Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources checklist

Some random points

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Herostratus (talk • contribs) 11:48, 2 September 2011‎

I've taken the liberty of copyediting the section below, since it is advice to editors, not merely personal opinion. --Lexein (talk) 06:24, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Some random points

There's ways to be mendacious without flat making stuff up. You can bend facts, say by cherry-picking data from a study. And a writer could do that on purpose or by mistake (just misreading the study, say). Incentives to lie or fudge facts is certainly the first thing to look for, but you also want to look for lack of expertise or intelligence or diligence.

Ideally you want to look at the publisher as your main guarantor of veracity. Peer-reviewed journals, or magazines with the means to check facts and the incentive to do so, are usually the most reliable sources. Everything else is subject to debate.

According to Slate, newspapers don't employ fact-checkers (though editors "backstop" and copyeditors "intervene" sometimes), and "the research desk sometimes assists with more esoteric queries, and when a deadline is particularly pressing, a reporter may ask the copy desk to confirm a fact." Books are lot more problematical than you might think -- trade publishers know that people don't much buy books based on the publisher, so they don't have an incentive to care. You're thrown back on the reputation of the author, which is a more slender reed. (Newspapers and book publishers employ copy editors, who do sometimes check facts, but not necessarily in as rigorous or organized fashion as dedicated fact-checkers.)

But regardless, reliability also depends on the author as well as the publisher - her credentials, reputation, and evidence (or lack thereof) of diligence and fair-mindedness.

---

limits on fact-checking as criterion

Not all media with fact-checking departments are good. The National Enquirer has been praised by the New York Times for good journalism on one series of stories, their reporters carry audio recorders, and it has a fact-checking department (formed after losing a case brought by an actor), but they still publish garbage. Their choice of subjects is only part of the problem. Also to be considered is whether someone in one of their articles could sue for libel; if they report on a meeting between a Martian and a U.S. President, one can't sue and the other wouldn't dare even if possible, and that's probably true of many stories about public figures even without interplanetary types, so the Enquirer can abandon facts. On the other hand, at the Washington Post, when they were covering the Watergate case, it was typical that only the two principal reporters and one editor knew who a secret source was; the publisher did not know, giving the publisher plausible deniability if someone asked her (I thnk this was discussed in The Papers and the Papers, a book about publishing the Pentagon Papers). The New Yorker likely would have insisted on the source being identified to the fact-checkers and I think that would have made detection from outside likelier, so reporting at The New Yorker has to exclude any matter that depends on secret sourcing that can't be turned over to fact-checkers or the publisher. (This may be somewhat minor, but there was an article about side-stepping fact-checking titled something like There are 00 Trees in the Forest, on reporters skipping facts and getting the fact-checking departments to insert facts in the first place.) A conclusion is that therefore some subjects in Wikipedia have to be sourced to media without much fact-checking, provided we can trust the authors and the publishers and/or editors. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:36, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Validating books as reliable sources

This essay gives up far too easily on the challenge of validating a given book's reliability. There are some simple rules-of-thumb that should be mentioned.

• Is there an Acknowledgements section at the beginning of the book? While publishers rarely -- if ever -- fact-check books, conscientious authors do want to get their facts straight & so they rely on friends, associates & contacts in the field to review their work in manuscript. The absence of such a section -- even in the form of a paragraph or two at the end of the introduction -- is a warning to the reader, while one that is packed with names of other acknowledged authorities is vote of confidence.
• Book reviews. (How did this not get mentioned in this essay???) While not all books are reviewed -- let alone all reliable books -- most do. And I am not talking about one in the New York Times Book review section, or the Times Literary Supplement (if that has survived the Murdockization of that venerable publication), but in the relevant secondary literature. I have found reviews of books I was interested in thru a search of JSTOR, but if one is seriously interested in a given field of knowledge, that person has learned what are the periodicals/magazines whose reviews are the most useful.
• Citation indices. While the one at Google is probably the best known general citation index, there are several specialized ones for the sciences & the humanities. A book with a low or non-existent presence in a citation index would likely not be a reliable source, while a book with a notable presence would pass the test.

There are a few more ways to measure the reliability of non-fiction books, but these three are IMHO the most important ones. -- llywrch (talk) 19:58, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

deleting on Esquire, adding N.Y. Post, & RS/N

Suggestions:

I'd drop the Esquire item unless there's more against that magazine; I suggest deleting it precisely because it's based on one failure. Seriously bad articles, in terms of fact-checking failures, have been published by The New York Times (a reporter, Jayson Blair, made up content for many domestic stories and was praised by a high editor), The Washington Post (involving a Pulitzer Prize that had to be returned by Janet Cooke), and The New Yorker (a long-time writer made up an entire interview and was sent packing in the 1970s (the problem was reported in, I think, The Wall Street Journal back then and probably first revealed in a literary journal)), but all have been around for about 50–150 years, plenty of time to make mistakes, and yet all three have earned high reputations for reliability despite the problems.

The New York Post when under Rupert Murdoch has consistently had problems with reliability. The Alex Jones who was a media critic on an NPR station and went on to run a center at Harvard before retiring (not the Alex Jones of InfoWars) once said that criticizing the Post for journalistic failings is "like taking candy from a baby." A local politician told me privately that she read "7" papers a day and if the Post was alone with a story then it was missing something. There likely are sources on that newspaper's reliability under Murdoch.

Perhaps mention Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard (RS/N).

Nick Levinson (talk) 00:11, 5 August 2018 (UTC) (Corrected and linked: 00:20, 5 August 2018 (UTC))