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Daily Sport

I notice that the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport not listed as deprecated and not trapped by Filter 869 (log). Do we really need an RfC for this? The Sport is the benchmark for unreliability in UK print publishing, and the low link count suggests that most Wikipedians are well aware of this. It's some time since I had to nuke any links to either site. Guy (help! - typo?) 14:32, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

With only a handful of uses it's not really an issue, and all references can be removed with only a few minutes work. I think the 1,500 links we have to the Daily Star per dailystar.co.uk HTTPS links HTTP links are more pressing, there's no reason that the Daily Star should be cited, especially on BLP articles. Hemiauchenia (talk) 14:37, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
I went out and bought that issue. The headline is misleading and the story doesn't actually say there is a World War 2 bomber on the moon. Even if it did, WP:REDFLAG and WP:WEIGHT would prevent including it. I can't think of any reason why someone would choose this source, and I don't think it's something to worry about. TFD (talk) 16:20, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
We don't need to hold an RFC for every source on Earth. For sources that are self-evidently not reliable sources by basic guidelines, like this one, feel free to remove them. The Sport isn't even trying to pretend it's real journalism. There's no danger of anyone seriously mistaking it for an actual source, and not really any controversy in saying it's crap. RFCs should be reserved for sources that give the outward appearance of serious, respectable writing, but which have serious flaws in their actual writing. --Jayron32 16:41, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
The main article on the Daily Sport specifies that its main focus has been on celebrity gossip and softcore pornography. They may be unreliable, but their topic areas do not really coincide with what Wikipedia covers. Deprecating them will not make much of a difference. Dimadick (talk) 15:01, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

RfC on adding a definition of "self-published source" to WP:V

At WT:Verifiability#RfC:_Definition_of_self-published_works, there is an RfC to decide whether a particular definition of "self-published source" should be added to WP:V. Comments are welcome there. Zerotalk 13:42, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Are Al-Dustour, Akhbarak, and Sada Al-Balad reliable Arabic news sources?

Are the following Arabic newspapers reliable sources?

Tunis Freedoms 12:04, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Hi @Tunis Freedoms: can you please give more information about them, where they are being used and why you consider them reliable or unreliable, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 22:36, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Some blogs as sources?

I understand that generally, blogs are not considered acceptable references, but what about one from CNN? See [1]]? This seems potentially acceptable based on section of WP:Verifiability: Several newspapers, magazines, and other news organizations host online columns they call blogs. These may be acceptable sources if the writers are professionals, see [2]

  • Exact source: [3]
  • Relevant to article: [4]
  • Quote:

    Dr. Don Colbert, a "divine health" expert who has appeared with Copeland in several broadcasts, then said the autism rate among children has increased with the number of childhood vaccinations. "I have had so many patients bring their children in and they say, you know what, the week after I had that immunization, for MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – my child stopped talking, my child stopped giving me eye contact. He was not alert, he was not coherent. he quit speaking, he quit being the child I had," Colbert said on the webcast. Colbert and the Copeland family are wrong about immunizations, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. “It's painful because these pastors are trusted spiritual leaders who are speaking to people not only in their congregations but also on television," he said. "They are putting people at risk.” There is no link between vaccinations and autism, and hepatitis can be passed from mother to child, making the shot necessary and effective, Schaffner said.

(The doctor quoted seems legitimate, see [5])

Thanks for comments.Ali Beatriz (talk) 18:38, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

WP:NEWSBLOG would presumably apply - it's a blog, but it carries the imprimatur of the RS, and is edited. Unless they e.g. have a history of making stuff up, I'd presume it was a normal newsblog and a perfectly good source for the quote, with attribution - David Gerard (talk) 18:51, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Hello David Gerard - thank you for the comment, which is clear to me and consistent with my thinking. Wonder if anyone else has a comment ? Ali Beatriz (talk) 19:08, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
A blog can be a RS if written by an expert who meets WP's criteria, even when it's not a WP:NEWSBLOG: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications" -- WP:SPS. In addition, as already noted, WP:NEWSBLOG applies in this case. -- FactOrOpinion (talk) 19:32, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Hello FactOrOpinion - thanks. The author is Daniel Burke, who is journalist for CNN, and hence appears legitimate. Also, and as noted earlier, the quoted doctor seems legitimate, see [6]. Looks to be a viable reference to me .. any other comments from people?Ali Beatriz (talk) 19:43, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Ali Beatriz - I just wanted to correct my earlier response, as I hadn't paid sufficient attention to the intended use, which is on a WP:BLP article. In that case, you have to attend not only to whether the source is reliable, but also make sure that the source is neither self-published nor a primary source, as WP:BLPSPS and WP:BLPPRIMARY preclude self-published or primary sources being used as sources for information about a living person, even if the sources are reliable. A WP:NEWSBLOG is neither self-published nor a primary source, so you're OK on that end too; I just wanted to clarify. -- FactOrOpinion (talk) 01:34, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the expansion .. looks as if the source is viable for use.Ali Beatriz (talk) 12:41, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
  • As above, it is reliable in my view, Atlantic306 (talk) 22:42, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for your comment, and confirming the general view.Ali Beatriz (talk) 12:41, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

PETA

At User talk:Normal Op#PETA (permalink here), I stated the following to Normal Op: "Regarding edits like this and this, where was it deemed that PETA is unreliable? Even if it was the case that PETA falls under 'questionable sources', WP:About self applies."

And, well, you can see Normal Op's reply. In response, I stated, "This isn't about me wanting to use PETA. I am not a PETA advocate. It's about you removing PETA when the source is being used to report on their own activities, such as whatever celebrity appeared in their PSA or whatever celebrity they gave an award to."

Thoughts? Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 00:14, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

  • If it's not covered by a third party source, it's not WP:DUE. (t · c) buidhe 01:22, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Based on this discussion, a salient point: don't make decisions about sources on Wikipedia based on MBFC, which we don't consider a reliable source. Including it in Cite Unseen seems questionable if the goal is as a guide to what Wikipedia considers reliable. That said, mention of a non-notable award (any non-notable award) and citing only the issuing organization is going to be WP:UNDUE. There is no reliability issue, though, as PETA is a perfectly fine source for who it gave its own award to. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 02:20, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Agreed... the problem ISN’T reliability (an organization is reliable for saying that it gave an award to person X, per ABOUTSELF)... the problem is DUE WEIGHT (why should we mention that the organization gave the award to person X). Blueboar (talk) 02:35, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, my concern was the editor removing the source with an "unreliable" rationale when the source was being used to report on PETA's own activities. As for mentioning that certain celebrities have appeared in PETA's PSAs, have been given PETA awards, or whatever else? PETA is the most well-known American animal rights organization and gets plenty of media attention, such as its "Sexiest Vegan" list, as reported on by Elle. So, yeah, if a reliable media source reports on something going on with them, it may be worth mentioning per WP:Due. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
The ASPCA is the most well-known American animal rights organization and if PETA gets plenty of attention then there is no need to use the unreliable PETA for anything at all as anything relevant will be covered by WP:RS. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 01:37, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
I think we'd need to compare sources on which organization is the most well-known. But as for "unreliable"? Like others stated above, its reliability isn't the issue regarding these cases. It's reliable for its own activities as long as it's not making a statement that would require a secondary source for corroboration. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:48, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
”Its own activities” is a near universal category... Do you mean they would be reliable for their own non-controversial activities such as awards and whatnot? For instance if they call the conviction of one of their activists a “miscarriage of justice” would we then state in wikipedia’s voice that it was so? Surely thats not what you are suggesting. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 01:54, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm going by what WP:About self states. Simple. Rhododendrites and Blueboar are clear above. And so is WP:About self. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:58, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
To give a more practical example that I could see with PETA, let's say the NYtimes mentions a celeb did a visually-interesting promo for PETA, and PETA has a blog statement that gets into details about the shoot with the celeb, some that would be worthwhile encyclopedic info in talking about the shoot in the celebrities page that the NYTimes mention didn't discuss. The fact the NYTimes mentioned the celeb's shoot with PETA would be the needed allowance to use PETA's blog to talk about its own shoot with the celeb for the facts of that shoot and nothing more. If no source otherwise mentioned the shoot, then we'd not be able to use PETA's blog here for lack of weight. (obviously how much of that blog to use in light of the NYTimes would still be tempered, shouldn't be paragraphs-long inclusion). --Masem (t) 16:46, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
I've been working on it, but then I get blowback, like this RSN. But it's all good, because that puts it in the open and gets other wiki-pinions. Maybe this thread can forestall the other 400 edit wars others will start as I begin to strip those 400 citations. Come join the project? Normal Op (talk) 19:00, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Guy says, "PETA is obviously not reliable for anything other than its own statements." And yet I see that Normal Op removed PETA as a source for its own statements and positions at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) in July and is now back at it. Purging going on. I'm not stating that one should not ideally rely on secondary sources, though. No article about an organization should be mostly built on sources by that organization.

WP:CONTEXTMATTERS also applies in this case. Using PETA for things that are vegetarian/vegan in the Vegetarianism and Veganism articles, for example, is fine.

As for supposed blowback, I was very clear about why I brought this matter here. And others have agreed with me about reliability and a source being used for its own activities...but not using the source for things that would require a secondary citation for corroboration. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 00:49, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

The problem is that reliability isn’t the only policy in play here. It does not matter whether PETA is reliable as a source for a statement about its own activity if some other policy indicates that we should not mention that activity. It’s a moot question. Blueboar (talk) 01:04, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
WP:About self has already been cited more than once in this discussion. If WP:About self, WP:Due weight and WP:CONTEXTMATTERS are followed, there should be no problem. Reliability isn't the only guideline in play here, but it is one of them the rules in play. If we are going to deem PETA unreliable for anything but its own activities and statements, as long as those statements don't run afoul WP:About self, we might as well go ahead do that. Turn this discussion into an RfC. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:12, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't think a general RfC on PETA is needed, since most people seem to agree that PETA is only citable via WP:ABOUTSELF; the disagreement is over what exact claims are self-serving or not. In general I feel we ought to avoid citing selfsource'd mission statements in the lead as often as we do, since they're often unduly self-serving, especially for controversial organizations or ones with a generally negative reputation. If that mission statement is taken seriously by anyone or is seen as a meaningful way to understand the organization, it ought to have at least some secondary coverage; if it does not, it's WP:UNDUE to focus on it, and potentially even actively misleading if the overwhelming thrust of coverage describes the subject differently. "The Death Cyborg Army says their mission is to bring peace and stability to earth" isn't a reasonable way to start an article if they're the only ones saying it about themselves and nobody else takes it seriously enough to even cover that claim. --Aquillion (talk) 15:49, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
I think that going with an RfC is best. We have people debating the reliability of PinkNews above and giving it more leeway than a source like PETA...despite the fabricated news reporting PinkNews has engaged in. So RfC started below. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:08, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Expanding the PETA question

The example Flyer22 Frozen gives is a very narrow example, and I feel the above answers have already covered it well. However, a lot of these peta.org blurbs that I'm finding inserted into BLP articles say extra stuff like "So-and-so is an animal rights advocate" or "So-and-so supports PETA" when there are no other mentions about animal rights or PETA in the biography and the only citation is directly off PETA's website. In this case, I feel strongly that these three Wiki policies/guidelines apply.

  1. WP:QUESTIONABLE: "Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts or with no editorial oversight. Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, that are promotional in nature, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions."
  2. WP:SELFSOURCE: "Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves ... so long as ... It does not involve claims about third parties (such as people, organizations, or other entities)."
  3. WP:BLPSOURCES: Wikipedia's sourcing policy, Verifiability, says that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation; material not meeting this standard may be removed. This policy extends that principle, adding that contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately and without discussion. This applies whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable and whether it is in a biography or in some other article. The material should not be added to an article when the only sourcing is tabloid journalism. When material is both verifiable and noteworthy, it will have appeared in more reliable sources."

