata wearers, on trust. The point is that nobody on the Telegraph fact checked the story before publishing and sticking it on the banner of their front page. They only amended it because of a loud campaign ridiculing them. Nobody on the Telegraph is interested in the bigger cause of road deaths, which their readers are told is caused by lycra louts on cycles. I think that's a serious problem for Wikipedia to take the paper seriously on anything remotely controversial.
You ask "what would we lose". I don't suspect an awful lot. If something is genuinely important, it tends to be covered elsewhere. It's the weight it offers some editors, who then insist that reliable sources are covering it so it must be included. I'm sure there are lots of "factually accurate and significant stories" that appear solely in the Daily Mail or the Sun or the Daily Mirror. There's enough news in the world that journalists don't have to invent or mislead with everything they write. -- Colin°Talk 13:40, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Sure, my preference is for basically any other source - I just think that "generally unreliable" is too strong, and precludes too many uses. I would go for "additional considerations apply", and advise caution on gender issues if the Telegraph is the only source covering it, but to be honest, I think a general rule on this topic - which so often is riven with social media drama and catgender nonsense - is if it doesn't have two sources, it probably isn't due.
As for what we lose, IIRC The Telegraph broke the story that GIDS suppressed negative evidence, which was part of the chain of events that ultimately led to The Cass Review. Just a quick look at old pages and back in 2021 they were the sole citation on the GIDS page that there had been resignations over the standards of care.
I think to come to a conclusion of "generally unreliable" means looking at a broader sampling of their coverage and not just cherry-picking all the worst ones. They throw a ton at the wall - what's the ratio of reliable to unreliable?
And even then, going through all the examples on the user page at the top, I just find most are entirely arguable. Saying people with Klinefelters or Jacobs syndrome are still male is just true, I don't see the objection. Getting quotes from activist groups and charities the author doesn't like does not make them unreliable. This article is described as suspicious - but why? Hannah Barnes covered this in the New Statesman, and the letter is here. There's no factual inaccuracy here, nothing that would lead me to say this is unreliable as regards the facts.
I think that the objection seems to often be that they are covering it at all plus their general culture war framing, and maybe there's a point sometimes (ie, they trumpet culture war cat puffery for weeks), but not always (they provided coverage of clinical whistleblowers when the Guardian did not).
And frankly, I have to say I'm not aware of any GENSEX article which is massively skewed by an overrepresentation of singly-sourced Telegraph coverage, so what problem is this seeking to solve? Void if removed (talk) 14:45, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
Expanding on my "what do we lose" thoughts with recent examples from the last week.
This recent article covers Wes Streeting's change of heart over calling women bigots for raising questions over the conflict between sex and gender. The only other place to cover this right now is The Times - both of these sources are disputed as to being "generally unreliable" on trans issues, though only the Telegraph is at issue right now. So - is this story a "trans issue"? Is anything about it unreliable? We would not be able to not use this on BLPs if these sources were deemed unreliable, and this was deemed a "trans issue" (and invariably, all issues of sex and gender are deemed "trans issues").
Then there is this article on health consequences for trans men. It is based on a small sample survey, so not the strongest evidence, but the paper does indeed exist, nothing about this report seems to be beyond the realms of popular reporting of such papers - the issue is that since this paper can be used to tell a seemingly negative story, the Telegraph are the ones who report on it. Whereas if a similar quality survey-based study told a positive story, no doubt an outlet like Pink News would report it in a heartbeat. There is bias in what is reported and the way it is reported, but I don't see anything blatantly unreliable here from a quick read of the article and the study itself.
And then there is this, which I think exemplifies the hyperbole that people are complaining about. Seriously, "wokeminster"? That's just embarrassing. But then in the text it says this is a nickname coined by "its own chief executive". Maybe the CEO should be embarrassed. I don't know.
I'm still on the "additional considerations apply" end of things. There's bias both in hyperbolic language and selection of story and angle of coverage - but that's as far as I'd take it in the majority of cases. Prefer other sources where possible, don't be beholden to the language used by the Telegraph, and if only the Telegraph reports it, consider whether it is WP:DUE, but not an absolute rule against. Void if removed (talk) 09:16, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
No disrespect to Streeting, but he's a shadow minister, so currently I don't see significant impact of his personal views mattering much other than his own bio page perhaps. If he were an actual government minister, then more sources might cover it. Wrt the health story: we don't consider any newspapers reliable for that, so it wouldn't figure in Wikipedia as a source regardless of this discussion. I wish there was a separate way to judge WP:DUE than whether the source is reliable or not. -- Colin°Talk 10:03, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
According to the last RfC, the Times and the Telegraph are both reliable for trans issues. If, as you say, There's bias both in hyperbolic language and selection of story and angle of coverage - but that's as far as I'd take it in the majority of cases, that generally means the source is reliable given that the bias is within the range of acceptability. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 17:08, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The Telegraph does seem to have a very strong bias on a number of things which has stepped over into propaganda territory, it is getting more like Fox news. I think it should have no consensus on general reliability - that people should be somewhat cautious using it. I'd only make it yellow at RSP because I think we need to keep a decent spread of opinions about, but we definitely need to at least attribute it for a number of things rather than just treat it as reporting reliably. NadVolum (talk) 13:02, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
I'm surprised that this isn't an RfC. The last discussion on The Telegraph for transgender issues was a 4-option RfC, which got quite a bit of feedback from people resulting in The Telegraph being declared "generally reliable". [60] Given that you clearly intend to overturn existing consensus, I'm wondering why you declined to use RfCs. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 01:38, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
In the interests of ensuring we get a broader perspective; I have begun notifying everyone that commented at the previous discussion (the aforementioned RfC) and have not yet commented here. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 01:48, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@Chess I mean, if you want to do that you can just ping them here. Please don't message people on talk pages directly because the more private a notification is, the more it looks like WP:CANVASSING. Loki (talk) 01:50, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@LokiTheLiar: I'll post a list of users I have notified here after I'm done. I don't believe leaving people talk page messages using Template:RfC notice is canvassing, otherwise it would not exist. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 01:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@Chess But this isn't an RFC, though. It's WP:RFCBEFORE. Loki (talk) 01:58, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@LokiTheLiar: I apologize, I'm using Template:RSN-notice and made a typo. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:06, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@LokiTheLiar: I have notified the users I felt were appropriate to notify. Specifically, I tried to notify everyone that commented at The Telegraph RfC I mentioned, minus editors that already commented here, were topic banned from GENSEX, indefinitely blocked from Wikipedia, or indicated that they did not wish to receive messages by redirecting their talk page to their user page. Since the list is long, I put it here: [61] Some people I accidentally notified despite their comments here.
Let me know if I missed anyone or you can leave the same message yourself. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 03:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
That previous RFC had no WP:RFCBEFORE, which is against the usual guidelines on this. This is the WP:RFCBEFORE for a future RFC. It's my contention that the main reason that RFC had that result is because it was sprung on this noticeboard with no warning and no context. Loki (talk) 01:49, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@LokiTheLiar: When you open the RFC remember not to notify partisan Wikiprojects, to avoid CANVASS issues. BilledMammal (talk) 02:28, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
I intend to ping everyone in this thread and notify all relevant Wikiprojects. I reject the idea that any Wikiprojects are partisan. Loki (talk) 02:29, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
It's a fact; evidence shows that some Wikiprojects are non-representative of the broader community on some topics, such as Wikiproject LGBT on this topic, and thus per two ArbCom rulings, one establishing that notifications to forums mostly populated by a biased or partisan audience are considered canvassing, and the other establishing that "biased " or "partisan" means non-representative of the broader community, they cannot be notified without violating CANVASS - and that is particularily problematic in this topic area as it is a contentious topic.
This is a high profile discussion, appropriate to list at WP:CENT, that will get significant participation - there is no benefit to notifying these partisan projects, and it will only result in drama and concerns that the result does not reflect the broader community. BilledMammal (talk) 02:39, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Neither of the two Arbcom rulings you cited said that informing the relevant Wikiproject on a topic is canvassing.
For those that were not aware, this was also recently discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:No queerphobes and multiple experienced users and admins have refuted the claim there as well, so there is no need to rehash it here again. Raladic (talk) 02:50, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
They say that informing non-representative forums is canvassing - they don't add an exception saying "unless they are organized as a Wikiproject". As for the previous discussion, four editors including yourself and Loki, and no admins, disagreed - and I note that all are members of the relevant Wikiproject.
