Wikipedia talk:Otto Middleton (or why newspapers are dubious sources)

Brilliant.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:57, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Love this essay. It's not just newspapers, of course. I'm endlessly discouraging editors from uncritically using old history books as sources, even though the books are available online and thus so very tempting to use. Otto Middleton never existed, but neither did Mike Girty, and he once made it to the main page! —Kevin Myers 19:23, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Double-plus brilliant... – ukexpat (talk) 20:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

This [1] seems relevant too (Jimbo found this one, and it needs a mention somewhere, as a reminder that all 'reliable sources' are provisional) AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:25, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

It is good. It would be interesting to see how this would have played out in a Wiki article. The "web journalists" and the PR release should have been non-starters under WP:RS. The Tweet probably would have passed (as much as it makes me cringe). Any stories which included "According to ..." or "As reported in ..." should have been rejected as tabloid echoes, which frequently include a bit of deliberate broken telephone.

Oh, I noticed that there seem to be references[2] which should point to a Daily Mail ref, but point to a Telegraph ref instead. AndroidCat (talk) 03:19, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Quote

"What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." Source: New Scientist, 1965 (I think it is by David E. H. Jones, from one of his Ariadne columns) --JN466 15:13, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

This assumes that production speed is the only reason for the resultant inaccuracies. Actually, I'd say newspapers are more like commercial fast-food than soufflé. It isn't just that they are prepared in haste, it is that unwholesome additives and artificial sweeteners are added to true content, in order to make the whole thing more tasty. No one really asks whether the result is edifying or healthy, because it is generally consumed with a pinch of (even more superfluous) salt. At any rate, an unsuitable source for writing enduring encyclopaedia content.--Scott Mac 18:45, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Added to my collection of bon mots. --JN466 14:53, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

I think they get so used to churning out stories, that they kind of make a quick little narrative in the mind and then look for a quote or the like and a fact or two and spin the whole thing off of that. See this in sports all the time. Now that a lot of press conferences are Youtubed, you can see how bad the reporters look as they just ask leading questions or dig for a quote that says what they want (rather than draw the subject out and learn something). This is not just with athletes, but with coaches, so it is not a dumb jock issue.TCO (talk) 18:29, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Are newspapers more dubious than other sources?

It seems like the message of this article is that newspapers are particularly dubious. This suggests that books may be less dubious than newspapers. And that's really kind of a risky proposition, if for no other reason than the fact that a book is likely to be sourced from news stories, so if we discover something in a book, this title suggests that it ought to be given greater credibility than a newspaper story, when this is obviously a specious argument. My counter to this, which seems to be anathema in the Wiki community, is that truth counts.

As Wikipedia editors, we should each place truth as number one, subject to the understanding that there is an exceptional requirement to make a claim which fails the verifiability requirement. For instance, maybe there's a mechanism whereby synthesis could be allowable. (I'm not advocating any particular criteria, I'm just saying that such a criteria could exist.)

A simple rephrasing of this rule is that you should have a good faith belief that something is true before including it in an article. I don't really have a solution for the case that editors have conflicting good faith beliefs, though one thing I can think of is to link to an extended discussion page in the case of a bona fide dispute. Nevertheless, I wouldn't want this to provide a mechanism for conspiracy theories.

But back to my main point: Don't be dissing newspapers, they provide a contemporary report of facts, and a comparatively small number of exceptions cannot overcome this advantage. Fabrickator (talk) 02:43, 25 March 2022 (UTC)