Opinions? — Normal Op (talk) 04:40, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

PETA is a source for information about itself that is in controversial. Anything that might be seen as self serving (such as membership) is should not be used for.Slatersteven (talk) 08:37, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

If the public figure has given an exclusive interview to PETA or otherwise told PETA that they are an animal rights advocate, etc., as has happened in the past, using PETA as a source for that is fine. But using an additional source or a different source to report on that matter, similar to a different source being used in the Mariah Carey article to report on a PETA award she received, is also an option. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

1. PETA isn't a questionable source. The organization promotes the idea of ethical treatment of animals. Hardly an extremist position in the Western world. 2. If we take this to the extreme, the official site for Premier League could not be used as a source for who won the league because it's a self-published source and involves a claim about a third party - the team that won. 3. I think one should look at what the claim is. A celebrity winning a PETA prize is mundane and uncontroversial. The likelihood that it is true is overwhelming. It is not the same as a claim that someone was awarded a prestigious prize from the International Holocaust Denial Society. ImTheIP (talk) 02:11, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

It's an advocacy group that exists to promote a specific viewpoint, which is contested (most people in the world are not vegans). I have trouble seeing that it is WP:DUE on high profile articles like Justin Bieber, where reams of independent, reliable sources exist. (t · c) buidhe 07:40, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
ImTheIP, yes it is. It's an activist group with a fringe perspective ("meat is murder"). Guy (help! - typo?) 11:28, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
I think a more important question here is whether or not the content is DUE. It might be notable if the article was about a member of PETA who set fire to a car because it had leather seats, or if they threw paint all over a woman who was wearing a mink coat, or something else notable. Just belonging to PETA is no different from being a member of any other advocacy or organization - do our readers care, is it relevant in the grand scheme of that BLP's life, and does it pass WP:10YT? I'd be more inclined to challenge that content per WP:NOTADVOCACY. Atsme Talk 📧 16:38, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
But if it is true (idk) that PETA has a fringe perspective, then it becomes more notable, not less, who they award their prizes to. Consider again the fictitious International Holocaust Denial Society. If they give an award to X it is relevant to know how X responds. Whether he or she repudiates the prize, declines to comment or warmly accepts it. Though, of course, you would need strong third party sources to verify that the prize is a real thing and not just some publicity stunt/attention grab.ImTheIP (talk) 18:05, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
@ImTheIP: They're all publicity stunts using celebrity branding techniques; or as Guy pointed out above, an association fallacy. Here are 400 publicity stunts by PETA mentioned in Wikipedia. One of their publicity stunts is naming people "Sexiest vegan", or "PETA's person of the year". There is no "acceptance" to refuse. Hollywood celebrities take all the news and attention they can get; it helps their career. Actors are not really free to turn down advertising gigs or endorsements by anyone as their careers are often short-lived. Normal Op (talk) 18:18, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
Well, a lot of things are publicity stunts and there is no Wikipedia rule against describing successful publicity stunts. There are lots of organizations handing out awards to celebrities and other famous persons. I see no harm in mentioning who has won major PETA awards.ImTheIP (talk) 04:01, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
This article has recently been created Jackie Kearney and mentions a PETA vegan award. Are mentions of these awards not aloud on biographies from now on? If this is the consensus then this should be publicized better because users are going to keep creating articles linking to PETA or adding the PETA website as a source to existing biographies. Should it be added to this list [7] and get a ruling? Psychologist Guy (talk) 15:26, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Whether their views are fringe or not isn't really the problem (well, it introduces an additional problem if they are, but none of the cites that I saw were to obviously fringe material, so that's not the issue.) The issues are that first, PETA doesn't have a reputation for fact-checking or accuracy (hence, they're not an WP:RS, making what we can use them for very narrow); second, many of the claims are potentially self-serving given that the organization is controversial and they're basically saying "look at all the good / uncontroversial stuff we do" or "look how important we are"; and third, if it's WP:DUE it ought to be covered in a secondary / independent source anyway. --Aquillion (talk) 15:53, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Not reliable An advocacy group that runs hyperbolic and gimmicky campaigns (I don't appose what they are advocating per se, but they are what they are). They have a fringe agenda and no reputation for fact-checking or accuracy. As per Aquillion, they also make many self serving and promotional claims. Bacondrum (talk) 00:23, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Editor stripping PETA from any and everywhere

I'm sorry, but looking at Normal Op's latest contributions, all I see is an editor yanking PETA from any and everywhere based on WP:IDON'TLIKEIT. All I see is an editor with a serious anti-vegetarian and anti-veganism angle to his edits. This editor is not taking WP:CONTEXTMATTERS into consideration whatsoever when it comes to this topic. As seen at Talk:Sia (musician)#Undue advocacy content in this article, where he was challenged by Ssilvers, Jack1956, Somambulant1 and SchroCat (permalink here), Normal Op has argued against use of PETA, pointing to this thread as justification, as if this thread has ruled that PETA is unreliable. As seen here, he removed the following from a section titled "Activism": "Albarrán became a vegetarian after seeing a documentary about slaughterhouses and remained as such for around 25 years, until making the transition to veganism. He has participated in campaigns by PETA for animals' rights." Oh, so we can't use PETA to report that someone is a vegetarian or vegan, and/or that they participated in campaigns by PETA for animals' rights? What? Just like we may use sports sources to report on someone being an athlete, or LGBT sources to report on someone being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, we can use PETA to report on someone being vegetarian or vegan, especially when it's a significant part of that person's life and they specifically told PETA that they are vegetarian or vegan. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:53, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Flyer22. PETA is a perfectly good source for reporting that someone participated in a PETA event. Based on Normal Op's bullying at Sia (musician) I removed the PETA sources, but I think his argument was wrong. He is still edit warring to delete the mention of animal rights advocacy at Sia's tour Nostalgic for the Present Tour. -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:19, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
PETA is an advocacy group , so if it is the only source reporting on a person's support for animal rights, that can be seen as promotional and should be removed. Same would be true for GLAAD regrading one's sexuality. I'd argue that a sports team talking about an athlete is a far different relationship as that's a professional one and not advocacy. But that said, once other sources have talked about the person's animal rights activities from a third-party, it seems fair to use PETA to add more info that third-parties do not give, as now it does not give the feeling of advocacy. Care still must be taken to not make the added material look like advocacy for the group. --Masem (t) 05:05, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
@Ssilvers: There is no edit warring by me. However, there seems to be a bunch of other editors who have jumped on the anti-advocacy bandwagon in the last 24 hours and are either removing peta.org citations and/or are finding alternative (non-peta.org) sources to cite. They probably read this thread and jumped on board. The count seems to have gone down by over a hundred since yesterday, and I made just 4 or 5 of those. Normal Op (talk) 05:12, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

@Flyer22 Frozen: you keep trying to narrow it down to things like "PETA's Person of the Year Awards", because you know peta.org wouldn't survive the scrutiny of a full and general reliable source discussion when the scenario is expanded to how these peta.org citations are really being used. And I'm not focusing on PETA's Person of the Year Awards; I could care less about them. For your information, FF, I am anti-ADVOCACY and against using Wikipedia for ADVOCATE work. I do not discriminate between one advocacy or another. I didn't have an opinion about PETA or peta.org before I started researching it for Wikipedia, and don't even recall how I wound up in the animal rights topic, but I have since then discovered that ADVOCACY is rampant in the PETA, animal rights, and vegan topics. You need to quit WP:HOUNDING me, FF, just because you don't like the subject area I'm editing in this month. (In June it was Confederate statues, before that it was places on the National Register of Historic Places, and before that it was Tiger articles.) I'm trying to fix the advocacy stuff, per Wikipedia policies, and to better the encyclopedia, while you're trying to stop me with this... what is it... oh yeah, the THIRD calling me out on a board over the SAME issue in like two days because it's not going the way you want it to. Stop the WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT, already. And no more PAs!

I assert PETA is NOT a reliable source. We're here on the Reliable Sources Noticeboard. Maybe we SHOULD be debating whether to add PETA to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources.

When I see these tiny insertions in dozens of articles saying so-and-so is a vegan or so-and-so is pro-animal rights, and there's nothing else in the article about it, and the citation source is peta.org, I can assume that it's not a big part of the person's life or someone else would have published it. Contrast those with the article for Joaquin Phoenix which mentions "animal" 15 times and doesn't need a peta.org sourced citation to show he's an animal rights activist. Check Bob Barker's article and you'll find "animal" 11 times and zero peta.org citations. That's because those two men ARE animal rights advocates and the newspapers know about it; it's a big part of their lives. (See WP:DUE.) But when you instead see that these tiny PETA blurbs have been inserted into hundreds of Wikipedia articles, and you check a few dozen of them and find the only mention of "animal" or "PETA" or "vegan" is with a peta.org source, one can logically conclude the content was inserted as part of an advocacy campaign that is an extension of PETA's advertising machine. If you look at one or two or three articles, you don't get the big picture. When you do a search for "peta.org" and find hundreds of these little insertions, and check a bunch of the BLP articles, you quickly find out it has been part of an WP:ADVOCACY campaign. I use the word "insert" because I've checked several of these with the "Who wrote that" tool, and I've found that the editor that inserted the PETA content, only inserted that content; they weren't already editing a biography and decided to add animal rights stuff as well. And I found that this pattern of editing behavior happened over and over and over again. See WP:DUCKTEST.

Then there's PETA's "Sexiest Vegan" awards and "PETA's Person of the Year Award". These are free awards that PETA can "give away" (simply labels, actually) that operate as free advertising with all the benefits of celebrity branding and none of the costs/expenditures. By simply naming someone, without even getting their permission, PETA can all of a sudden gain some sort of news coverage (or generate its own) that aligns PETA with a celebrity. Celebrities are usually happy to take any attention they can get; it increases their value as a commodity. So the celebrity isn't going to say "No". The award itself has no actual value beyond the publicity and public goodwill it generates. The awards themselves are worthless and, as such, mentioning them in Wikipedia in someone's biography is WP:UNDUE. You argue that mentioning it in a wiki article is harmless, but you're wrong.

As for using PETA's publication to support what they say about someone else, even if you were in the room and you could verify it happened, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you know a fact to be true; it only matters if some other reliable source said so. That's why we use secondary sources for our citations in this encyclopedia.

PETA has a long record of controversial publications, outrageous stunts, stretching the truth and outright lying about events and facts, as well as what people say or think about issues. Here's just one such news report (published in The New Yorker and reposted by its author) [8] where it says "peta's publicity formula–eighty per cent outrage, ten per cent each of celebrity and truth", and Newkirk's quotes "We are complete press sluts" and many more... er... "questionable judgment" quotes.

In a second example (which I had researched and wrote for the PETA article) PETA continues to this day to promote the information that milk causes autism even after being proven wrong AND admitting it! "When pressed, PETA cited two scientific papers, one from 1995 and one from 2002 using a very small sampling of children (36 and 20), and neither showed a correlation nor a causation between milk and autism. Newer studies from 2010 and 2014 have shown no association between dairy and behavior in autism. Despite having been corrected, PETA says they still keep the information on their website "because we have heard from people who have said it contains helpful information."[1][2][3] Excuses by PETA to keep their false scientific claims on their website for the last six years! Do you get that? This is not what reliable sources do!