I won't go too deeply into the discussion here - I just wanted to make sure editors were aware that such notifications would be problematic and a policy violation. BilledMammal (talk) 02:55, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
No, it is your claim that Wikiproject LGBT is partisan, but as was already pointed out at the MfD, both people supporting and opposing LGBT issues are subscribed to the wikiproject, with the specific purpose of being informed of relevant LGBT related articles and discussions. Also there were many more than 4 users that disagreed with your claim (just to quickly refute the 4 - myself, YFNS, Loki, Nat Gertler, Bilorv, Girth Summit, AusLondoner, Joe Roe, Trystan, OwenBlacker,..), and it did include admins such as @Girth Summit and Joe Roe so please do not distort the facts. Raladic (talk) 03:05, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
As per the ArbCom cases I quoted, a forum is partisan if it is not representative. My evidence shows it is not representative - it doesn't need to have zero diversity of opinion for that to be true.
Regarding the evidence, only four editors opposed it. I'm aware a previous accusation of canvassing was made without evidence that may have garnered additional responses, but rejection of an accusation without evidence cannot be inferred to mean rejection of an accusation with evidence.
I'm going to step back now; I've said my piece and there is no benefit to continuing unless such notifications are sent. If you want to discuss further you are welcome to come to my talk page. BilledMammal (talk) 03:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Previously uninvolved here, but this caught my eye.
Let me get this straight...
1) there is a proposal to, sometime soon, create an RFC about The Telegraph and trans issues.
2) Some editors are suggesting that they intend to post notifications on a variety of Wikiprojects of their choosing.
3) Upon being warned to avoid CANVASS issues, the claim has been made that Wikiproject LGBT is not likely to be partisan on the question of The Telegraph and trans issues, so notifying them would not be a CANVASS violation.
That sounds absurd on its face. Of course the members of Wikiproject LGBT are likely to be biased on the topic at hand. To say "some members oppose LGBT issues", and thereby imply that notifying that Wikproject is unlikely to inject bias into the RFC, is like planning an RFC about a hot-button issue in American politics and notifying Wikiproject Conservatism. There might conceivably be some members there that "oppose conservatism", but notifying that Wikiproject would still be regarded as blatant canvassing - notifying Wikiproject LGBT would be no less blatant.
Simple solution - don't canvass others before an RFC. People who are following the matter are likely to notice the RFC, and there is an RFC noticeboard that will attract others. That will suffice, no need to ping anybody else. At worst, that looks like a blatant CANVASS violation and a POV push. At best, it introduces a potential for bias that would not otherwise have existed, and will cast a shadow over the RFC. That's all I'll say here. Philomathes2357 (talk) 03:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
And this sort of nonsense is why I don't bother to get involved in most discussions like this. All I will say in short is, you're completely wrong, Philomathes. If there was a politics related RfC, notifying Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics would be completely appropriate. You are correct that notifying Wikiproject Conservatism would be biased on a general politics topic, but that has nothing to do with this. For an LGBT topic, notifying the related Wikiproject is completely in line with policy and is not in any way canvassing. SilverserenC 03:41, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
You've already made this argument elsewhere and it went nowhere. WP:APPNOTE explicitly allows notifying Wikiprojects, for one, so your argument is dead in the water even if everything else you said was true.
But I also disagree that "evidence shows" any such thing, for many reasons:
1) Wikiprojects are public spaces. The intended audience of any Wikiproject is anyone interested in the topic area, not people with a particular opinion on any given topic area. You can watch Wikiprojects that you don't like, and many people do.
2) Even if you could establish the audience of a Wikiproject did in fact share a particular opinion, it wouldn't be a bias for the purposes of WP:CANVASS. An RFC about creationism vs evolution can notify WP:BIOLOGY even though almost all biologists think creationism is silly. Wikiprojects exist to improve the encyclopedia, and a Wikiproject that was WP:ACTIVIST in the way you're implying would be WP:NOTHERE and get deleted.
3) Your previous argument was that there was a statistical difference in the way Wikiproject members voted versus non-Wikiproject members. But there's an obvious statistical problem with saying non-Wikiproject members who voted on an RFC in a particular topic area are representative of Wikipedia as a whole. Whatever the eventual consensus was is representative of the opinions of Wikipedians in that topic area. If it's not the same as the majority opinion of non project members, that indicates that it's actually people who edit in the topic area but aren't members of the relevant project who are "partisan". (But it's equally silly to say it's WP:CANVASSING to notify them.)
4) Your statistical argument has another major flaw: if we applied it to ordinary American politics it would imply that since black people vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, every black person should be considered biased with regards to American politics. But that's ridiculous (and in a Wikipedia context a violation of WP:HID).
Furthermore, your argument combining two ArbCom rulings is pretty clearly WP:SYNTH, and I mean that not just to state a policy but to point out that it's a combination of unrelated facts to imply a fact not in evidence. That case was about notifications to an outside biased forum, and neither principle you linked even contemplates notifications on Wikipedia itself being canvassing. Loki (talk) 03:49, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
I just attempted to hat this discussion but was reverted.[62] notifying WT:LGBT of LGBT-related discussions/RFCs/etc is canvassing is silly. That was consensus in two discussions this month, the latter explicitly about "is notifying WT:LGBT canvassing". This has been consensus for over a decade. This is not the place for arguments to the contrary and such arguments border on tendentious. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 03:49, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • In terms of my actual opinions on this matter, the first issue I have with Loki's evidence is what BilledMammal said. The Telegraph did not say that a student identified as a cat, they pointed out that a student was censored for saying students shouldn't be allowed to. Even assuming that the Telegraph did say a student identified as a cat, though, that claim is very different than students identifying as cats are accommodated with litter boxes. The second is a well-known hoax, the first is very plausible given the extent of the furry and otherkin community. The Telegraph certainly never spread the second, so using that to criticize the Telegraph is a textbook strawman fallacy.
The other claim that Loki makes is that The Telegraph quoting Thoughtful Therapists is wrong. First of all, it is standard journalistic practice to get quotes from advocacy groups on both sides of an issue. They didn't use it for facts, they didn't publish an op-ed by the group, they used certain quotes from the group to explain why some people would oppose laws on transgender identity. This is an impossible burden for any publication to meet. The Guardian and The Observer regularly quoted Osama bin Laden to provide his perspective on America. Despite Al-Qaeda being generally considered as an extremist terrorist group, newspapers quoted bin Laden because his perspective on events such as the Iraq War or 9/11 was valuable to readers and they wanted to present different sides to an issue. If we designated newspapers as unreliable for quoting WP:FRINGE groups, we would have to designate practically every publication as such for providing a platform to groups such as ISIS or Al-Qaeda which are more fringe than Thoughtful Therapists. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist opined that using the Flat Earth Society as a source for astrophysics would be wrong, but The Guardian has quoted flat earthers on numerous occasions when writing news stories on the movement. [63] [64] [65]
TACTT being described as an activist group is accurate when TACTT describes itself as an activist group on their website, saying TACTT is an activist group, rather than a learning space. [66] Loki has had three weeks to respond to Barnards.tar.gz pointing this out and nobody else has stepped in to show why that isn't accurate, so I'll assume the point is conceded.
To summarize, the main points of the creator of this RfC is that the Telegraph is unreliable because it quotes WP:FRINGE groups and said a school let students identify as cats. My response is that banning the quoting of WP:FRINGE groups is a standard no other journalistic organization is held to and the Telegraph never said in its own voice that students identified as cats. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 03:56, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
The fact that you're trying to claim that terrorist groups fall under WP:FRINGE makes me immediately dismiss your opinion as uninformed on even what Wikipedia policy is. From our very page on the subject, FRINGE has to do with pseudoscience and, to an extent, alternative history claims. It does not have to do with "is the opinion of a terrorist group on a subject".
Should I even bother addressing your purposeful strawmanning of what Loki and others said in relation to newspapers not only platforming FRINGE groups, but purposefully not defining them as fringe proponents? That's the problem and where the misinformation comes from. Quoting from pseudoscientists like flat earthers is fine, so long as you are explaining them as being flat earthers. If a source tried to claim a flat earther was an expert on tectonic plates or geology when they weren't, that's called misinformation. And is exactly the sort of thing we downgrade sources for here. SilverserenC 04:08, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@Silver seren your comments, like "Should I even bother addressing your purposeful strawmanning", "The fact that you're trying to claim that terrorist groups fall under WP:FRINGE makes me immediately dismiss your opinion as uninformed on even what Wikipedia policy is.", and your recent edit summary, "Oh, this tired old nonsense argument again" are WP:UNCIVIL, and don't help the conversation. These stand in stark contrast to @Chess's content-oriented comment. I'll save my opinions on this matter for the RFC. Philomathes2357 (talk) 04:18, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Terrorist extremist groups frequently promote alternative history takes and bizarre pseudoscientific beliefs on religion. See Letter to the American People, published by The Observer, where bin Laden accuses the Jews of controlling America to make Israel. I thought that was implicit, but you can read up on ISIL's beliefs on measuring rainfall (they think it's wrong) as well. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 04:26, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
A few responses:

