User:Theleekycauldron/Essays/The RSP straitjacket
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The WP:RSP straitjacket
In late March of 2023, New University, the school newspaper of the University of California, Irvine, published a review on the television adaptation of The Last Of Us. There's nothing too special about this review, but it's high-quality as television reviews go: the author is clearly familiar with the franchise history of the show, and proceeds to take apart and provide insightful commentary on the stylistic choices made in the acting, production, costuming, set design, et cetera.
Just over a week before New University published that piece, Deadline Hollywood ran a review of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver's episode concerning TANF, Fox News, and Randy McNally. It is, to put it bluntly, worthless. Were it not for the fact that Deadline does not publish in print, it might have proved useful as toilet paper. The article provides exactly no critical insight on the style or content of Last Week Tonight, it simply recaps the episode and attempts to regurgitate the delivery of as many of Oliver's jokes as possible.
Now, why am I singling out two low-profile pieces of media, one of them by a student, to make them fight a seemingly unfair fight? Because Deadline Hollywood is, per Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources (RSP), a "generally reliable" source for entertainment. New University is, meanwhile, relegated to being covered by WP:RSSM, meaning that it can "sometimes be considered reliable" for non-local topics (although they take second place to "professional" sources and are required to be "reputable", a requirement that other sources are not necessarily subjected to.) In practice, that means that Deadline is a rock-solid source for anything Wikipedia wants to do, and it is given more weight and respect in assessing the prevailing view on a piece of media; New University, meanwhile, is relegated to bottom-tier when it is even allowed to be included at all. The system delivers a pretty clear result against the better and more thoughtful piece of journalism: An outcome we, as editors of an encyclopedia reliant on journalism for huge portions of our articles, should definitely be concerned about. So, let's talk about Wikipedia's understanding of what makes a reliable source, where and why it breaks down, and how it makes Wikipedia's resulting articles less informative and imaginative.
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