So why would anybody ever use them as a source! Peta.org would fail to be called a "reliable source" under the Wikipedia reliable sources policy: "Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." See WP:REPUTABLE. And from WP:CONTEXTMATTERS: " In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication." PETA is not a newsroom with an editorial staff doing fact checking, they are an advocacy organization, and with their history of falsifying matters and publishing it, they would NEVER pass a reliable sources test. Editors above have been very generously "PC" about the touchy subject of calling out such an outspoken organization (whose annual budget for advertising is over $10M [9]). After all, one's fellow Wiki editors many well be PETA followers. No, you cannot use peta.org's statement that so-and-so is a vegan or vegetarian. It violates WP:ABOUTSELF, and it's self-serving for PETA to publish that. It's completely different than a sports publication mentioning someone is an athlete. Using an LGBTQ source to say that someone is gay or bi might well be advocacy and nonRS. First of all, being called an athlete is unlikely to be controversial; being called gay/bi/etc. is more likely to be controversial. But that's all hypothetical and not really related to the PETA discussion. Per Wikipedia rules, if you want to discuss or argue about a policy, such as WP:ABOUTSELF, then you're supposed to discuss it on the Talk page of the policy.

You need to find some other reliable source that says someone is vegan — and if you find one, and they say that, then go ahead and use THAT in someone's biography article. Earlier today I did just that; I swapped out a peta.org citation with a reliable source saying that someone was a vegan; then posted that. But I don't suppose you noticed that when you checked my contributions and then called me anti-vegan.

I have presented a case that PETA/peta.org is NOT a reliable source. I have read (above) that others also think peta.org is not a reliable source for anything other than information about PETA itself (per ABOUTSELF). So far, I haven't seen one argument or piece of evidence to show peta.org IS a reliable source, nor even one opinion that PETA is a reliable source.

Remember, we're on the Reliable Sources Noticeboard.

— Normal Op (talk) 11:26, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't think quite that much needs to be said. The previous part of the discussion (PETA saying things about themselves) was at least debatable because what's self-serving is sometimes unclear, but stating that someone is a vegan or the like is unambiguously a claim about a third party and therefore not an acceptable use of WP:ABOUTSELF; and I think it would be difficult to argue that PETA itself has the reputation for fact-checking and accuracy WP:RS requires. --Aquillion (talk) 15:55, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
"So far, I haven't seen one argument or piece of evidence to show peta.org IS a reliable source." In my mind an unreliable source is one that regularly or at least intermittently publishes false information. Has PETA been caught doing that? If not, I don't understand why it would be an unreliable source. ImTheIP (talk) 19:34, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
@ImTheIP: People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals#Milk_and_autism Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:38, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
  • In my mind an unreliable source is one that regularly or at least intermittently publishes false information. This isn't quite correct, although I can understand why you would think that given the sort of sources we usually discuss on WP:RS and how the discussions tend to go. Overall WP:RS requires that a source have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy; this is something that, in theory, needs to be positively affirmed and proven by the people who want to use the source - it isn't something we assume. So when talking about a think-tank, advocacy organization, or private website the burden is on people who want to use the source to make the argument that it passes that threshold. The reason discussions here normally seem like the inverse of that is because most of the time the sources that require in-depth WP:RSN discussion and a full RFC are ones that, at first glance, seem like they might pass that bar (eg. sources that present themselves as reputable news organizations or high-quality publications, and whose presentation in that regard at least some editors accept.) We don't generally waste time discussing organizations that trivially fail that threshold and which nobody (or almost nobody) thinks is an WP:RS. PETA is different in that it's not really claiming to do serious fact-checking or anything like that - while some of the people above saying it's not an WP:RS might be basing that on its bad reputation, for the most part that's not the issue. It's not an WP:RS because, by the nature of what it is, it's not really attempting to be one and that's not really its purpose. For an activist organization, you would have to actually show they perform fact-checking and have a reputation based on it in order to convince people it's generally usable as an WP:RS. --Aquillion (talk) 00:08, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Thank you for that, Aquillion. That's very well expressed. Normal Op (talk) 01:03, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Normal Op, I didn't read any of your latest comment. I might read it later, but I won't be replying to it. I know from this ANI thread on your tendentious, advocacy editing and having skimmed enough of your gaming the system/wikilawyering arguing that debating you would be a huge waste of time. It's because of that ANI thread that I now see why you focused on the "Pet food" section of the Veganism article. In my opinion, that ban should not have been lifted, and it is perhaps time for a different one. And I will also note that no one has stated that PETA should be used for scientific claims. This is where you do not grasp WP:CONTEXTMATTERS. Like I stated above, we have people debating the reliability of PinkNews above and giving it more leeway than a source like PETA...despite the fabricated news reporting PinkNews has engaged in. So RfC started below. It's designed similarly to the PinkNews RfC.
Aquillion stated "that someone is a vegan or the like is unambiguously a claim about a third party and therefore not an acceptable use of WP:ABOUTSELF; and I think it would be difficult to argue that PETA itself has the reputation for fact-checking and accuracy WP:RS requires." If a public figure tells PETA that they are vegetarian or vegan, that is a WP:About self matter and is acceptable. We use exclusive interviews and similar all the time. We have no reason to think that PETA is lying. No such reports of them lying about stuff like that exist. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:08, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Though not your first PA offence against me, Flyer22 Frozen, this is your second and final warning to knock off the personal attacks! I've already muted you because of your contemptuous writing to me, and about me. You even accused me of edit warring on an article by mis-attributing to me edits of others. You have been going after me like a dog with a bone. Your attachment to PETA has quite an Wikipedia:Advocacy flavor, to wit: "Advocacy is the use of Wikipedia to promote personal beliefs or agendas at the expense of Wikipedia's goals and core content policies, including verifiability and neutral point of view. Despite the popularity of Wikipedia, it is not a soapbox to use for editors' activism, recruitment, promotion, advertising, announcements, or other forms of advocacy." I care not one wit about PETA one way or the other, but you seem to care... a lot. Normal Op (talk) 04:09, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Stop pinging me to this page that I'm obviously watching. I see no need to ping you to this page again either. To repeat, I am not interested in your gaming the system/wikilawyering. I am far too experienced a Wikipedia editor to fall for any of that. It humors me to see you trying to school me on Wikipedia's rules. You stated that I "even accused [you] of edit warring on an article by mis-attributing to [you] edits of others." False. You state that I have committed a personal attack against you by noting your documented activism on Wikipedia, and yet you call me an activist when there is no documented proof of it and when many editors (Mathglot, for example) on this site know that I do not tolerate activism editing on Wikipedia. When I look at your history, including your recent "must purge Wikipedia of PETA" silliness, as if this is some WP:DAILYMAIL case, all I see is an activist. Go report me at WP:ANI if you must. Your assertion that I am attached to PETA, when I do not agree with their extreme views and have been clear on my user page in the past that I do not try to police people eating meat, is laughable. It's as laughable as you stating that you "care not one wit about PETA one way or the other." For me, this is about the way you have gone about editing on this matter. Yes, I am a vegetarian. But I am not a vegan, and couldn't care less about trying to police your meat-eating. I did not become a vegetarian for ethical reasons. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 04:24, 9 August 2020 (UTC) Tweaked post. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 04:36, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Per Wikipedia guidelines, if I am mentioning you, I should notify you. If you don't want the pings, use the mute function. Normal Op (talk) 07:21, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
[10] in regard to deletions like this shouldn't we wait until a consensus is first reached here? I don't think we should delete anymore PETA until we get an official decision has been made by consensus vote. (see discussion below). Psychologist Guy (talk) 15:12, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
"Talk to the hand", really? Did you just time travel from the 90s? Somehow I'm not surprised that you would reduce a woman's response to "talk to the hand." You stated, "Per Wikipedia guidelines, if [you are] mentioning [me], [you] should notify [me]. If you don't want the pings, use the mute function." This is yet another Wikipedia aspect you are wikilawyering. And, really, since it's not based on any rule, it's questionable to even call it wikilawyering. If you were reporting me at WP:ANI, you would have a point. But that would only count for you notifying me on my talk page. Nowhere are you required to keep pinging me to a page I am watching. When an editor tells you to stop pinging them because they are watching a page or will check back, you should stop. Point blank. This is per WP:Harassment. It's per WP:Harassment because your pings are not being helpful in any way and are instead causing distress. Your unnecessary pings annoy me. Since you know that, you should stop. Stating "Oh, well, just mute your pings. It's your fault if you keep getting pings from me." is silliness. And it's not like you would lose anything by simply ceasing pinging me. You're just going to keep pinging me when mute is on? Who is the pinging for then? What nonsense. Editors have been reprimanded for unnecessarily pinging others -- meaning after they were asked to stop. Likewise, editors have been reprimanded for thanking editors via WP:Echo when it has been used as a harassment tactic. Editors have been warned and/or reprimanded for either when it comes to their interaction with me. And you would be no different. As certain admins (including WP:CUs) know, I have stalkers who ping me via sock accounts. So that is one reason I don't like to be pinged unless necessary.
Now that aside, let's get something make something very clear: Your reckless edits have removed PETA for WP:About self matters. That is the main reason this thread was started. And as made clear by Ssilvers above, SMcCandlish below, Adrian J. Hunter here, and by others, using PETA to report that someone is a vegetarian or vegan because that person told PETA that, or using PETA to report that a public figure did a PSA with them, or won a PETA award are WP:About self matters. As is clear by this post you made, you are aware that PETA is not some little organization and that they are instead powerful. They aren't telling falsehoods by stating that a public figure is a vegetarian or vegan. And yet you are going on your "must rid Wikipedia of that pesky PETA in all cases" crusade. It's ridiculous. You've stated that editors are being PC for not going along with your extreme take on using PETA as a source. You've gone on about an advocacy campaign for PETA on Wikipedia, when it's significantly more likely that the reason editors have used PETA as a source is because it's so well-known.
When this thread is archived, you're going to point to it like it's the WP:DAILYMAIL case, as if PETA can't even be used to name vegetarian and vegan foods. And, actually, as is clear by the Sia case, you pointed to PETA in a "no, not the Daily Mail" way before I started the RfC below. Sighs. I'm just going to state now that when you are again sanctioned for disruption, whether it concerns the PETA website or something else, I will state, "Told you so." Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 21:11, 9 August 2020 (UTC) Added more to post. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 21:36, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
When this thread is archived, you're going to point to it like it's the WP:DAILYMAIL case, as if PETA can't even be used to name vegetarian and vegan foods.
As well they should, since PETA is not an authority of any kind regarding food -- or really, anything else except their own beliefs -- since they're an animal rights advocacy group. --Calton | Talk 02:16, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
They don't have to be an authority on food to be used to name vegetarian and vegan foods. Being an animal rights advocacy group doesn't discount them in this regard. If they are making false or misleading claims about meat, then, yes, they shouldn't be used to comment on meat matters (except for their own opinions). But that's not the same thing. And if one comments that "Well, if they can't reliably speak on meat, they can't reliably speak on what are vegan and vegetarian foods."? Still not the same. They don't want people eating meat; so a lot of what they state on that is going to be opinionated. But exactly why would they be wrong in stating that so and so is a vegetarian or vegan food? In what way would they be misleading people? Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 03:08, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
They don't have to be an authority on food to be used to name vegetarian and vegan foods
Why yes, yes they do: it's kind of the point of the whole "reliable-sources standards" thingie. It's implied by that word, "authority".
Being an animal rights advocacy group doesn't discount them in this regard
a) Yes it does, since I'm not seeing the words "food", "diet", "cuisine", "nutrition", "vegetarian", "vegan" or any variant thereof there. b) You have things backwards: you have to show that they meet the reliable-sources standard, not demand other people prove to YOUR satisfaction that they don't. All your waffling and logic-chopping doesn't change that. c) "What harm could they do?" is not a reliable-sources standard, last I checked. --Calton | Talk 12:02, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
No, no, they don't. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS is clear. We do not always use sources to report on something they are an authority on. Our use of media and news sources for various matters demonstrates that. They only need to be reliable in that context and the claim should not be a WP:REDFLAG matter. I am a WP:Med editor and know what are appropriate sources to use for medical material, but, per Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)#Popular press and Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)#Other sources, even we allow lower-quality sources for certain matters because context matters. In this context, there is no reason at all to believe that PETA wouldn't be reliable for reporting on what are vegetarian and vegan foods, as if they would have people eat non-vegan foods by lying to them, for example. They are an advocacy group that is also concerned with veganism. And they have been used on Wikipedia for years without issue for simple information material. As much as you or anyone else may want this to be a WP:DAILYMAIL matter, it isn't. And as someone who edits the Vegetarianism and Veganism articles, I can also state that we do not only stick to sources that are authorities on foods. A review article on vegetarianism or veganism usually is not coming from some food journal or similar. All it is doing is reviewing the literature on the subject. And, of course, there are the society and culture aspects that we cover in the Vegetarianism and Veganism articles, and in medical and anatomy articles in general. I have not "demanded other people prove to [my] satisfaction" anything in this discussion. I have not waffled on anything. You have things backwards. As usual, I know what I'm talking about. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:19, 23 August 2020 (UTC) Tweaked post. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:26, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