The Telegraph did not say that a student identified as a cat

They very much did, and in fact said that students at other schools identified as several other animals besides.

Even assuming that the Telegraph did say a student identified as a cat, though, that claim is very different than students identifying as cats are accommodated with litter boxes. The second is a well-known hoax, the first is very plausible given the extent of the furry and otherkin community

This claim seems obtuse, and very ignorant of what the hoax actually entails (and why it's used). The idea that it's plausible for a student to identify as an animal is already odd because "the extent of the furry and otherkin community" is actually tiny, and especially tiny among kids. But even granting that, the core of the hoax is the alleged endorsement of adults. You can even read more about this on the hoax page, which includes plenty of examples which do not include literal litter boxes.

First of all, it is standard journalistic practice to get quotes from advocacy groups on both sides of an issue.

I agree, and had this been done in that context and with those labels I wouldn't have an issue. James Esses is clearly an anti-trans activist and if he was interviewed as a representative for his group there'd be no problem. But unfortunately, Thoughtful Therapists is consistently referred to not as an activist group but as a professional group, when its spokesperson is not even a relevant professional. And it's clearly an issue of bias because similar groups with opposing biases are instead clearly referred to as activist groups with no acknowledgement that they are actually composed of professionals.

To summarize, the main points of the creator of this RfC is that the Telegraph is unreliable because it quotes WP:FRINGE groups [...]

No it's not. I never said Thoughtful Therapists as a whole was fringe. I said that James Esses in particular is not a therapist, has never been a therapist, but was repeatedly misrepresented as a therapist even though the Telegraph knows full well that he is not. Loki (talk) 04:21, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
They very much did
Can you quote where they did that? As far as I can tell, all they say is some varient on students "were reprimanded for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat". This is true; there is a tape recording of students being reprimanded for this, which is a different claim from the one you claim the Telegraph made, that a student did self-identify as a cat.
and in fact said that students at other schools identified as several other animals besides
They did make this statement - but can you prove it was false, or are you merely assuming it is? BilledMammal (talk) 04:44, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Just as an aside, I personally know two children in the UK school system who identified as animals for brief periods. There is nothing whatsoever dubious about this claim. Of course, if the Telegraph has somewhere claimed children were provided with litter boxes (or in this case, the wolf equivalent), I would be very sceptical.Boynamedsue (talk) 05:52, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Those are good questions. Andreas JN466 19:07, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Can you quote where they did that? As far as I can tell, all they say is some varient on students "were reprimanded for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat".

You have literally quoted them say that. They say "a classmate's decision to self-identify as a cat". If I say that Keir Starmer opposes Rishi Sunak's decision to defund the NHS, and Sunak has not in fact decided to defund the NHS, have I lied or not?

They did make this statement - but can you prove it was false, or are you merely assuming it is?

It's not on me to prove it's false, it's on them to give literally any evidence for what is clearly in general a well-known hoax. Loki (talk) 19:54, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
A closer example would be Keir Starmer condemns Rishi Sunak for his opposition to the decision to fund the NHS.
And even if there hasn’t been a decision to fund the NHS it wouldn’t make you a liar, as with that statement you’re not taking a position about the accuracy of that claim.
It's not on me to prove it's false
If you want to declare a source unreliable you actually need to prove it is unreliable. It also isn’t a hoax; see Otherkin. BilledMammal (talk) 20:07, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
From this article
"A school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat."
There is no "a hypothetical classmate", or "classmate could identify as a cat". Even if we do say it isn't directly saying "that her classmate identifies as a cat." It is highly misleading and unreliable anyway because we as editors couldn't tell what actually happened. LunaHasArrived (talk) 20:42, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
On a separate note they have on multiple occasions published op eds by James Esses
here is his page of 4 op-eds he has written for the telegraph. LunaHasArrived (talk) 08:46, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist opined that using the Flat Earth Society as a source for astrophysics would be wrong, but The Guardian has quoted flat earthers on numerous occasions when writing news stories on the movement. - you would have a point if that underlined section was replaced with when writing news stories on astrophysics. The Telegraph does not quote anti-trans quacks when writing on the movement, it quotes them when writing about trans issues in general, and does not mention they are quacks. Imagine if the Guardian quoted the Flat Earth Society on literally every piece of news about astrophysics... Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 17:56, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • The Telegraph is indistinguishable from a tabloid now. I see it most days. It was always partisan, but in recent years it has dropped any pretence of balance, and there's serious debate over whether it might be the first notionally serious paper to switch from the Tories to racist rabble-rousers Reform UK. It is unreliable on climate change (Nigel Lawson wrote regularly for them until his death), any culture war issue (Toby Young is a semi-regular columnist), Europe (it is exceeded in its fervour for Brexit only by the Brexiter Beobachter), Russia/Ukraine, Prince Harry, the Royals in general - the only part of it that's any good is the crossword. Guy (help! - typo?) 14:59, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • That goes beyond what a reasonable person would perceive as bias into something which does actually impact its reliability... I'm disappointed to see that The Telegraph rather than cleaning up this questionable blind spot of theirs has gotten worse. The Telegraph seems to have looked at the Daily Mail and said "Oh that looks fun, reputation and tradition be damned lets do that!" I often see The Telegraph as roughly comparable to the Wall Street Journal... The big thing you see with The Telegraph which you aren't seeing with the WSJ is the messaging and tone from the editorial side making its way into the news side (which is a big reliability issue). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:18, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • I'm against any blanket deprecation of sources. Reliability is context specific, and this noticeboard generally does an excellent job at recognizing and handling this in specific cases, and which the notice at the top when editing this page reminds us of. Blanket deprecation usually happens when the source is biased in the "wrong" direction, and done by collecting and ginning up / spinning up any minuses that can be found, which can be done to nearly any source. North8000 (talk) 15:26, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • What are you defining as "blanket deprecation", North8000? Because this discussion is about considering The Telegraph as unreliable on transgender related topics. It is not about deprecating the newspaper's reliability as a whole. SilverserenC 17:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • By blanket deprecation, I mean any deprecation that is broader than deciding whether or not it is suitable to support a particular piece of text. North8000 (talk) 22:10, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
  • There's no suggestion of deprecation in the OP. At worst we're splitting it in half on RSP and adding a separate entry declaring it "unreliable for trans topics" or somesuch. --Licks-rocks (talk) 18:49, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
@North8000: The point of this non-RfC that seeks to overturn an RfC is that The Telegraph presents a point of view that is unacceptable to the people editing in the gender and sexuality topic area. Let's analyze the context in which this occurred, the Cass Review. On April 25th, Colin removed a citation to The Telegraph and replaced it with Pink News. [67] Colin also removed a citation to The Telegraph which broke the story that the Cass Review would be released in the future, with a BBC article that announced the Cass Review after it came out. [68] These are hardly cases where The Telegraph was shown to have been spreading false information.
The user Void if removed removed The Telegraph as well, because it spotlighted that one of the key recommendations of the report was to prevent children from transitioning genders. [69] They feel that the article should only be cited to the review itself. Reading the review itself, one of its overview of recommendations is that The option to provide masculinising/feminising hormones from age 16 is available, but the Review recommends extreme caution. There should be a clear clinical rationale for providing hormones at this stage rather than waiting until an individual reaches 18. [70]
At the time of my comment, the article does not include this information. [71] Instead, it says that:

The report made 32 recommendations covering areas including assessment of children and young people, diagnosis, psychological interventions, social transition, improving the evidence base underpinning medical and non-medical interventions, puberty blockers and hormone treatments, service improvements, education and training, clinical pathways, detransition and private provision.

Recommendations included:

  • The development of a regional network of centres, and continuity of care for 17-25-year-olds.
  • The use of standard psychological and pharmacological treatments for co-occurring conditions like anxiety and depression.
  • Individualised care plans, including mental health assessments and screening for neurodivergent conditions such as autism.
  • A designated medical practitioner who takes personal responsibility for the safety of children receiving care.
  • That children and families considering social transition should be seen as soon as possible by a relevant clinical professional.
This is what I would call "burying the lede", as this recommendation was moved to become a single sentence in the "findings" section, specifically Cass Review#Hormone therapy. Most newspapers spotlight the recommendation that the Cass Review recommended against puberty blockers for minors.[72][73] [74] What is happening is that editors on the Cass Review article have used WP:MEDRS to argue that only the Cass Review itself is reliable for information on what is contained within it. By doing this, the article can now selectively emphasizes the aspects of the Cass Review that do not conflict with the view that minors should receive puberty blockers and gender-affirming care. One reading of the recommendations section is that the Cass Review implies that there should be more gender-affirming care for minors, given the recommendation of "the development of a regional network of centers" and "a designated medical practitioner who takes personal responsibility for the safety of children receiving care."
The problem with using only a scientific study to describe the contents of the study is that it is a WP:PRIMARY source with respect to its own contents. By removing The Telegraph and secondary sources which describe the relative importance of recommendations, the article can now be made to avoid mentioning facts that are inconvenient for the point of view that editors feel the article should have.
Other notable facts left out from the summary of the Cass Review [75] include a recommendation that services be provided for detransitioning, that clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity, and for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress. What's fascinating is that editors have brought this up and have been shot down on the talk page, with Colin saying that I still stand by my comment that I don't trust the Telegraph to report trans health issues accurately. [76] [77]
In practice, it appears that editors are deeming the Telegraph unreliable and substituting their own viewpoints on what is important about the Cass Review. This is not something that we should be encouraging. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 01:00, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
Good, rigorous comment @Chess. I agree with your bolded conclusions. Everyone is free to reach their own conclusions about "gender-affirming care" for children, but they are not free to manipulate Wikipedia to give undue weight to any particular view about the topic.
I've only recently taken an interest in this discussion, so I may very well have missed something, but I have yet to see any credible that shows a pattern of the Telegraph publishing outright falsehoods about trans issues - they appear, instead, to be publishing views that many editors find offensive (some of them minority-held views, sure).
Even if a factually dubious claim or two may have snuck through their editorial process, that would still not be, per se, a compelling case for changing their reliability assessment. We give RS a lot of leeway to screw things up. For example, the NYT "accidentally" pushed the WMD hoax, which led to over a million needless deaths, but that has not affected their reliability (it's barely even mentioned in the NYT article).
I'm perplexed why this has become an issue. I'm hoping some very compelling evidence demonstrating a pattern of egregious unreliability is presented soon, or otherwise this whole conversation will start to appear WP:TENDENTIOUS. Philomathes2357 (talk) 01:14, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
I don't think I could count the amount of times this breaks assume good faith. @Chess if you want to hash out WP:Medrs on the Cass review talk page feel free, but don't assume that people are removing sources for any particular reason and to hide a viewpoint. there is a reason why medrs exists and it basically comes down to, newspapers are bad at displaying science. LunaHasArrived (talk) 01:45, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
I am specifically trying to assume good faith by blaming this on a process failure and not on a conspiracy by specific people.
According to WP:MEDPOP, the high-quality popular press can be a good source for social, biographical, current-affairs, financial, and historical information in a medical article. This is precisely the sort of information that sources like the Telegraph provide. They discuss social and current affairs impacts of reports such as the Cass Review, e.g. that children should generally not be prescribed puberty blockers, which is a highly charged issue outside of the medical community and many consider to be an important conclusion of the study. Removing the Telegraph has had the effect of minimizing the importance of this issue. This is true whether or not the personal intentions of the people involved was to hide this information. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
@Chess I would suggest the idea that I've had any part in downplaying Cass' findings against the lack of evidence for the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers is absurd to the point of offensiveness, and if it has ended up not being stated prominently enough for you in the article that is largely because of the tidal wave of partisan garbage and mis/disinformation in popular press sources that swamped the release of the review, sifting through in some kind of consensus fashion is a sisyphean task. If you see talk, my original suggestion was that the format of the page should highlight the things highlighted in the Review's executive summary:
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
If you want to join in editing that page, please, be my guest. I don't have infinite free time. This has nothing to do with the Telegraph discussion IMO. Void if removed (talk) 08:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
@Chess - If I had to, at gunpoint, ascribe to Void If Removed a viewpoint, it would be that minors should not receive puberty blockers and gender-affirming care. For Colin, I'd guess the same or similar. If anything, I'd argue both push that POV excessively, so I did a double take reading you accuse them of pushing the opposite... It's like if somebody accused me of going out of my way to defend Genspect and NARTH.
You are citing one of the most amazing cases of bi-partisan agreement in GENSEX I've seen, "this newspaper is misrepresenting a scientific document on trans healthcare" (from those who agreed with, and disagreed with, the reports findings), and presenting it as indicative of trying to silence the POV that children should be prohibited from transition.
That edit of VIR's you cite[78], is them removing the Telegraph piece that is being used to cite "the Cass review recommends holding off on medical transition until 25" - which it absolutely does not (it recommends holding off until 18, 16 sometimes, which is fucked up in it's own right, but not holding off until 25)[79] This fuckup from the Telegraph was repeated by multiple sources, and the Cass Review had to put out an item in it's FAQ explicitly specifying they didn't recommend that.[80]
TLDR: If a page has both trans and gender critical editors agreeing "the Telegraph fucked up reporting this document, it never said what they said it did", and the authors of the document agree, and the document itself clearly never said what the Telegraph said it did, there is not a pro-trans cabal the Telegraph just really fucked up
Void, I know editing can be tense between us, but I hope we can both smile at how off base this was. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 02:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
The Telegraph never said that people under 25 would be denied care. The article says that:

Under-25s should not be rushed into changing gender, but should receive “unhurried, holistic, therapeutic support”, Dr Cass concluded. She said “life-changing” decisions must be properly considered in adulthood, noting that brain maturation continues into the mid-20s.

The report found that “clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity”. Young adults aged 17 to 25 who want to change gender should be seen by “a follow-through service” rather than sent straight to an adult clinic, the report concludes.

Someone misrepresenting the nature of the article doesn't mean the Telegraph is wrong. Anywikiuser already explained that that the summation was likely inaccurate in the talk page discussion I linked from April. [81] I'm surprised to see your argument being that people I see as anti-trans rights and pro-trans rights agree the Telegraph lied therefore it must be true. I fail to see why editors' beliefs about what the article says is more reliable than what the article really says. It would be more helpful if you pointed out where in that article the Telegraph actually did lie since I have repeatedly linked that article for you. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 02:36, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
The later paragraph is at best incredibly misleading, it says a "17-25 year olds who wants to change gender should be seen by a 'follow-through service' rather than sent straight to an adult clinic."
this faq page ( The question saying "has the review recommended that no one should transition before the age of 25) Clarifies that this follow through service is only for people who got seen before the age of 17 and therefore a 17 year old could be "sent straight to the adult clinic" based on Cass's recommendations. LunaHasArrived (talk) 03:12, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
This article?[82]
  • Second sentence of the article The report by paediatric consultant Dr Hilary Cass has made 32 recommendations, including: [1] calling for the “unhurried” care of those under 25 who think they may be transgender; [2] an end to the prescribing of powerful hormone drugs to under-18s; [3] and early help for primary school children who want to socially transition
  • 1) The piece later expands Under-25s should not be rushed into changing gender, but should receive “unhurried, holistic, therapeutic support”, Dr Cass concluded. She said “life-changing” decisions must be properly considered in adulthood, noting that brain maturation continues into the mid-20s. - AFAICT, "unhurried, holistic support" does not appear in the document. There is no discussion of "rushing under-25s into changing gender". The reports FAQ says The Review has not commented on the use of masculinising/feminising hormones on people over the age of 18. This is outside of the scope of the Review.[83]
  • 2) However, Dr Cass has gone further and said children who think they are transgender should not be given any hormone drugs at all until at least 18. - the report's recommendation 8 actually says The option to provide masculinising/feminising hormones from age 16 is available, but the Review would recommend extreme caution. There should be a clear clinical rationale for providing hormones at this stage rather than waiting until an individual reaches 18.[84]
  • 3) there is a section Young children should have therapy before they are allowed to socially transition. Cass actually said the family should: Parents are encouraged to seek clinical help and advice ... This should include discussion of the risks and benefits and the voice of the child should be heard. ... Young people and young adults have spoken positively about how social transition helped to reduce their gender dysphoria and feel more comfortable in themselves. ... The Review has therefore advised that it is important to try and ensure that those already actively involved in the young person’s welfare provide support in decision making and that plans are in place to ensure that the young person is protected from bullying and has a trusted source of support. [85] - ie parents should get advice on how to care for the child, and listen to the child.
TLDR: Within the first 2 sentences of that article, I counted 3 factual inaccuracies. 1) was explicitly not in scope of the review, 2) ascribes a more hardline position to Cass than she had and 3) it ignores all mentions of supporting social transition for youth and that it is families/parents, not the kids, who are brought for counseling. The Telegraph has tried very very hard to make it seem like the Cass Review said 3 things it did not.
What the article really says is fearmongering nonsense and cherrypicked quotes and not up to WP:MEDRS standards or even WP:MEDPOP standards, as editors of varying political opinions have already agreed (which was raised in relation to your comment that editors were substituting their own viewpoints) . Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 04:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
I got as far as @Chess's claim that the Telegraph "spotlighted that one of the key recommendations of the report was to prevent children from transitioning genders" and decided it wasn't worth my while reading whatever other nonsense they wrote. That isn't a recommendation in the report, never mind a key recommendation in the report. If the Telegraph wrote that, then Chess has just made, themselves, a strong argument for not using that unreliable source. YFNS, my position on puberty blockers is that Wikipedia should document the most reliable evidence or lack of evidence on their efficacy, which I think various systematic reviews have demonstrated and Cass repeats, and simultaneously neutrally report what various international and national guidelines recommend wrt their use for trans healthcare. I don't appreciate your claim I've been pushing my position on it or that there are only "trans and gender critical editors" who are complaining about the Telegraph: my position is whatever the evidence says together with whatever experts recommend, which is also Wikipedia's position per WP:MEDRS. If WPATH published a better systematic review next month that demonstrated the opposite, I'd advocate articles should change.
The Telegraph systematically gets trans reporting wrong. It is failing basic journalistic standards of reporting news neutrally and keeping opinions for opinion columns. It misreads important nuanced documents like the Cass report, claiming it is some kind of victory for its anti-"gender ideology" and transphobic campaigns. That's deeply unhelpful for medical healthcare. It is fairly clear that on culture war topics the Telegraph has no editorial oversight requiring fact checking and accuracy, only that the article meets the Tory Party ideological campaigns. -- Colin°Talk 07:58, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
Colin, quick note, I did say your position is similar to VIR but not the same - you and I disagree on the evidence of their efficacy that the reviews present (we all agree they don't change GD, I just think their conclusion that "no change in GD could be proof the treatment works for preventing it worsening" should be given weight). I did not mean to put you in a GC camp, just note that accusing you and VIR of a POV neither of you hold was funny.
I was mostly commenting on the accusations against VIR, as he said I would suggest the idea that I've had any part in downplaying Cass' findings against the lack of evidence for the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers is absurd to the point of offensiveness - I responded last night out of shock at the absurdity. I was attempting to defend you both from silly accusations, and apologize if I caused offense in my haste. Best regards, Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 15:05, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for trying to fix this. The most egregious comment was "both push that POV excessively". We generally reserve "POV pushing" for a block request with plenty evidence, for editors who clearly came to WP pre-armed with a personal POV they want to push, regardless of what the best sources say. I think it is possible for reasonable good faith editors, with either strong ideological positions or none or little, to come to somewhat different conclusions from the vast array of sources we have. I have been defending Cass and the systematic reviews they commissioned from a MEDRS pov. I'd prefer to make my arguments and have them challenged on that basis, rather than be accused of being in one ideological camp or another from which I'm pushing some activist POV. -- Colin°Talk 21:13, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
For 1), page 224 of the Cass Review says Taking account of all the above issues, a follow-through service continuing up to age 25 would remove the need for transition at this vulnerable time and benefit both this younger population and the adult population. This will have the added benefit in the longer-term of also increasing the capacity of adult provision across the country as more gender services are established. In other words, younger people feel rushed to transition before the age of 17 because they'll lose access to the care that transgender minors receive.
For 2), there is a distinction between the words "should" and "must" that is best explained by RFC 2119. [86] This phrase, or the phrase "NOT RECOMMENDED" mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances when the particular behavior is acceptable or even useful, but the full implications should be understood and the case carefully weighed before implementing any behavior described with this label. This is precisely what Cass says, children under 18 are recommended not to receive hormones. The article from the Telegraph later says She said the NHS should exert “extreme caution” in giving out cross-sex hormones to under-18s as the research carried out by her review concludes there is “a lack of high-quality research” on their effectiveness. She said their use should be incorporated into the puberty blocker trial, which means that the Telegraph understood that "should" in this context means there are exceptions.
For 3) page 165 says for the full quote of the recommendation: When families/carers are making decisions about social transition of pre-pubertal children, services should ensure that they can be seen as early as possible by a clinical professional with relevant experience. Again, Cass recommends that children should be seen by a clinical professional while the decision is being made, not after. "Should" =/= "must". It seems the Cass Review implies that this can be broader than therapy, but it's quite clear that it recommends against a child socially transitioning before a clinical professional can see them (even though that might not be possible in practice). Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 00:49, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
@Chess I would suggest that if we weren't treating the Cass Review as MEDRS then that page would be 99% garbage sourced to partisan ideologues who insist the Cass Review advocates conversion therapy and should be ignored because Hilary Cass spoke to "baddies". Void if removed (talk) 07:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Hmm. As regards The Telegraph is a decent, serious, reliable source I would have agreed with this five or six years ago. Since then it has taken a (not, admittedly, complete) swerve towards printing Daily Mail-esque misinformation, which I suppose in unsurprising when you employ people like climate change denier James Delingpole, GB News presenter Camilla Tominey and the regularly post-truth unpleasantness that is Allison Pearson. I wouldn't trust it now. Black Kite (talk) 09:42, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Are these sources on K. Annamalai reliable?

