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User:JzG

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The values and distinctions you are trying to stress are so far outside my Overton window that they're not just out the Overton door and down the Overton block--they're 40 miles away on the interstate from the town of Overton. -- Mike Godwin [1]

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

— - Robert A. Heinlein
Obligatory disclaimer
I work for Dell Technologies but nothing I say or do here is said or done on behalf of Dell. You knew that, right?

About me

JzG reacting to yet another drama

I am old, British, married to the world's most tolerant woman, and have two adult children. I was an amateur baritone prior to developing debilitating tinnitus. I do not tolerate racism, or any kind of bigotry. Being British, I have the British sense of humour (correctly spelled) and I absolutely do not have an accent, since I went to a thousand-year-old school. Everything I do or say could be wrong. I try always to be open to that possibility. If you think I am wrong, please just talk to me nicely, and it can all be sorted out like grown-ups.

On politics See User:JzG/Politics for a statement of my views.

Spam

{{duses}} produces an insource search and a Linksearch search. The former is flaky in my experience but does have the benefit of focusing on mainspace. {{Link summary}} is the canonical search but produces a lot of extraneous items such as links on other wikis that are not always useful when managing non-spam bad sources. {{deprecated publisher}} and {{deprecated journal}} help with fake journals.

Filter

Includes many bogus sites includiong Royal Ark.

The elephant

XYZ

Almost all links to this domain are spam. Pass 1: Remove or whitelist existing refs to .xyz (244 links found in mainspace as of 220-16-10).

Advocacy

Predatory open access publishing

These publishers are on Beall's list, feel free to suggest others with DOI roots I can work on.

Also generally shite:

ijddr.in HTTPS links HTTP links - has published scraped Wikipedia content

Vanity press

An on-demand print house, masquerading as an academic publisher:

Spam

Web hosts

Citation spamming and Vanispamcruftisement

Multiple additions of citations to the same author from predatory and other journals, by multiple editors with no history other than adding that material (i.e. probable citation spamming):

  • David W. Solomons

Shitty sources

The Media Bias Chart is widely referenced in reliable sources. It appears to be accepted as broadly correct.

It has two axes: partisanship and reliability. In Wikipedia terms, the following seems to be true:

  • Hyper-partisan sources are not reliable for unattributed statements of fact. This includes the likes of The Intercept, Mother Jones, HuffPos, Slate, National Review, Reason, Weekly Standard. These sources are always open to challenge and should be removed if challenged and only reintroduced if there is consensus.
  • Unreliable sources are unreliable, and also usually highly partisan. Only the National Inquirer seems to publish bollocks pretty much regardless of its political angle.

As a principle I would have zero problem with the following:

  • Sources in the green box (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ, WaPo, FT etc. are generally considered reliable for factual statements because they clearly distinguish them from editorial. They are generally acceptable for editorial when attributed with a few qualified exceptions such as the WSJ's inexplicable promotion of climate change denialism, which qualifies for exclusion under WP:FRINGE.
  • Sources in the yellow box are generally reliable for reports of fact but require care and attribution for statements of opinion. The position on the axes matters. CNN is more reliable than the Washington Times or HuffPo (equal quality but less bias), Slate is more reliable than Washington Examiner (equal bias but better quality). There is internal variability. Rachel Maddow is pretty scrupulous about fact-checking, but much of MSNBC is just unsourced opinion and should not be cited.
  • Sources in the orange box - "extreme / unfair interpretations" - should not be used unless there is a compelling reason and consensus on Talk among editors of multiple ideological viewpoints.
  • Sources in the red box - "nonsense, damaging to public discourse" - should be blacklisted. That is massively controversial right now, because it includes a handful of liberal sites that most liberal editors know not to use (Palmer Report, Wonkette, Bipartisan report, Occupy Democrats) and virtually all the conservative outlets popular with MAGA types, including InfoWars, WND, Blaze, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller.

Note that Alternet is in the same box as the NY Post, Daily Mail and Daily Wire here. I agree with that. Neither are appropriate sources and both could be blacklisted: nothing of value would be lost. In fact I would also include Daily Kos, Second Nexus, OAN and Fox News. It's highly unlikely that any of these would be the sole source for any genuinely significant fact.

Also sites with no evidence of WP:RS:

Bag o'shite

Red box sources

Egregious fake news and other "fuck no" violations

2,292 links prior to September 2018 (UTC)
58 links, sources in 2 articles including self-source as of 08:34, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
2 links, valid in 2 articles as of 13:26, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
910 links as of 08:36, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Think-tankery

We should never source anything directly to a think-tank, their function is policy-based evidence making and is the absolute antithesis of everything Wikipedia stands for.

Fake universities

Unofficially official and personal pages

Woo

Random junk sources

Gunwanking

Royalcruft

Wikis & fancruft

Plain old-fashioned spam

Possible medispam

Abortion activism

Russian propaganda

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