___

Sources

  1. ^ Kluger, Jeffrey (May 30, 2014). ""Got Autism?" PETA's Phony Milk Claims". Time. Archived from the original on June 17, 2020. Retrieved August 3, 2020.
  2. ^ Lupica, Diana (October 11, 2017). "Old PETA Advert Associating Milk With Autism Causes Outrage". Vegan News, Plant Based Living, Food, Health & more.
  3. ^ Novella, Steven (May 28, 2014). "PETA Embraces Autism Pseudoscience". Science-Based Medicine. Archived from the original on July 21, 2020. Retrieved August 3, 2020.

RfC: Reliability of PETA

In this discussion, editors present evidence that PETA has, in the past, misrepresented scientific studies, made easily-falsifiable claims, and has been forced to retract them. They discuss this, and agree that PETA is an often-unreliable source that should be used with great caution. In the limited circumstances where it's appropriate to use PETA as a source, editors are encouraged to consider using in-text attribution.
It is apparent from this discussion that some editors may be about to start removing PETA as a source from articles. Please use good editoral judgment as you do this, bearing in mind that alternative sources may be available, and PETA remain a reliable source for PETA's opinion.—S Marshall T/C 15:09, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Which of the following best describes the reliability of the reporting of the PETA?

Further questions:

  • 1. Is PETA reliable for statements about a person being a vegetarian or vegan? What about when the person tells PETA that they are a vegetarian or vegan?
  • 2. Should citations to PETA be attributed and/or have an inline citation?
  • 3. Are PETA awards and commentary about a person making PETA's "sexiest vegan" list to be excluded from Wikipedia articles unless covered by a secondary source? Should such material be included at all, such as in the "Public image" section? Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:27, 9 August 2020 (UTC) Note: I updated this time stamp when adding in the third "further considerations" aspect. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:32, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Survey (PETA)