Hi! I'm writing an article on K. Annamalai, the Tamil Nadu state president for the BJP and more or less Narendra Modi's main man in the state. I've used all of the sources listed below for the first draft, which are not listed anywhere on the Perennial sources page as either reliable or unreliable (you can read my article draft here to see how exactly I've used them). I'd be quite grateful if you guys could go over all of them and let me know if they're good enough to be cited in a Wiki article.

- The News Minute (these articles)
- Livemint (this article)
- Business Standard (this page)
- India Today (this page)
- Deccan Herald (these four articles here)
- NDTV (this article)
- theprint.in (these articles)
- Oneindia (this page)

By the way, how do I get at least some of these sources on the Perennial page? They're all a pretty big deal in Indian news media (to varying degrees), but none of them are listed on the page - in fact, there are only three Indian sources listed as "reliable" in total, which sort of limits the options of people trying to write articles about figures who are only discussed in India. Let me know who I should talk to so I can help fix this. Thanks! CalyxSage (talk) 09:56, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

@CalyxSage: The Oneindia page you list is certainly not acceptable as a source since as per the disclaimer at the page it "is sourced from various publicly available platforms including https://en.wikipedia.org/" and the publisher disclaims responsibility for its contents. See WP:CIRCULAR for one of the relevant policies.
Most of the other sources you list should be okay under WP:NEWSORG although that should not be taken to mean that they can be used blindly, especially when writing a WP:BLP, and editorial judgement needs to be applied depending upon what exactly the source is being cited for. As a concrete example, while this Print profile may be used as a source for the subject's educational qualifications, it is a puff-piece ("broke a lot of hearts", "strict policeman who has a heart of gold" etc) and a wikipedia article should not regurgitate its characterizations uncritically.
At a quick glance, your current draft seems to along the right lines although I would suggest that you have it reviewed at WP:AFC before moving it into mainspace so that some kinks can be ironed out. For example, the line about the subject belonging to the Kongu Vellalar community is currently unsourced (see also WP:CASTEID) and the note about the community being classed as OBC, which is cited to a government database, would constitute WP:SYNTHESIS. But overall a good start! Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 20:05, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
I'll get rid of the Oneindia source, I was only using it to cite his birthdate and birthplace. This Hindustan Times article confirms the same information, should I just use it instead as a citation in the same place?
Also, I'm not really sure where to source Annamalai being from the Kongu Vellalar community. I got that information from the Tamil Wikipedia page about him but now that I look back at it, they didn't actually source it either, whoops. Everything else I look up about his background confirms that that's the community he's from, but nothing that I could source in a Wikipedia article (e.g. websites with names like "StarsUnfolded", Quora posts asking about his caste, etc). What should I do? I feel like this information is something that should be noted in an article on him, seeing that this type of thing gets a fair amount of weightage in India.
Thanks! CalyxSage (talk) 08:02, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
Deccan Herald should definitely go on RSP. I’m not familiar with the others. RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 02:48, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm only sort of familiar with the Indian press environment, but I believe that all of these sources, maybe save Oneindia, are pretty well established (NDTV is just Indian CNN). Maybe ask other Indian Wikipedians who are familiar with news in India about their validity. CalyxSage (talk) 08:10, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Obituary in Lobster (magazine) for Olivia Frank (a transgender mossad spy); is it investigative or conspiratorial?

Link

Written by the same already cited author who wrote this already cited article in Tablet (magazine), this request is primarily due to an abundance of caution because I want to heavily rely on it, as well as the contentiousness of the content, particularly I/P and gensex. FortunateSons (talk) 07:45, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I'd be rather nervous. Lobster has published some important and well researched investigations, and has some writers who are also published authors with reputable presses (probably the most heavyweight are Peter Dale Scott and John Newsinger) but by definition the material here is edging towards WP:FRINGE, because it focuses on "parapolitics", conspiracy theories and topics the mainstream won't cover. On its masthead, it has some recommendations by other publications, the most mainstream of which is probably Red Pepper who said in 2001 “It feels very amateur, but in the best sense of the word: human, passionate and honest—qualities often lost in the polished professionalism of other publications.” So if this is the only source for something, you need a big load of caution.
The author does have some bylines apart from these two articles, mainly in regional alternative media: https://muckrack.com/andrew-rosthorn/articles - mostly the regional editions of Byline Times, for which there's a bare consensus for reliability (per page patrol: weak consensus for reliability in a January 2022 RSN discussion. Previously, no consensus in a May 2021 RSN discussion.[1], no consensus in an October 2020 RSN discussion.[2]) BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:57, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Thank you very much, that’s quite in-depth.
In this particular case (note the author engaging with the wiki page), that author also writes in the Independent.
What approach would you recommend? FortunateSons (talk) 17:13, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
17 articles for Independent 1996-2013. Adds some credibility. Looking at these, most but not all are NW England stories (e.g. he was a regional stringer) but also a few in the topic area of this article: intelligence/parapolitics. Not sure what I'd recommend. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:16, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
Ok, thank you very much. I think very selective inclusion might be appropriate, but I will be very careful. FortunateSons (talk) 10:32, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 338#Byline Times (bylinetimes.com, NOT byline.com)
  2. ^ WP:RSN/Archive 316#Byline Times

Get Ready to Rock (getreadytorock.com)

Hi all. I am currently doing an FAC for AC/DC. I don't know if this source: Get Ready to Rock: getreadytorock.com (ref #267), is reliable or not, since it's from an interview with Exodus members Tom Hunting and Gary Holt. In this interview, Holt cites AC/DC as an influence for Exodus. See Legacy section for context about this. — VAUGHAN J. (t · c) 05:18, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

While a blog, that they seem to have a fairly extensive staff (which works in their favor), and scanning a few articles, I'm not seeing much to indicate unreliability - everything's well-written and it's mainly standard music news/critical reviews. The Kip (contribs) 06:15, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
Cheers. — VAUGHAN J. (t · c) 06:25, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Can [well-known] 4chan archives (i.e 4plebs) be used as a primary source?