  • Option 3 if we're really doing this. There's no indication that they do any sort of fact-checking. Interviews with them are likewise generally unusable - we rely on the interview being with a WP:RS, normally. Since PETA isn't an RS, an interview with them cannot be considered WP:RS - that is not "person X says they're a vegetarian" (which would be the case if we were citing eg. their Twitter), that is "PETA says person X says they're a vegetarian". WP:ABOUTSELF requires that it be published by the person in question - otherwise articles would be full of hearsay from unreliable sources. Awards, commentary, and so on generally require a secondary source, and always require a secondary WP:RS source, without exception, whenever any third party is mentioned, including any awards, recognition, description of someone's characteristics, whether they are a vegan / vegetarian or not, etc. I'm baffled the discussion has gotten this far - we wouldn't accept a political think-tank saying "X totally agrees with us" as a source for their politics without secondary coverage, either. --Aquillion (talk) 06:18, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Οption 4. This organization is singularly focused on one objective, the welfare of animals. The means it uses are often confrontantionally militant. Its internal and operational structure approaches those of a military group. Therefore, it would be expecting truly too much to expect to come out of PETA some neutral critique of others' or its own actions and ideas. But, of course, we can always quote and relay PETA's viewpoints as they emanate from the organization itself, per WP:ABOUTSELF. -The Gnome (talk) 07:11, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 - not to be trusted, surely anything they report can be found in alternative (reliable) sources. GiantSnowman 09:14, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3: PETA, like all activism organizations, is not a reliable source for alleged facts, beyond their own positions, statements, and non-controversial history (e.g. who is on their advisory board, or where they were founded), though they are not categorically unreliable "no matter what", like a publisher devoted to falsehoods (Weekly World News, National Enquirer). Advocacy/pressure groups like this (on any topic) aren't reliable for statements of alleged fact about the world, because everything they write is one-sided socio-political staking out of a position, a stance, and is unlike other forms of non-fiction writing. It is the nonprofit/NGO direct equivalent of marketing. That said, PETA is not less reliable (nor more) than other such organizations, regardless of the subject of the activism. PS: In the heated discussion above, Flyer22 is correct that if celebrity A. B. Ceedy says they are a vegetarian in an interview published by PETA, we can use that. That's WP:ABOUTSELF material on the part of that person, and we have no evidence of any kind that PETA fabricates interviews. For interview material, PETA is a conduit for the statements of someone else, and is not the creator of them. There's a very big difference between PETA asserting, in their voice, that someone is a vegetarian, versus PETA quoting an individual personally stating he or she is a vegetarian. Whether PETA is biased and self-serving in who they choose to interview and what they choose to ask them is irrelevant. This reminds me a lot of the failure to distinguish between something like Facebook or Twitter (a legal entity) as a speaker and publisher (e.g., whether claims that Facebook or Twitter makes about its own relationships with various government agencies and how it handles private user data), versus Facebook or Twitter as a self-publishing service, as a conduit for other's own expression. Twitter is not a reliable source for whether Twitter actually abides by regulations, or whether a particular vaccine idea is a good one, or whether Pluto should be reclassified as a planet again. They are a reliable source, in the conduit sense, for the fact that Trump really did tweet another stupid and inflammatory thing this morning, and what exactly the wording was. In short, do not confuse the medium with the message, or confuse the source of the idea with the venue through which you encountered it. PETA as an originator of a claim is useless, but PETA as a relay of the claim of someone else isn't suspicious.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 
  • Option 4 - maybe a source for claims about itself, absolutely not a source for claims about anyone or anything else, and obviously not an RS for statements about living people that can't be source to an RS - David Gerard (talk) 10:36, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
That's #4 verbatim. -The Gnome (talk) 09:03, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Fixed! (at last) - David Gerard (talk) 21:20, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
In particular, the milk and autism one makes it MEDRS important that we not trust a word PETA says about anything - and I would include about themselves in that - David Gerard (talk) 21:20, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 PETA is an agenda-driven activist organization, not a news outlet. They should not be cited for anything outside simple factual statements about themselves. Zaathras (talk) 15:35, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 They seem perfectly happy to let truth be a casualty of getting what they want. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:49, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 2: If PETA has made an interview with some celeb claiming to be a vegetarian/vegan, that interview is a sufficient source to claim that someone is a vegetarian/vegan. If PETA has published a report linking meat to cancer then that is not a sufficient source for the claim eating meat gives you cancer. It all depends on the context and what kind of claim is being made. The claims "X is a Nazi" and "X is a vegetarian" are syntactically similar, but the former obviously needs much stronger source support than the latter.ImTheIP (talk) 21:56, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 per SMcCandlish. Cavalryman (talk) 22:59, 9 August 2020 (UTC).
  • Option 4 per above. Also, any claims in any source that a person is vegetarian/vegan need to be dated because many people stop eating a vegan diet [11]. (t · c) buidhe 00:41, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 or 4 - close enough to being the same thing. Atsme Talk 📧 01:15, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 Given their nature (extreme advocacy) and tendency to see things form a very "narrow perspective" I am gona say not reliable for anything except the fact they said it.Slatersteven (talk) 09:10, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 2 or 3. No, PETA is generally not a reliable source. But an outright ban on citations is inappropriate. Is the fact that a certain product won one of their awards something that could be sourced to them? Probably, as PETA is the primary source for information about PETA's awards, and that may be content worth including in an article. Is PETA good for factual matters about the world outside PETA? Probably not. I do worry that (as I say below) it's not entirely clear what is actually being proposed, and I do worry (as is fairly clear above) that people's own views of PETA are influencing their assessments. Nonetheless: I echo what SMcCandlish said above about PETA being no "worse" than any other pressure group, and what he said about interviews. Josh Milburn (talk) 11:53, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 - They are not a news organization, they are an advocacy group. That's fine for things they are doing, but they don't claim to be objective, so we shouldn't either. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:11, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 or 4: Per Atsme and Dennis Brown. — Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤)
  • Option 3 or 4 As per Aquillion and The Gnome. It's an advocacy group, where's the peer review or editorial oversight? Bacondrum (talk) 23:30, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3: One of the tests for RS is whether they do fact checking on a regular basis. PETA does not appear to do this. This is regrettable, because it's true that PETA is sometimes the only interview source for whether someone is vegan. (Other interviewers generally don't ask this question.) Nevertheless, as long as PETA doesn't do fact-checking, wikipedia shouldn't consider them a RS. — Eric Herboso 23:44, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Comment: Is it so important to include someone's dietary choices? If it's only of importance to a Wikipedia editor and not to interviewers, nor was mentioned by a celebrity, then isn't this advocacy? Normal Op (talk) 17:47, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
      • You’re correct that people’s dietary choices shouldn’t be on their pages just if it’s merely their dietary choices. But “veganism” refers to more than diet. It’s an ethical stance that includes clothing and other choices. It’s on par with saying someone volunteers everyday for a particular cause, because they make daily choices for that particular cause. They might not be loud about it, and other outlets might not ask them about it, but being vegan in the traditional sense is a significant aspect of what a person chooses to do everyday. It’s similar to if a celebrity chose to be a volunteer firefighter and was serious enough about it to do something related to firefighting every day. I would argue that this is strange and significant enough that it would be noteworthy to include in a bio, so long as it was sourced from an RS. I don’t think PETA is a RS, but I do think that if a celeb publishes their own info stating that they are vegan, then that is allowable per WP:ABOUTSELF. — Eric Herboso 23:58, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
        • @Eric Herboso: If a celebrity publishes their own information, then PETA's publication of that same fact isn't needed as a source. Your assertion that all vegans are "ethical vegans" contradicts Veganism. Normal Op (talk) 01:43, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
          • @Normal Op: I agree wholeheartedly that PETA shouldn’t be used as a source (because they're not a RS); I was saying that WP:ABOUTSELF would allow their own published info to be used as a source. But I completely disagree with your saying that my assertion contradicts veganism. The first line of veganism is completely in line with what I’ve said: that veganism is not just a dietary choice, and that it is additionally a philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. I believe this makes it appropriate to include in a bio, even though I don't think citing PETA to do it is acceptable for technical reasons. (As an aside, if your agenda is to not have vegan status included in bios, your best argument seems to me to be that veganism is something that many people eventually stop doing, and so any citation would need to be for a dated period of time. Finding citations that someone was vegan from 201X-202x would be more difficult to find than a single point citation of someone being vegan, and thus might result in less citations of veganism on wikipedia. (I mean no offense in assuming you have an agenda here; it just seems that way from the focused edits & comments you keep making.)) — Eric Herboso 02:42, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4. Advocacy group, not a news organization. Jayjg (talk) 17:18, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 and 4: As an activist organization with a mantra for sensationalistic campaigns and a history of false statements, they are generally unreliable for any factual reporting whatsoever. As for ABOUTSELF matters, they would only be acceptable for uncontroversial statements about themselves, and never about another person. (I notice an option for 'deprecated' wasn't offered.)
Q1: No, especially in the absence of a secondary and reliable source because PETA has a reputation for altering the truth. Also, "being a vegan", as for any dietary choices, can be a temporary condition for many people. It is not a permanent fact about a person such as where someone was born or what their primary language is. Would you report in Wikipedia that someone follows the Atkins Diet? No.
Q2: No opinion.
Q3: No, PETA awards should not be included in Wikipedia. PETA hands out these awards like water bottles at a marathon race. Such awards are only rubber stamps by a controversial advocacy organization and are neither valuable nor important. Mentioning them in Wikipedia is UNDUE and just more advertising for the advocacy organization. How are they even judged? Is PETA in the people business like People magazine is? I would trust People's Sexiest Man Alive or Sexiest Woman Alive before I would put any stock in a PETA award. In my research I encountered: "Celebrities regularly featured in People magazine were excluded" from PETA's 'sexiest' awards. What does THAT mean? Did you know PETA has at least 6 different types of awards? Sexiest Vegetarian, Most Beautiful Vegan Celebrity, Sexiest Vegan Celebrity, Sexiest Vegan Over 50, Sexiest Vegan Indoors, and Sexiest Vegan Next Door (non-celebrities). Each press release includes this sort of agenda promotion: "That skin … that hair … that body! Ever notice that certain celebrities just seem ageless somehow? No, not the plastic surgery nightmare stuff. It’s that glow. What’s their secret? Refraining from eating meat." — Normal Op (talk) 17:38, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Why wasn't an option for "deprecated" offered? Common sense, that's why. This is not a WP:DAILYMAIL matter, which is what I've been telling you. That you want to treat it like one is clearly out of step with what pretty much everyone else has stated. Similar goes for other comments you've made about the source, and yet you want us to believe you have nothing against PETA. You clearly haven't listened to anything that editors who are far more experienced than you are have stated about using PETA. Or if you have, then you don't care. You just want the source's use severely limited or rather the source outright banned. I don't know what else  SMcCandlish could state to get you to listen, but I've pinged him again just in case he thinks he can state anything else that would help. And, for the record, whether or not mentioning "sexiest vegan" is WP:Due is about context, like various other things when it comes to using sources like PETA. If secondary sources are noting that a celebrity, especially one whose notability partly or mainly hinges on their appearance (their perceived physical attractiveness), made PETA's "sexiest vegan" list or topped it, then, yes, it is likely WP:Due for us to mention that. Various celebrity articles have "Public image" or "In the media" sections to address how the public and/or media views them. A lot of these articles, such as Jennifer Lawrence, are of WP:Good or WP:Featured status. And Lawrence being considered beautiful or sexy is something that is mentioned in her "In the media" section. If she were a vegan and made PETA's "sexiest vegan" list, it would likely be reported on by one or more secondary sources and would also likely be included there in her Wikipedia article. If she were a vegan, and with her reputation for advocacy, it's something that would that she is a vegan would certainly be included in her "Personal life" or "Off-screen work" section. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 01:30, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Flyer22 Frozen: Your antagonistic, condescending, and repetitive personal attacks towards me are getting really old. Knock it off! Normal Op (talk) 02:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Your "Flyer is being so mean to me" tactic is really old. Knock it off. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:06, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Blah, blah, blah, Ginger. Normal Op (talk) 06:50, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Pot, meet Kettle. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 04:29, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Get a room, you two. :) All joking aside, these personal comments have to stop. If I have to file a report at ANI I would really like to be able to say "it was getting bad but editor X stopped when I asked them to and so no action is required regarding editor X" Even better if you both stop this behavior now. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:51, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
Guy Macon, as is clear, this matter has been over for days. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 03:11, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 2, at risk of being the only person in the room with a tan suit: their investigations are GREL; their footage is GREL for the event they capture; and everything else should be considered as reliable as any company pamphlet or neighborhood news. All three cases should be attributed. As for the particular case: Q1 - yes if as part of an interview with the subject; Q2 - attributed; Q3 - I'm not inclined to this sort of tabloid shtick regardless of where it comes from, so no. I am inclined to change my vote if evidence of unreliability is presented. François Robere (talk) 14:53, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
    • For the avoidance of doubt, media campaigns should not be cited as anything other than examples of media campaigns. François Robere (talk) 17:28, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 5 Not reliable at all, not even about themselves. PETA has shown repeatedly that they will weaponize and distort information in pursuit of their goals. Everything they do and say is suspect. Even about themselves: remember when they claimed to run animal shelters but killed all the pets they took in? They lie. About everything. SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 04:50, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 As other editors have said, they are an agenda-driven advocacy organization with no editorial oversight. Over the years, this organization has repeatedly presented absolutely outrageous claims as being factual. For example, they once claimed that milk can cause Autism. Sources that regularly spread this much pseudoscience have no place on Wikipedia. They appear to be so concerned with pushing an agenda that they seem to not think that facts matter. Scorpions13256 (talk) 04:22, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3. PETA is an advocacy group, whose scientific claims might be correct in some cases, but like many advocacy groups they start off with their conclusion ("exploitation of animals is never justified") and try to find scientific evidence to support that, instead of letting the scientific evidence guide their views. That approach leads to them to often ignoring evidence contrary to their views, while accepting poorly founded scientific claims. The "beer is healthier than milk" claim is among them, another is the claim that B-vitamins prevent mosquito bites, to prove that there is no need to kill them. On some occasions, animal rights groups have documented severe animal abuses taking place, and when that evidence is picked up by a news organisation, we may elect to add a link to the original source, but we should always rely on secondary sourcing to verify such claims. Sjakkalle (Check!) 21:04, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @Sjakkalle: From what you wrote, I'm thinking you meant "Option 3", not "Oppose 3". Is that correct? Normal Op (talk) 21:35, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 3 per above. ~ HAL333 02:26, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 1, reliable for factual claims I asked below for examples of when PETA has published false statements of fact. There are serious accusations here and I do not see them backed by evidence. I feel like there is a disconnect here. Much of the opposition says that PETA is an advocacy organization, which is true, but there is a difference between statements of opinion and factual reporting. I do not see evidence here of PETA inappropriately reporting facts, nor am I aware of claims that PETA is unreliable for the reporting they do. I recognize that PETA is an organization which seeks controversy, which has long been their advertising and marketing strategy for drawing attention and public conversation to the issues on which they report. Definitely some people dislike PETA, but Wikipedia surveys should have a basis in evidence and not somehow get steered by personal opinion. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:55, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
    • I do not see evidence here of PETA inappropriately reporting facts, nor am I aware of claims that PETA is unreliable for the reporting they do Perhaps you should scroll up and read some of the examples given -- or are you also claiming that drinking milk causes autism, as detailed above? --Calton | Talk 02:39, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @Calton: If there are more examples then point them out. For this example, I will talk it through.
The position with PETA starts with saying that milk is unhealthy, and that all unhealthy behaviors exacerbate medical conditions. The social context is that there is a milk industry pushing milk as part of a healthy diet, and I do not see PETA as out of bounds of science for challenging that idea.
PETA on autism is at "Learn About the Link Between Dairy Products and the Disorder". I do not read them going so far as to say "dairy causes autism", but I agree with their claim getting rid of milk consumption as an unhealthy habit would contribute to a healthy lifestyle. They cite two studies, admittedly older.
  • Lucarelli, S; Frediani, T; Zingoni, AM; Ferruzzi, F; Giardini, O; Quintieri, F; Barbato, M; D'Eufemia, P; Cardi, E (September 1995). "Food allergy and infantile autism". Panminerva medica. 37 (3): 137–41. PMID 8869369.
  • Knivsberg, AM; Reichelt, KL; Høien, T; Nødland, M (September 2002). "A randomised, controlled study of dietary intervention in autistic syndromes". Nutritional neuroscience. 5 (4): 251–61. doi:10.1080/10284150290028945. PMID 12168688.
I also see at People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals#Milk_and_autism that lots of mainstream media and even some experts have criticized PETA, but in my view, these sources misrepresent what PETA says. I do not see PETA as writing in error here. At worst their message is subject to misinterpretation.
PETA does publicly get medical review from physicians. One person known for giving them medical review is Dr. Neal D. Barnard who founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. That is a small organization but it has a membership of actual physicians, does fact checking, supports its members in publishing academic articles, and has a public relationship with PETA for providing medical review. The Wikipedia article says a bit about the relationship. There is some criticism that PETA has no review, and this is not correct. I dispute that they are a careless organization, and instead feel that there is plenty of public evidence that they make attention seeking statements anticipating exactly what critics will say, and with advance planning of exactly how they are going to defend themselves and respond. This is not a fringe organization with no control, and it seems naive and misguided to imagine that an organization this old, this attention seeking, this well funded, this well connected in the New York City media industry, and so lawsuit experienced would fail to have an editorial process in place after so much history of facing challenges to their statements and defending them publicly.
I still think I am justified in asking for a list of statements which they made and which demonstrates their unreliability. I expect RfCs to surface evidence and not just be opinion polls. I am not seeing much evidence here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:29, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Editor Bluerasberry asks for evidence that PETA has published false statements of fact. I provide a choice sample of such false claims herebelow, in the Discussion section. -The Gnome (talk) 23:02, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure that this line of questioning is useful. The wikipedia rule for reliability is to look to whether the organization has systems in place that check for accuracy. The rule is not to see if what they publish is true or not. The reason for citing an obviously false thing that they've published is to establish it as evidence that the organization does not check for accuracy. But presumably even if they published lots of falsehoods, they'd still be considered reliable by wikipedia standards if they had a system in place to check reliability for those claims. I don't think that PETA is a reliable source, but I'm certain that many other animal advocacy organizations are clearly reliable sources, even though many of the claims by those other orgs and by PETA are factually the same. — Eric Herboso 04:41, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
    • The wikipedia rule for reliability is to look to whether the organization has systems in place that check for accuracy Nope. The fact-checking/error-correction is ONE TEST of reliability -- which, despite your attempt to gloss over -- they have failed. PETA having a mechanism for fact-checking or error correction -- which, by the way, you haven't demonstrated or even suggested -- and ignoring the any actual corrections, as they have done -- would be an even worse indicator of reliability. Nice attempt at obfuscation, there. --Calton | Talk 05:17, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
      • I agree with you that PETA should not be considered a reliable source. You shouldn't be so quick to attack people here, especially when they agree with you about the main question at hand here. PETA clearly does not have a system for fact-checking, and thus clearly shouldn't be considered a reliable source. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that you are wrong about the test of whether the org has a system in place to check for accuracy. It's true that a system of checking is not the only test for reliability, but the others are things like whether the source is published or whether it's independent. (See WP:SOURCE for details on this.) Consequently, if an org hypothetically gave lots of false statements, but it nevertheless had a clear system of checking facts, then I think that we'd have to allow it as a reliable source to be cited. We could say that the false statements were evidence against the org having a fact-checking system in place, but if it were made independently clear that they had such a system in place, then I don't think current wikipedia rules on sources would allow us to disallow the source as reliable on that basis. If you don't like this, you might want to try to change the existing policy -- but I actually think the policy is correct here. Policing truth shouldn't be what wikipedia editors should have to do. It should be enough to check whether there are systems in place that tend toward truth. Otherwise, you might end up with editors claiming that the US postal service site is unreliable as a source because the current person in charge is clearly lying about factual things, or that all .gov websites shouldn't be considered reliable sources anymore just because the head of the US government is a known liar. — Eric Herboso 19:11, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
        • @Eric Herboso: Regardless of you saying you're on the same side of a voting as another editor, your repeated insistence on WP:SOURCE's sentence ("The best sources have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments.") as senior to the one which follows (which you basically have deprecated) ("The greater the degree of scrutiny given to these issues, the more reliable the source.") makes your assertions argumentative and disruptive, not constructive. You haven't presented that PETA does any fact-checking at all or even has a system in place. While you tell another editor to argue his presumed position about a policy elsewhere, you argue the same not-relevant-to-this-issue thing here. Normal Op (talk) 21:13, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
          • @Normal Op: I'm not presenting that PETA does fact-checking because I agree that they don't do fact-checking. They clearly do not do fact-checking. But I disagree that my comments are disruptive. This is a discussion about whether PETA should be considered a reliable source. When people here make arguments that PETA should not be considered reliable because of their false milk/autism claim, I feel that it is important to clarify that this is not sufficient evidence to regard PETA as unreliable. It is my understanding of wikipedia's policy that you further would have to establish that they don't have systematized fact-checking. I know that you disagree with this understanding of wikipedia policy, and I acknowledge that if you are correct then my comments here can be construed as disruptive. But under my understanding of the policy, it is important for this distinction to be made. Many of the people voicing an option here are merely stating that the fact of PETA spouting falsehoods is sufficient evidence; while I may agree that PETA should not be considered reliable, it is for a different reason than what others are citing. Potentially they might change their mind if they understood the wikipedia policy on reliable sourcing as I do, and so it is constructive, not disruptive, for me to point this out here in the comments. — Eric Herboso 22:30, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 Their "milk causes autism" schtick ALONE should put them in this category: it's one thing to make a mistake or overreach, but to double down not because they dispute but because it helps their advocacy? No. --Calton | Talk 02:39, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • As for the supplementary questions: absolutely not; obviously, if it comes up; no, Wikipedia is not in the business of parroting PETA's PR stunts uncritically. --Calton | Talk 02:43, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4. PETA itself is not reliable factual reporting for encyclopedic purposes. PETA's claims and actions etc. should only be mentioned in a Wikipedia article if reported as fact by a third-party independent reliable source. PETA may have started out as an ethical organization, but they've gone rogue and often downright crazy since then. Softlavender (talk) 03:52, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 Just read this piece in The Atlantic The Bad Science Behind PETA's Claim That Milk Might Cause Autism, PETA was promoting discredited scientific studies and refusing to back down when they were challenged, there's simply no reason to cite them. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:59, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4 Just like any other agenda driven pseudoscientific source. If it is important that we know if someone is a vegan or not then another source would say it. AIRcorn (talk) 10:27, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Option 4. Much of what they say is simply dishonest, other statements misrepresent fringe opinion as fact. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:53, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion (PETA)