Hi there, wondering if 4chan archives such as 4plebs.org can be used as primary sources in certain situations, such as citing a post related to an incident (ex. the votehillary.com incident) with another source (in this case, a government document linking to said post) backing it up? It may seem tight, but I think having a consensus on it could be valuable.

I'm requesting these auto-archiving services to have a consensus because the original archive page, containing archives to many, many, 4chan posts was excluded around 2015.

Thanks, LOLHWAT (talk) 20:12, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

WHy would RS not cover something? Slatersteven (talk) 20:18, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
I was just asking for consensus on these specific situatuons; that's all. LOLHWAT (talk) 20:19, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
Then I would say a blanket no, as there is no way of judging how accurate such are, ar they wp:sps for example? Slatersteven (talk) 20:25, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
When there's a reference to a secondary source, I consider it good practice to also reference the primary source, and that's what I usually do. That is to say
According to the Scowmpka Argus-Picayune,[1] Billy Bob made a post on his blog, www.BillyIsTehEpicSmexeh.com,[2] confessing to being the Streetlamp Crapper of summer '89 and asking where he could go apologize. Mayor Haskins met with Billy Bob later that week, and they agreed that Billy would go around on Sundays and help change lightbulbs.[1]
This is how I'd cite this: citation 1 would be the Argus-Picayune article, and citation 2 would be the post on BillyIsTehEpicSmexeh.com, which is obviously not a reliable source, but it's the actual post that this paragraph is talking about, so why not link people to it so they can go read it? It's WP:ABOUTSELF.

I think that if there's some relevant a link to foolz or archive.moe or fuuka or whatever would be justified if we have a RS saying "the thing was posted on 4chan in a thread saying blah blah blah". jp×g🗯️ 17:34, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
Well said. LOLHWAT (talk) 17:40, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
4plebs is used in a number of academic sources [87] [88] [89] [90], so seems to be a fine primary source in the limited cases where including one would be appropriate Tristario (talk) 12:42, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
Strenuously disagree. WP:PRIMARY is clear that primary sources used in this manner must be "reliably published", which 4chan is not; using it in this manner would be WP:OR. Academic sources are permitted to perform OR; we are not, and can therefore only cover things posted on 4chan, at all, in circumstances where actually reliable sources have noted it. Cases where 4chan is cited as the sole source to establish that something was said on 4chan should be removed on sight. --Aquillion (talk) 17:15, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
I wasn't suggesting 4chan be used as a sole source, the kind of context I was thinking of was where it's been noted by a reliable source, as given in the example above. Tristario (talk) 03:21, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
I agree with this usage. A 4chan post is definitionally a reliable source for the contents of the post, and 4plebs in my experience has been a reliable source for replicating the contents of 4chan. A "generally unreliable" source can have exceptions to its unreliability, and this is a fair one to make. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 18:46, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
See Primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Dege31 (talk) 12:51, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
This is lacking in context, to the point where we can't really answer it without knowing what that context is. If the claim is about a living person, then a self-published sourced and a court document likely aren't sufficient. If it's simply that the votehillary.com incident happened? Maybe, but like Slatersteven, I have to wonder why there aren't better reliable, secondary, independent sources?
I see that the editor has courtesy vanished, so I don't anticipate an answer to this—but adding my own $0.02 in case someone points to this thread later on. Woodroar (talk) 17:00, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
  • No, for several reasons. WP:PRIMARY does not exempt a source from WP:RS; as PRIMARY says, only primary sources that have been reputably published can be used on Wikipedia. Therefore, 4chan archives can't be used as a primary source to say eg. "X was posted on 4Chan"; that would be textbook unacceptable WP:OR. And none of the exceptions to RS in this case can apply; WP:ABOUTSELF and WP:SELFPUB require that there be no reasonable doubts as to the authenticity of the author, but 4chan doesn't provide any sort of verification (or, normally, accounts), so even if someone is claiming to be a particular person talking solely about themselves or a subject-matter expert, that wouldn't be enough. --Aquillion (talk) 17:11, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
    It's pretty common to use a primary source to supplement information discussed in a secondary source, I disagree that that is "textbook OR". Just as it's not OR to grab someone's birthday from a primary source it's also not OR to grab e.g. a thread title (see example below) from a primary source which is in this case a faithful reproduction of a 4chan thread.
    And I don't understand what you mean regarding the "authenticity of the author" part here, everyone on 4chan is anonymous, we wouldn't be using those posts as sources for the belief of some specific author, we'd be using those posts as a source for the existence/content of the posts. I think the relevant question would be whether we believe those archives are faithful reproductions of the original threads, which given their use by academics and journalists seems likely. Endwise (talk) 05:29, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
    So every instance of twitter being used as a source would be disallowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?go=Go&search=insource%3A%22twitter.com%22&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1 good luck with that clean up... Traumnovelle (talk) 18:20, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Okay, here is an example. Miles Routledge, who famously posted through the fall of Kabul, has a sentence in his article like this: Routledge said in an August 14 4chan post that "the intelligence agencies show that the capital may be taken over in 30 days; however not in a few days [...] Also if I get proven wrong and die, edit a laughing soundtrack over my posts. It'll be funny I think." This is currently cited to this Daily Dot article -- here I think it is obviously fine to link to an archive of the post. jp×g🗯️ 00:48, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, linking to an archive of a post in situations like that seems fair Tristario (talk) 03:23, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Here's another example, of an article which currently cites an archive of a 4chan post: Superpermutation#Lower bounds, or the Haruhi problem. It links to a warosu archive of a 4chan thread where a novel mathematical discovery was made. This warosu archive is actually linked to in a reliable secondary source (this article in The Verge). In this case the archive is just used to supply the title of the thread, and basically as a courtesy link for people who want to view the primary source. The secondary source verifies that the thread is authentic, so I think this is another case where it is fine. Endwise (talk) 05:10, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I tried to have a link to a 4chan archive (archive.today) whitelisted for the article LLaMA and it was denied at MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist/Archives/2024/01#archive.today of 4channel.org. Used for a similar purpose of illustrating an event on 4chan. I disagree with the decision there and would like to see this addressed firmly once and for all. —DIYeditor (talk) 01:20, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Pinging Stifle who made that decision. —DIYeditor (talk) 02:05, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
As I said at the whitelisting discussion, 4chan is not a reliable source; it's about as unreliable as they get. DIYEditor said it was not to be used as a source, but as an external link, and declined to further engage when I asked which part of WP:EL permitted it.
I express no views on the wider present discussion. Stifle (talk) 07:38, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

The South African

I have a question about The South African as a reliable source. I came across this article and it seems they have directly copied from our Des van Jaarsveldt page. I remember last time I came across this, it resulted in an RFC that led to depreciation (WP:ROYALCENTRAL). So I'm fulfilling WP:RFCBEFORE and asking here if we should consider it a RS if its hosting plagiarised content? The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 07:58, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

LOTR Fansite (TheOneRing.net)

Is TheOneRing.net a reliable source? Online it's described as a fan-based website, which I know requires caution. This site is used as a source in Music of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to mention Howard Shore's involvement in composing the score. The article also draws upon a YouTube interview with TheOneRing.net and Bear McCreary. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 20:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

I looked at the source and I don’t think it’s the most ideal personally.
It’s an article on a fan site. It links to a blog post, Twitter post, and a YouTube video. CycoMa1 (talk) 01:52, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
It does link to a news article. Although I’m not sure how reliable the news article is.CycoMa1 (talk) 01:55, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
But any way I personally think it has no place in the article.
I see potential of it being replaced with a better source.CycoMa1 (talk) 02:09, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
What does the rest of the community think?CycoMa1 (talk) 02:16, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Forgot to to mention, the article cites more than one article from the TheOneRing.org.
But still, the whole website in general is not reliable. TheOneRing.net is basically a fans blog site.CycoMa1 (talk) 13:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Also just adding on to the whole YouTube thing.
Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources#YouTube.CycoMa1 (talk) 02:20, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Fansites are basically never reliable Dronebogus (talk) 09:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't see how it could be considered reliable. It's a group blog, and you're asking about BLP-related content. --Hipal (talk) 03:53, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Just to clarify, as the editor who added these sources to the article, this site is not being used to verify Shore's involvement in composing the score. There are much more reliable sources being used for that purpose in the article. This is indeed a fan-run site, albeit one that has been around for decades and often gets inside access to Lord of the Rings projects and direct interviews with creatives which are all great for us to use. It is in a similar position to something like TrekMovie.com which is also a great source for interviews and insights but wouldn't be used for an exclusive scoop based on unknown sources. In this instance, TOR.net covered unconfirmed reports about Shore and McCreary's involvement in the series. I didn't include it as a source until their involvements were confirmed by more reliable sources, at which point I added this one in to support the fact that those reports were circulating before the official confirmation. The YouTube video is a direct interview with McCreary and perfectly fine for inclusion. - adamstom97 (talk) 14:34, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for those clarifications. In that case I will probably accept the source for what it is used for in the article. YouTube can be used as a source in certain cases, so I will investigate it further. Heidi Pusey BYU (talk) 21:14, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Hasan Piker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Abraham Accords and mixed sourcing

Piker is a leftist streamer, AOC is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives . He recently made statements regarding Israel and the Abraham accords in a conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, specifically covered by:

JPost

Jewish Insider

National Review

Cleveland Jewish News (aggregated?)