  • Comment how is "PETA" defined? Is this a website, all their websites, quotes of theirs in other media, their own quarterly journal, what? GPinkerton (talk) 02:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • As currently noted in its Wikipedia's article, it's an American animal rights organization. Some in this discussion have also called it an activist organization. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:20, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • GPinkerton, I would include anything published on any of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' numerous websites including peta.org, peta2.com, petaindia.com, petaasiapacific.com, peta.org.uk, peta.de, petafrance.com, peta.nl, peta.org.au, petaasia.com, petaasia.cn, petalatino.com, petakids.com, furisdead.com, and dozens more. I would also include any statements directly attributed as being from PETA, including statements made by Ingrid Newkirk, Alex Pacheco or any of the PETA executives or staff in the performance of their duties at PETA. Normal Op (talk) 03:15, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
I think the question of how we define PETA is a good one. The people you mention by name also publish in outlets that do have a reputation for fact-checking. Even if PETA-published sources have to be ruled out or limited (on which I right now express no opinion) we should not ban citations to these writers' work in more reputable outlets. (The only time I can think of citing PETA on Wikipedia was literally yesterday, and this was for one of their awards -- though not their "sexiest vegan" nonsense. Their various awards are quite widely commented upon in the vegan world, among the winners, and in the mainstream press.) Josh Milburn (talk) 08:24, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
In what outlet would Newkirk or Pacheco publish that isn't PETA commentary, op-ed, or press release? Do you have any examples? (I'm assuming you saw my "in the performance of their duties at PETA" qualifier.) Normal Op (talk) 08:56, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
I do not share your assumptions (or what I take to be your assumptions) about "op-eds". Newkirk has published several times in The Guardian: this is a highly regarded UK broadsheet. I think it would be problematic if a hamfisted anti-PETA guideline banned citing work published in The Guardian. (Obviously, these pieces can't be taken to be completely "neutral" with regards animal protection issues, but no broadsheet is "neutral" anyway.) Newkirk has also published scholarly work (e.g., she has a chapter in Sister Species, published by Illinois UP, which is a key collection in the scholarly literature on animals and women) as well as non-fiction (but non-scholarly) books with established, reputable publishers (e.g., Animalkind was published with Simon & Schuster). Restricting citations to PETA's website is one thing. Blacklisting people associated with PETA is completely another. Josh Milburn (talk) 15:45, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
@J Milburn: I'm not advocating blacklisting; you must have missed my "in the performance of their duties at PETA" qualifier. Books go through an editorial process that op-eds do not. All 4 of Newkirk's articles in The Guardian are labelled as "Opinions" and are covered under primary source policies including WP:PRIMARY: "Further examples of primary sources include ... editorials, columns, blogs, opinion pieces, or (depending on context) interviews; ... original philosophical works..." Normal Op (talk) 18:09, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
With respect, I didn't miss it; a lot of what you are saying (including the "duties at PETA" claim) is ambiguous, which is precisely why we're having this conversation. If I understand you correctly, you accept that the books are OK, even if the proposed "PETA ban" goes through. You are not advocating a ban on work from people associated with PETA. (Though I honestly do not know what your position on the "op-eds" is. Could I ask you to state it in plain English?) So what are you proposing? Is it simply a ban on content published by PETA? Or is it more than that? SMcCandlish seems to think it's more than that. I am inclined to oppose this proposal for the simple reason that I do not know what it is. It feels suspiciously like an attempt to just ban a bunch of citations that certain editors do not like because of a perceived link to an organisation that certain editors do not like. I've got a lot of issues with PETA (though I understand that their very decentralised structure and love of press attention complicates views of the organisation), and I don't see any reason to think of them as a particularly reliable source on most things, but this whole thing feels a bit off. Josh Milburn (talk) 11:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Just as a quick follow-up (and a partial going-back on myself): Feel free to reply, and feel free to ping me if you want me to see something, but I am not sure I want this to be any more of a time-sink than it already has been! Do not feel you have to answer my questions if you do not want to. Josh Milburn (talk) 11:55, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
@J Milburn: I meant to indicate that your attempt to frame this RfC as an author blacklist discussion by using books and op-eds as examples was immaterial because we already have policies/guidelines for the handling of books and op-eds. Books are usually more acceptable because they have more editorial oversight. Op-eds are usually less acceptable because they have less editorial oversight. The phrase I used "statements directly attributed as being from PETA" meant those cases where an otherwise reliable news source is quoting PETA to get filler for their article, or just plain churnalism. I have seen numerous instances recently of 'news articles' which are only repeats of what the 'reporter' read on peta.org or gleaned from the latest PETA advertising video. And I don't mean the reporter was covering the subject; they were merely repeating the PETA campaign message; a sort of well-disguised press release. That falls under "statements directly attributed as being from PETA". Normal Op (talk) 17:37, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Re 'how is "PETA" defined?' As an organizational author and as a publisher. 'Is this a website, all their websites, quotes of theirs in other media, their own quarterly journal, what?' All of the above, and quoted statements by them in the press.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:15, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Could someone provide examples of use? I'll eventually get around it, but the earlier we have them the better this RfC will go. --Hipal/Ronz (talk) 16:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
I mentioned my own citation of PETA above -- it's in Jackie Kearney. I doubt this is the sort of thing that some others so strongly object to, but it certainly seems to be something they want to ban. Josh Milburn (talk) 11:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you. Quote below. --Hipal/Ronz (talk) 15:32, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
If it is worthy of inclusion people other then PETA would care (see wp:undue). If no one cares why should we?Slatersteven (talk) 15:34, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
In Jackie Kearney: "The book won the PETA UK Vegan Food Award for Cookbook of the Year 2016."[1]
If PETA does something notable others will notice it.Slatersteven (talk) 14:58, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ "Vegan Food Awards 2016". PETA UK. Retrieved 8 August 2020.
  • I agree with other editors that the issue is weight, not reliability. The reason we normally would not use PETA as a source is because we need evidence that their findings have been widely reported before we mention them. It's not because we question whether their facts are accurate. TFD (talk) 05:17, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Question This discussion seems to include no examples of false or incorrect claims which PETA has made. Does anyone have examples? I find this discussion strange, because I presumed that the basis of discussion of the reliability of a source should be some examples demonstrating a lack of reliability. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:47, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Ok, Bluerasberry, here's another PETA boof. In 2014, PETA "investigated" horse racing. They presented a 7-hour video and a 285-page report alleging cruelties and consisting of the PETA investigator's notes, medical documents and reports from [PETA] veterinarians who reviewed the videotape. [12] In 2016, "Exhaustive investigations by racing commissions in Kentucky and New York are now complete. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission brought no charges against [the trainer], saying the allegations "had neither a factual or scientific basis." The New York State Gaming Commission fined [the man] for minor transgressions, but the most serious charges were deemed unfounded. It's fair to say no trainer has ever been so thoroughly investigated. [13] So, in pursuit of PETA's agenda to prove all use of animals "unethical", they almost destroyed a credible man's career, used The New York Times to broadcast their message, and in the end PETA's publication (report and video) was proven false. There's probably a dozen more of these "mistakes" by PETA that I could drag out, but you can find them just as easily. Normal Op (talk) 23:25, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
Despite having been proven wrong, today PETA's website peta.org maintains seventy-two (72) webpages continuing to promote their allegations against Asmussen. See here: [14]. Further information is available at Steve Asmussen#Allegations by PETA, and [15]: "it's clear that the original video PETA posted on its website is heavily edited. The PETA website video routinely moves around audio segments to run with unrelated video." If that doesn't prove "unreliable source", then I don't know what will do it for you. Normal Op (talk) 23:37, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
What is this evidence of? As I understand what you're saying, an organization responsible for maintaining the reputation of horse racing disagreed with an organization that doesn't like horse racing on what's considered problematic in horse racing. By the same logic, every newspaper who criticized police for excessive force was "proven wrong" when the police department opted not to take disciplinary action. What am I missing? (this isn't an argument for PETA's reliability btw). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:20, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: It was in response to Bluerasberry's question "This discussion seems to include no examples of false or incorrect claims which PETA has made. Does anyone have examples?" and was not intended to be a comprehensive argument/presentation. However, as I have discovered in my recent researches, PETA has performed a string of similar "false exposes" in the attempt to excoriate entire industries (in the pursuit of their advocacy agendas); each one based on notes and video obtained by PETA operatives, followed by lengthy reports from PETA to authorities, that are often proven false or grossly exaggerated, and in many cases leading to lawsuits against PETA or their operatives. The whole point was that (1) PETA is not a reliable source, and (2) has been proven not-reliable by more than just Wikipedia editors during discussions, and (3) that their unreliability is far more egregious than declarations that someone is a vegan in a wiki BLP page. Normal Op (talk) 18:15, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
It's quite a different scale of unreliability than a newspaper reporter inflaming their readers about the latest use of excessive force by police. In some cases, the PETA videos were shown to be so heavily edited as to be false, and not representative of any truth. Normal Op (talk) 18:20, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
  • PETA's claims linking dairy products to autism: Despite metastudies (studies that examine other studies) such as this one, by the University of Texas, from 2010, firmly refuting PETA's claims, PETA still insists that "scientific studies have shown that many autistic kids improve dramatically when put on a diet free of dairy products" and still carries the relevant, false guidance on its website, quite prominently too. (See here for more information on the two studies on which PETA based their claims.) PETA even doubled down on its stance, claiming that "milk has already been strongly linked to cancer, Crohn’s disease, and other serious health problems." Since parents and guardians of children with autism are considered an understandably vulnerable group, the insistence of PETA to ignore science when its findings do not coincide with PETA's views is proof that the organization is simply not trustworthy except for items concerning itself, i.e. expression of opinions, statements about events, etc.
PETA's claims equating sheep shearing to torture: PETA continues to claim that the practice of sheep shearing is equivalent to torturing the animals, through mass adverts proclaiming that "wool is just as cruel as fur." The claims have been refuted and the ads withdrawn, after public protests, for being "misleading." (See here for more info.)
PETA's claims about the worthlessness of experiments on animals: During the currently ongoing global health crisis, PETA claimed as fact that the research for vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 did not involve tesing on animals, thus, PETA claimed, proving that animal testing in not just immoral but worthless. The claims were false: NIAID has stated that the mRNA-1273 vaccine has "shown promise in animal models." Moreover, as Forbes reported, NIAID investigators have conducted "preclinical immunogenicity testing of the mRNA-1273 in mouse models." Despite the refutations, PETA insists on its baseless claims. There are more examples of blatant disregard for reality and facts but those should suffice. It's a solid #4. -The Gnome (talk) 22:49, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

False negative(?) edit filter —> The Sun

Hi! I added The Sun to an article in my sandbox and got no warning; and when I pasted the article into Mainspace a vague warning that *some* link was deprecated (out of the 20+ I was using) but it didn’t tell me which one.

I’m hoping both these issues can be addressed with the filter. Gleeanon409 (talk) 19:42, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Specifically:
  1. can the deprecation warning filter be applied to Draft: space as well as mainspace? (This would catch a tremendous amount of use of deprecated sources early.)
  2. is it possible for the red notice to say which link it doesn't like? (This might be a bit more complicated, and shouldn't be regarded as a blocker on 1.)
- David Gerard (talk) 20:39, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
David Gerard you might get a better answer to this at Wikipedia:Edit filter noticeboard DES (talk)DESiegel Contribs 01:15, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Now might be a good time to plug Headbomb's "unreliable" script that automatically highlights unreliable and deprecated refs. JoelleJay (talk) 03:21, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
No response at Wikipedia:Edit filter noticeboard. Is there somewhere else that we should be asking? Gleeanon409 (talk) 14:53, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Gleeanon409, what filter number is it? I don't mind having a look. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:35, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
I’m not sure how I would find that out? @David Gerard:? Gleeanon409 (talk) 23:29, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
It's filter 869. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:38, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
@JzG:, any update? Gleeanon409 (talk) 10:13, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Gleeanon409, it's already applied to namespace 118, which is Draft. Guy (help! - typo?) 22:42, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for checking! Gleeanon409 (talk) 23:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikimapia

I often see new articles about minor hamlets citing wikimapia as a source, for example Sary-Kamysh. This is a user-generated map without excellent oversight. It was last discussed Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_126#Wikimapia in 2012. I think it should be clear that this is not a reliable source, so can we add it to the list? --Slashme (talk) 12:38, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Its a wiki, not an RS.Slatersteven (talk) 12:42, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, that's exactly my point. It should be added to the list of unreliable sources. --Slashme (talk) 19:55, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Slashme, certainly not reliable, I'd recommend an edit filter on this considering it's been cited in over 5000 articles per wikimapia.org HTTPS links HTTP links Tayi Arajakate Talk 00:31, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Website:favoritesroyales.canalblog.com/archives/2011/04/29/21008725.html

Is http://favoritesroyales.canalblog.com/archives/2011/04/29/21008725.html a reliable source? It appears to be a blog. Thoughts? --Kansas Bear (talk) 05:34, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

It is being used at Charles V of France. --Kansas Bear (talk) 05:37, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

No, it is absolutely not a reliable source. There is no information on the author, so no way to determine if he/she is a subject-matter expert (which is one of the few exceptions to the general prohibition on blogs). JoelleJay (talk) 21:24, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree with JoelleJay. There is nothing here that points at reliability one way or another--not the website, not the apparatus, not the writing, not the author (who dat?), not the editorial board (which? blog is run by the author). Drmies (talk) 15:25, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

The Sunday Guardian

The Sunday Guardian is an Indian newspaper founded by a ruling party politician and has been cited in over 500 articles per sunday-guardian.com HTTPS links HTTP links. The paper is rather tabloid-esque and has highly questionable practices; for instances they used the real names of people in a self designated "fake news" piece in relation to an ongoing criminal investigation (see 1 2, 3) Seeing as this has never been brought up on this noticeboard before, I was wondering what would be the community's take on how it should be used, if at all. Tayi Arajakate Talk 01:03, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Tayi Arajakate, links 2 and 3 are identical? (t · c) buidhe 01:31, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Buidhe, fixed that. Tayi Arajakate Talk 01:41, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

To me it looks reliable. You have only provided one case of an alleged fake news and it seems like more than that is needed to establish that this newspaper is a serial purveyor of fake news. And the political connections of the founder shouldn't be enough to automatically disqualify the newspaper from being used. Many media outlets in the WEST are founded by people with political connections. From what I have seen of their reporting, especially reporting on world news, their articles are incredibly well researched. Full of details that surpasses even the ones from Europe and English speaking countries. They have notable personalities writing there and sometimes interview leading experts from around the world to discuss various issues too. Fortliberty (talk) 20:55, 28 August 2020 (UTC) see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Waskerton

I'll Get Drive Thru

https://illgetdrivethru.com/about-ill-get-drive-thru/

[16], [17], [18], [19]

Is this a reliable source? It looks like a random blog to me, but I haven't heard of it before now. Darkknight2149 20:16, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Seems like a random blog to me too--run by one guy, on WordPress, explicitly a fan blog, etc. Drmies (talk) 21:32, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Tagging for comment: Shadowolfincubi Darkknight2149 01:45, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

I went ahead to contact the blogger himself who was kind to get back to me with a scan of the page from the book that he cited. I will cite it in the article. -- Shadowolfincubi (talk) 08:20, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

American Academy of Achievement

I just noticed some content in Michael Dell sourced to an interview hosted on the website of the Academy of Achievement, a/k/a American Academy of Achievement. Given that the purpose of this organization is to praise people, seems to me that no content from that website can be relied on for WP:NPOV, and indeed a lot of it is really WP:SPS. I also wonder how many other BLPs rely on this as a source. Thoughts? --Orange Mike | Talk 22:53, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

See achievement.org HTTPS links HTTP links for usage. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 23:02, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
796. Houston, I think we've got a problem. --Orange Mike | Talk 10:46, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
  • 100% crap. Most of these additions that I have tracked down in the past are obvious spammers. Guy (help! - typo?) 00:30, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Ham and High

Would like a take on whether the Ham and High (Hampstead and Highgate Express) can be considered reliable. It's part of the Archant group of local newspapers. I'd like to use it as a source for Marta Grigorieva. Would normally consider local papers reliable, but the two references I have found, From Kalashnikov to painter's palette: an artist at work and Artist Marta's work is the bee's knees for Robin Gibb read promotional to me. Both are essentially interviews. Thanks. Tacyarg (talk) 07:14, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Adding that insource gives 353 results. Tacyarg (talk) 07:16, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Tacyarg, yes, it's a very old and rather prestigious local newspaper. Guy (help! - typo?) 00:31, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

"Dubious" citations from an academic's book and article

Source is clearly reliable. Questions of WP:UNDUE are not the remit of this forum. Guy (help! - typo?) 00:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Thucydides411 disagrees with Zachary McLeod Hutchins, editor of Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, published by Dartmouth College Press, leading him to keep placing this "dubious" tag in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. This is all part of a larger, eh, dispute, and Thucydides has filled up most of the talk page with their rebuttals (essentially, he wants to leave out any connection to slavery, content supplied by Binksternet), but this is a small matter: Thucydides thinks that Hutchins is wrong. I maintain that this is not Thucydides's job to argue, at least not on Wikipedia.

And while we are here, they placed another "dubious" tag, in this edit: "Crèvecœur's responded to Dickinson's argument about the supposed oppression caused by British taxation and criticized the very trope, according to Zachary McLeod Hutchins: "An avaricious attorney and slave owner like Dickinson, Crèvecoeur suggests, supports oppressive systems far more unnatural and burdensome than imperial governance and the Stamp Act."" I maintain that the citation (Hutchins, Zachary McLeod (2015). "The Slave Narrative and the Stamp Act, or Letters from Two American Farmers in Pennsylvania". Early American Literature. 50 (3): 645–80.) is fine and the attribution proper. Thucydides claims this is a fringe view, but his evidence boils down to "others don't say this so it is fringe".