Are any or all of those reliable? FortunateSons (talk) 19:36, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Past discussions about The Jerusalem Post seem to indicate it's considered reliable aside from archaeology and content translated from other non-English news outlets[1], paid advertising sections labeled as "Special Content"[2], and opinion pieces. It's used frequently enough that it seems like it should be listed on WP:RSP, but I think someone would need to do a deeper dive to search for other past discussions, summarize with links to past discussions, and get consensus for the summary. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 20:56, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Thank you very much. Any idea about the other sourcing for this use case? FortunateSons (talk) 20:59, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the other sources aside from National Review (which is listed on WP:RSP). And even if a source is generally considered reliable, that doesn't mean every article is worth citing. The quotes in the JPost article are rather short, there's not a lot of context, and there's not much of an explanation. I would look for a better source. And that's assuming this is worth including in any article, but that's a better discussion for an article talk page. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:08, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Perfect, thank you. I think it’s likely due for Piker, not sure on AOC. FortunateSons (talk) 21:13, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
@FortunateSons: Can you clarify what you mean by "perfect"? Being listed on WP:RSP doesn't mean a source is considered reliable. You should read the National Review entry. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:20, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Perfect referring to your response, not the listing, sorry for being unclear. I will wait for more responses regarding the two others :) FortunateSons (talk) 21:24, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
What content are you hoping to include, on what article? Have you discussed it on the talk-page of that article already? 128.164.177.55 (talk) 17:45, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Probably as written now, with some low-level extensions if permitted. However, this is all covered by the relevant ARBPIA rules, so only extended-confirmed users can participate in the discussion. FortunateSons (talk) 18:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
The question you have asked ("are any or all of these reliable sources?") is certainly not covered by ARBPIA. Possibly, if you were to give a coherent answer to my questions, I would no longer be able to participate in the discussion because of those rules; unfortunately you have not done that :(. What is the content you are hoping to include, on what articles? Is there prior discussion of this on article talk-pages? 128.164.177.55 (talk) 19:51, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Here is the content for Piker, cited to the three sources above:
In May 2024, the Jerusalem Post and National Review reported that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed with Pikers statement that the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel was a direct consequence of the Abraham Accords and the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem during a live stream.
There have so far been no objections to content, so I was BOLD and added it. I will likely start a discussion once there is a version indisputably covered by RS, as I have found that a due conversation is significantly more productive when the status of the sources is clear. FortunateSons (talk) 20:24, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Cleveland Jewish News cites Jewish Insider as the source of its information, so I don’t think it adds anything. I’m not familiar with Jewish Insider, so can’t help you there. John M Baker (talk) 18:29, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
You’re right, thank you! FortunateSons (talk) 18:33, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
These sources are marginal in terms of prominence (not reliability) possibly even JPost - are you really sure this is due? If this were the standard for dueness in these two articles, I would think they would be 5x longer; and our threshold for dueness should be consistent per WP:PROPORTION (from one of our three core content policies). DFlhb (talk) 18:41, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
That’s a good question. I think something between 1-3 RS (and one source with mixed reliability) covering a single event are due the singular sentence I have now sourced with it (and maybe a second one). However, I do not at all object to you raising it on the talk page if you disagree. :) FortunateSons (talk) 18:53, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
  • JPost is considered GREL but biased iirc - it's usable, but I'd strongly recommend attribution and trying to find a more neutrally-positioned source.
  • I'm not familiar with Jewish Insider unfortunately, but if CJN is jus repeating what they said, the latter feels redundant.
  • WP:RSP says National Review is considered partisan and should only be used with attribution.
The Kip (contribs) 19:34, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
That’s a good point. There is no neutral coverage (as of now), but there might be some in the future. I will attribute to JPost and NR for now. FortunateSons (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
IMO I wouldn't attribute in this case, despite what RSP says; I haven't watched that stream (I assume you have?) but since it was on camera, as long as you can check it's accurate, attribution would a pointless waste of words. Really there's just the dueness question DFlhb (talk) 20:28, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
It’s linked in the JI article, so yes, the statement is accurate IMO. FortunateSons (talk) 20:39, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
  • Seems undue for a BLP if these are the only sources covering it. My suggestion would be to wait a month or so and see if it gets WP:SUSTAINED coverage, especially from ones outside the same small political bubble - almost all of these are right-wing / anti-progressive outlets; the fact that they're picking a bone with a progressive isn't very significant unless it spreads to other sources or has WP:SUSTAINED coverage. I don't think it's worth the entire paragraph you gave it here, and certainly it's not enough for a mention on either of the other two articles you referenced right now. --Aquillion (talk) 20:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
    Minor correction, but as far as I know, NR is the only right wing outlet, all others are generally centrist-ish (with all of the fun disputes that tend to be attached to that labels, particularly for JPost).
    On your broader point, I probably agree that it should be shortened (likely into the upper paragraph, removing the attribution and one citation). However, in this case, the degree of coverage is already in line with how much coverage other items in the article have received. However, bringing it up on the talk page once we have RS status is probably the best way to answer the due question.
    Regarding the other two, it’s definitely not enough for the article about the Abraham Accords, and probably not yet enough for the AOC article, though it might be if she makes another statement about the accords and gets us to clear sustained coverage. FortunateSons (talk) 20:50, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Apparently it's for [91] in Hasan Piker (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). The article as a whole needs a great deal of work to bring it up to the standards of WP:BLP. --Hipal (talk) 20:57, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

I don’t disagree with the general cleanup requirements for the article, but there is no consensus for exclusion as “grossly undue” here. FortunateSons (talk) 21:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Irrelevant. You should review WP:BLP again. --Hipal (talk) 03:44, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Do you want me to tag you on the article talk page once the RS discussion is closed? FortunateSons (talk) 06:06, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Is it possible to find the recording of the Twitch itself? That should settle the reliability question. Whether it's due is another matter. Alaexis¿question? 09:17, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

It should be, but there is a clip embedded in one of the sources anyway. Would a Twitch link be better? FortunateSons (talk) 11:32, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
That would settle the reliability question, i.e., whether she actually said that and whether there is important context that is missing in other publications. Alaexis¿question? 19:00, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Yeah that makes sense, thank you. FortunateSons (talk) 19:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Claim is verifiable per our policies and requires no attribution, and none of the sources have reliability issues. However, definitely isn't due in AOC BLP, might be in Piker BLP as he's a far more marginal figure so a more prominent person agreeing with him more likely to be due. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:48, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

That makes sense, thank you :) FortunateSons (talk) 11:07, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

A discussion about the inclusion of the content can be found here FortunateSons (talk) 15:05, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 389 § Jerusalem Post unreliable for archaeology?
  2. ^ Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 414 § "Special Content" in The Jerusalem Post

The World History Encyclopedia

Despite being notable enough to have a Wikipedia entry covering it, the World History Encyclopedia appears to regularly present outdated hypotheses and theories as fact, such as:

These are all examples of World History Encyclopedia presenting claims based on generally outdated scholarship that nowadays persist only in fringe groups outside of any presently reliable historiography.

Given that this source is sometimes cited on Wikipedia here and there, especially in articles relating to ancient history, I would request that more scrutiny be given to its claims by Wikipedia's users focusing on history. Antiquistik (talk) 16:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

OpenAI "content and product partnerships" with Vox Media and The Atlantic

The Atlantic announces product and content partnership with OpenAI

Vox Media and OpenAI Form Strategic Content and Product Partnership

These articles are a bit difficult to decipher. The best reading I have of them in terms of answering the question "will future articles contain AI generated content?" is "no, but a sufficiently vague no that we have plausible deniability if we change our minds later." Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 03:19, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Probably another wait and see situation such as with the Washington Post thread. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:57, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Agreed, it's just the higher ups thinking out loud at this point. Nothing to do about it until things change. Oaktree b (talk) 17:58, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Oftentimes this is OpenAI trying to buy data. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 15:27, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
@Chess: that seems likely, but my concern is that OpenAI is giving more than just money in return, and the article is very vague as to what. I agree with the above though that there's nothing really to do but keep an eye on it. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 16:45, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

The Life, Death and Rebirth of an A.I.-Generated News Outlet

For the interested, from NYT. WP is mentioned in passing. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:22, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

pv-magazine.com blocked by the visual editor?

I tried adding this as a source for a PV article (www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-plant-goes-online-in-china-2/) and I was blocked by the visual editor with a note saying it isn't reliable. I have searched the discussions on this page and the perennials lists but I can't find anything.

Is this normal? First time a source is blocked like this from the visual editor. (I think a source for the discussion on the source should be included in the editor at least... Wikipedia itself not citing sources is quite ironic :-P)

p.s. I was blocked here as well as the link is triggering some kind of blacklist. I think it might be an error at this point? {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  talk 12:02, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It is on the spam blacklist. The site was extensively spammed by employees of the magazine a number of years ago. MrOllie (talk) 12:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
Weird. Could you link to a discussion on this? Is it still accurate? It's a pretty reliable source today I think. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  talk 14:10, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
If some time has passed it might make sense to unblock and see how it goes? {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  talk 14:12, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Sbisiali

Anyone come across this one before? I was reviewing at AfC Draft:Zoya Tsopei Sahenk, which cites news.sbisiali.com as well as greekcitytimes.com. The latter is already flagged up as generally unreliable, and sbisiali.com seems to me, if anything, even worse. Their main https://sbisiali.com/en website describes itself as "The First Application That Links Business To Celebrities, And Give The Opportunity To Any User In The Application To Be Famous", "new social media platform that will connect fans with their beloved Celebrity within an elite community of high profile personalities" (groan), and "a place where fans dreams of communicating with their role model is possible, a place to create a new form of collaborations between brands & celebrities" (double-groan). -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 15:42, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

ekn.kr

ekn.kr: 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 - Wikipedia: en - fr - de • Google: search • meta • Domain: domaintools • AboutUs.com

Used for pretty serious allegations on Lee Jinjoon. Wondering where this would go on the reliability scale. LilianaUwU (talk / contributions) 03:44, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm wondering too, it seems like it could go both ways but it has been used for major allegations. Wiiformii (talk) 03:47, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
Energy Economic News is a relatively minor but respected voice in South Korean media. While not always the top pick, it's gained trust for solid reporting, especially on energy and economic issues. It's been around since '89. Fohifiaeh (talk) 23:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Is this tourist map context-acceptable?

For the past few days at this writing, I have been investing a great deal of my time on Draft:Silas Bronson Library, whose companion piece was submitted for AFC consideration at the start of this month. (For those outside Connecticut, this article couplet deals with a long-venerable Waterbury institution and its 19th-century founder.)

Googling '"Silas Bronson" - 1968' a couple of hours ago, I came across this map that states the year its current Main Branch was completed (as well as its architectural style). So far, all I can afford for the claim otherwise is a page from Bronson themselves, which I'm yearning to replace before submission. (See you at WP:Resource Exchange with a related filing.)

  • Historic Walking Tours with Edward J. Halligan: Downtown Waterbury (PDF) (Map). The Matt @ Rose Hill. March 2020. Retrieved 2024-06-07.

--Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 07:59, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Is this website an rs for Lemba people

[92] specifically [93] It's published by Kulanu (organization), One example I've found is this: "The restrictions on intermarriages between Lemba and non-Lemba make it nearly impossible for a male non-Lemba to become a member of the Lemba. Lemba men who marry non-Lemba women are expelled from the community unless the women agree to live in accordance with Lemba traditions. A woman who marries a Lemba man must learn about the Lemba religion and practice it, follow Lemba dietary rules, and practice other Lemba customs. The woman may not bring any cooking utensils from her previous home into the Lemba man's home. Initially, the woman may have to shave her head. Their children must be brought up as Lemba. " sourced to this article[94] by Rabson Wuriga. Wuriga has good qualifications but his conversion was in South Africa where the Lemba community was strongly I believe by people encouraging this identification. Doug Weller talk 13:39, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

What's the claim sourced to it? I think there is a risk of POV in this, in the sense that these sources strongly emphasise the Jewish-like elements found in Lemba culture. I would probably be looking at attribution if this was the only source, or perhaps even questioning whether the claim is WP:DUE if it was something that seemed exceptional relating to ties to Jewish practices. Boynamedsue (talk) 20:42, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

The reliability of The SportsGrail

Hello, other editors. I am a newish Wikipedian who wanted to check on the reliability of a certain source — The SportsGrail. I've seen it's employed on many pages, but I wanted to still ask other more experienced editors what they thought of it. I linked to its website below.

https://thesportsgrail.com/

-- Solitaire Wanderer (talk) 00:41, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

holiday proclamation as source for Swahili speakership

Swahili language uses a holiday proclamation by the UN to say that Swahili has over "200 million speakers".

  • Elsewhere, the article cites Ethnologue that Swahili has 5.3 million L1 speakers and 83 million L2 speakers.
  • The 2005 Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ed. A. Anderson, E. Brown; publ. Elsevier) says "according to some estimates [it] has as few as 5 million mother tongue speakers and 30 million second language users".
  • The Encyclopedia of the World's Minorities (ed. Carl Skutsch; publ. Taylor & Francis; 2013), p. 183-184, says "The most important single [Bantu language] is Swahili as a primary or secondary language (50 million speakers)."
  • Linguist John M. Mugane, in The Story of Swahili (2015), p. 1, says "In terms of speakers, [Swahili] is peer to the dozen or so languages of the world that boast close to 100 million users", footnoting this to p. 287, which says: "The World Bank estimates that 120 to 150 million people speak Swahili as a second language; William J. Frawley (2003, 181) puts the number at a minimum of 75 million, and Ethnologue has it as 40 million. This book takes the higher number as closer to the reality, given that Swahili is well known as a lingua franca in countries whose populations far exceed 150 million." P. 227 speaks of "Africa's Swahili-speaking region, in which 100 million people who speak it as a second language have created a diverse array of [varieties]".
  • This University of Arizona Critical Languages Program page says estimates of the number "vary widely, from 60 million to over 150 million".

I see from the talk page that a few editors have tried to change 200 million to other sources' figures, and were reverted by an editor who preferred the highest figure, so I want to raise the question for wider input: is the holiday proclamation a sufficiently reliable source to list "over 200 million" as the only estimate, contradicting other sources? (Should we say estimates vary? Is that synth, if we just have varying estimates, but only one source saying "estimates vary"?)
Full disclosure, I was alerted to the subject, and decided to look into it and found the sources and discrepancies above on my own, after Benwing—a linguist who I see was one of the users commenting on the talk page last year—mentioned it in a recent discussion about Ido speakership figures. -sche (talk) 01:28, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

If different RS have different numbers of Swahili speakers, then it's better to give a range, rather than a single estimate (e.g., 60-150 million). If it's the only source that gives this figure, I'm not even sure that it should be included in the range.
A source from 2005 is likely to be less reliable given the population growth over the last 20 years. Alaexis¿question? 11:20, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
I suspect there are various issues here including
  • What dialects are including under the term Swahili
  • Age of the statistics (sub-Saharan Africa still has a fairly high population growth so 20 year old statistics can be well out of date)
  • What proficiency is included in the L2 numbers.
  • biases (for instance the Unesco proclamation is likely to be on the high side because of politics and not necessarily fully backed by scholarship)
Ethnologue for Tanzania Swahili has https://www-ethnologue-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/language/swh/ "59,400,000 in Tanzania, all users. L1 users: 2,000,000 in Tanzania (2023 Joshua Project), increasing, based on ethnicity. L2 users: 57,400,000 (2021). Total users in all countries: 86,515,480 (as L1: 3,222,080; as L2: 83,293,400)".
Mugane also states in his book mentioned above on page 8 "it is distinctive in being primarily a second language for close to 100 million speakers....for every native speaker of Swahili, there are about one hundred nonnative speakers".
I would say go for a list and draw heavily on Mugane's footnote 1 on page 287 and be explicit on date and source. Erp (talk) 00:46, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Source Assement: TRA Noticias and elCribe

I would like to get opinion of other editors on the following sources: [95] [96] Caddygypsy (talk) 14:47, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Reliability of social media analytic websites

Are social media analytic websites such as Social Blade, Viewstats, and NoxInfluencer reliable for verifying an online influencer's statistics (i.e. followers, likes, reposts, views, etc)? — 🌙Eclipse (talk) (contribs) 17:04, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't know of their RS-ness, but using such sources could be considered not inline with WP:PROPORTION, dependimg on context. They have no WP:N value of course. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:45, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
I think you can find some discussions in the archives, but in general if it's relevant (which isn't an issue of reliability) I don't see why you wouldn't use the primary sources. If the primary sources don't display the information I would be sceptical of the any secondary sources stating they have the information. I know some of this kind of site do 'ratings' as well, they would never be due for inclusion in the article. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:00, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
ActivelyDisinterested, the most-subscribed YouTubers list relies on them to verify statistics. — 🌙Eclipse (talk) (contribs) 18:24, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
It should probably use the primary sources instead. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:38, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
why wouldn't you just go to the social media directly? I'm pretty sure articles here only look at followers/subscribers, views, likes, the basic stuff Freedun (yippity yap) 20:27, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
I suspect such sites inhabit the murky fringe of influencerdom, where I wouldn’t rule out shenanigans. I’ve got low confidence that they care about accuracy. Their business seems to be selling influencers and brands to each other, so more views means more business. The incentives seem all wrong. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 21:16, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
would they really fake views tho? Freedun (yippity yap) 01:37, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
Barnards.tar.gz, that is a bit far-fetched IMO. Do you have any proof they do any of that? What's on those websites that makes you feel that suspicious? — 🌙Eclipse (talk) (contribs) 12:39, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
No, I don't have any specific reason to think they are wilfully misrepresenting anything. It's more that I find the whole influencer economy deeply shady, and would prefer to err on the side of extra scrutiny before blessing any participant as reliable. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:01, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Probably technically useable under some circumstances, but I would strive to avoid them wherever possible. FortunateSons (talk) 08:45, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
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