Thucydides thinks they know better than this scholar, who is a professor at Colorado State and has published an edited collection about the Stamp Act and an article in one of the foremost journals in the field. If this were fringe, reliable secondary sources should denounce it as such; Thucydides is not a reliable secondary source, and the tag is spurious. Their continued edit warring and talk page obstructionism is part of their regular MO, but that's for another day. If you've looked at that talk page, you know we can expect a wall of text; I am hoping that all you scholars and historians and academics can see through that. Drmies (talk) 15:09, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Thucydides thinks that Hutchins is wrong. I maintain that this is not Thucydides's job to argue, at least not on Wikipedia: This is the crux of it. If Hutchins is wrong, all Thucydides needs to do is comprehensively demolish Hutchins in academic sources and persuade relevant scholars to do so also. The Wikipedia will follow. But until that happens, we follow the extant literature, and by the way of these things, scholarship does not exist to parrot itself, and to expect every point to be made and interpreted the same way by every scholar is narrow and restrictive. However, that one scholar makes a point that is not subsequently rejected cannot be WP:FRINGE otherwise most of our humanities/arts-FAs would have to be delisted. ——Serial 15:27, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
If Hutchins' view is indeed mainstream, it should be easy to find other scholars who have written similar things. Crevecoeur and Dickinson's letters are not exactly obscure subjects, and there is a large body of literature on both. It's not too much to ask that some other source be brought in to show that Hutchins' characterization of Crevecoeur's letters - which is radically different from any other scholarly characterization I've been able to find - is more widely shared. Most of the material in the article Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania could easily be sourced to several different sources, but the claims about Crevecoeur appear to rest solely on one source that takes a different view from the rest of the literature. -Thucydides411 (talk) 22:35, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I am connected to this dispute, having introduced Hutchins to the article with this addition eight days ago. Of course I think Hutchins is a valid source, a university scholar published in a university press. Our friend Thucydides411 is not on any kind of firm footing in the attempt to remove Hutchins. I'm seeing WP:IDONTLIKEIT at play. Binksternet (talk) 15:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
What sources are being used to refute Hutchins? --Jayron32 15:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
None, Jayron32. It's kind of an argumentum ex silentio--Hutchins argues that Crevecoeur is criticizing Dickinson without mentioning him directly. Thucydides argues he is wrong, from two silences: a. other scholars haven't made that argument, and b. Crevecoeur doesn't mention Dickinson directly. No one else says that. BTW if you're interested in the matter, Hutchins's article in Early American Literature is quite a fascinating read. Drmies (talk) 15:38, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm mostly interested in people citing sources when they try to change Wikipedia text. But thanks for the offer. --Jayron32 16:03, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
This is not an accurate summary of the dispute, and I don't think RSN is the correct venue for this discussion. The question is not whether Early American Literature is a reputable journal. The question is whether or not Hutchins' interpretation of Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer is representative of the mainstream view. I think it's clear that it is not. To support this, I pointed out that the way that historians generally characterize Crevecoeur's subject is radically different from how Hutchins characterizes it. I was unable to find a single other academic source that characterizes Creveceour's Letters in a similar way to Hutchins (particularly Hutchins' claims about Crevecoeur's letters being a veiled tract on the Stamp Act, John Dickinson, and Parliament's rights to tax the colonies). I gave these four journal articles (the first four hits on Crevecoeur's Letters on JSTOR, so as not to cherry-pick) as examples: If Hutchins is representing the mainstream view, it should be possible to find some other academic who shares his interpretation of Crevecoeur's Letters. Yet the major themes that Hutchins sees in the letters - the Stamp Act and a veiled criticism of John Dickinson - are not mentioned in any of the above works. Drmies has written this concern off, simply stating that because Hutchins is a professor and Early American Literature is a reputable journal, I have no right to question inclusion of Hutchins' views in the article Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Drmies hasn't made any effort to show that Hutchins' views are shared by any other scholars, or that they deserve the weight that they're being given (Drmies has now inserted Hutchins' views into two different paragraphs of the article). "So and so is a professor" is not a sufficient response to the question of whether or not their views are being given undue weight and are representative of the mainstream academic view. -Thucydides411 (talk) 16:30, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Is there a reason this couldn't be solved by explicit attribution: Using Hutchin's name alongside the views expressed is his paper, and differing views expressed in other papers attributed to them? "According to Hutchins..." is a great way to indicate the source for the reader. --Jayron32 16:51, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
This still gives undue weight to Hutchins' views. The major problem is that Crevecoeur is only tangentially related to the subject of the article, which is John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Giving the full range of views on Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer would take up a lot of space, particularly in an article about an entirely different work. Such a weighing of different views on Crevecoeur's Letters would be appropriate in the article about Crevecoeur's Letters, but not in the article about Dickinson's Letters.
This gets to my general criticism of the additions that have been made over the past few days at Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. They significantly unbalance the article. Whereas quite major aspects of Dickinson's letters are only given only one or two sentences, there is suddenly a two-paragraph section about the Whig metaphor that tyranny = slavery, including not just one but two separate quotations from Hutchins' essay about Crevecoeur's Letters. This is wildly out of proportion to how most sources discuss Dickinson's Letters. For example, the Oxford History of the United States volume on the Revolution, by Robert Middlekauff, does not mention the use of the slavery trope in Dickinson's Letters at all. Of course, if you do a Google Books search for terms like "Dickinson slavery," you can find some works that mention the use of the trope, but that's not the way to establish due weight. It's cherry-picking. -Thucydides411 (talk) 17:19, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
You tagged as "dubious". You said their interpretation was fringe. You have no published scholarship that argues that Hutchins is publishing fringe. So yes, the question is whether the press and the journal are reliable: they obviously are, until you prove the opposite. And when you say "Crevecoeur is only tangentially related", you are clearly expressing your own opinion. None of the scholars you cite say that that is the case. It's you. Original research. Drmies (talk) 17:44, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
It's a very non-standard interpretation of Crevecoeur's letters. The specific claims you're trying to use Hutchins' article for, about Crevecoeur's letters being a veiled attack on Dickinson's views on the Stamp Act and Parliamentary authority to tax the colonies, is not made by any other scholars. Yes, I personally view these claims as far-fetched, given that Crevecoeur never mentions Dickinson, the Stamp Act or Parliamentary authority to tax, but my point is that you haven't shown that Hutchins' views are mainstream. If they are, it should be possible to find some other scholar that shares them. If your answer is then that Hutchins' views are so new that nobody has had time to publish similar views, then you're at least tacitly admitting that this is a new view being advanced by one scholar, and which is not reflective of mainstream scholarship on Crevecoeur's letters. You have to make the argument about why this material is WP:DUE in an article about Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, and how it is reflective of the mainstream scholarly view. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:12, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
That's just your opinion, and I am not convinced you have covered the full range of scholarship. No, I don't have to make any argument: the two editorial boards of the press and the journal (both of which very mainstream) have already done so. Drmies (talk) 19:22, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Our basic policies state that we should describe all significant viewpoints described in reliable sources. The viewpoint in question (expressed by Hutchins in Early American Literature) is significant and reliably sourced, and therefore should be described in the article. Of course we shouldn't present it as the only, or even dominant, interpretation, but I don't quite understand Thucydides's insistence on minimizing this material as "fringe". It's not even clear to me that the viewpoint in question is minoritarian, rather than simply modern—after all, American historiography has evolved over time away from simplistic veneration of the Founding Fathers toward a more critical and nuanced exploration of the contrast between their advocacy for individual human rights and their literal ownership of other humans. Thucydides also seems to argue for the exclusion of reliably-sourced content because he personally believes it to be wrong (e.g. [20], which is sort of antithetical to this site's basic policies and expectations. MastCell Talk 17:42, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
From WP:DUE: Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources. Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means articles should not give minority views or aspects as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views or widely supported aspects. Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all, except perhaps in a "see also" to an article about those specific views. (emphasis added). Not all views that have ever been published in a reputable literary journal merit inclusion, especially in a relatively short article such as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:17, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I think you're asserting that Hutchins's view is insignificant, or that of a "tiny minority". I don't agree. If Hutchins were publishing an alternate interpretation on his blog somewhere, that would be one thing. But his view is clearly part of mainstream historiographical discourse, published as it was in a reputable peer-reviewed journal in the field, and as such it seems reasonable to mention it. MastCell Talk 19:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Basically, Thuc edits as if he thinks his opinion is as important to our readers as the expert journalists and peer-reviewed sources we cite for our article content. I think his best bet would be to stop with the bludgeoning and get his insights published in respected journals. Then, eventually, there's a shot some of his views might end up as lasting content here. SPECIFICO talk 19:41, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I tend to agree that this isn't suitable for this venue; Hutchins is reliable, the real question is what weight to accord his views. Still, the discussion is here. The mainstream viewpoint is probably best represented by Dennis Moore, who in 1995 edited More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur. In his introduction Moore says this:

One of several immediate sources for models for Crèvecoeur's series of ostensibly epistolary essays would certainly have been the series of twelve "letters" that John Dickinson published in colonial newspapers in 1767 and 1768 and then collected...Not only is there the obvious model of epistolarity, which Crèvecoeur and his readers would have been aware of by way of Samuel Richardson's Pamela and its many imitators; Dickinson's text also provides the example of the ingenuous rural observer.

If Moore thought that Crèvecoeur was replying to Dickinson that was the time and place to say so. He doesn't. Moore also brought out a new edition of Crèvecoeur's writings in 2013, which received good reviews (see e.g. [21]). Now, Hutchins says this: ...the relationship between these two texts has remained concealed over the centuries for two reasons.... This is academic-speak for "I am advancing a new and novel interpretation." There's also this: Scholars produce new work on Crèvecoeurs Letters constantly, but little of this scholarship addresses the epistolary character of that text, and our failure to investigate the generic codes of these and other American letters has prevented us from seeing connections between Crèvecoeur and Dickinson that would have been obvious otherwise. In footnote 6, too long to quote in full here, explains that he's working from the Oxford edition of Crèvecoeur's letters and not Moore's 2013 edition (which he calls "excellent") because This essay emphasizes the epistolarity, unity, and structural integrity of Crèvecoeur's 1782 Letters, an emphasis best served by citing the Oxford edition.

Note also Tara Penry's chapter Contrast and Contradiction: The Emergent West in Crèvecoeur's Regional Theory in Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers, published in 2014. She has this to say: The “middle” provinces bound Crèvecoeur’s New York with the Quaker Pennsylvania that he so admired and also to the scene of the 1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which Dennis Moore believes was “certainly” an influence on Crèvecoeur’s own epistolary form and “ingenuous rural” voice.

I don't know that you can dismiss a scholarly viewpoint as "fringe" unless it's been explicitly attacked as such. Five years is long enough for such an article to make it into print. That said, Hutchins himself appears to take the position that this is a new interpretation not advanced by other scholars, including at least one scholar who has worked on Crèvecoeur for decades. Nothing wrong with that and that's how scholarship happens. However, if no one else working in early American history picks up the thread, then it's something of a dead end and a summary-style article might want to exclude such dead ends. Mackensen (talk) 23:06, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't think the article should state as a fact that it was hypocritical for Dickinson, as a slave-owner, to compare the Stamp Act to slavery. Just because that is the opinion of one expert does not make it a fact. TFD (talk) 23:41, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
That is not the point here, nor is your opinion on content relevant. Mackensen, it's not just an article--it's an article and a book that Hutchins published, and EEL is hardly a publication for cutting-edge stuff. I appreciate your contribution, which goes well beyond the RS discussion, though of course the talk page is a better place for it (God knows that talk page needs input from some new people), and I'll just say that I think a few sentences in that article based on Hutchins is not UNDUE--certainly not compared to the dozens of citations from a few other scholars. Drmies (talk) 13:23, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm in agreement with Mackensen, who makes very good points. It would have been better if this issue had been framed as a question of WP:UNDUE, that might have stopped the discussion going down some blind alleys.

In the abstract, if we have one scholar writing on a topic who argues position 'X' and nine scholars writing on a topic who never even mention 'X', then I don't think its reasonable to argue that 'X' is a significant viewpoint merely because it was published in a reputable journal. Being ignored by the rest of the scholarship is often a more damning rebuttal than spawning half a dozen articles explaining why 'X' is wrong.

Now, is any of that the case here? I'm not sure. Hutchins' article was published in 2015 and all the other sources referenced pre-date that. Is it the most recent scholarly publication about Dickinson or Crèvecoeur? If not, is his position discussed by subsequent scholarship? --RaiderAspect (talk) 04:48, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

RaiderAspect, the framing of the discussion isn't mine. Drmies (talk) 13:23, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't have the background to discuss the main issues here, just wanted to check whether people are familiar with databases for searching relevant scholarly literature (e.g., JSTOR, Google Scholar, America: History and Life, MUSE), in terms of finding newer academic works that cite Hutchins and/or are about Dickinson and Crèvecoeur. Google Scholar is open access; the other databases may be accessible through an editor's local public library or an academic library (e.g., if an editor is enrolled or has paid for access). For example, a Google Scholar search pulls up the following article as a recent one citing Hutchins: Gochberg, R. (2019). Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's "Curious Book" and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet. Early American Literature, 54(2), 445-476; but I don't have access to read it and see how Hutchins' article is discussed. -- FactOrOpinion (talk) 12:38, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
FactOrOpinion, I was working along these lines at Talk:Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania#Crevecoeur. I was able to check the reference in Gochberg. It cites Hutchins as an example of one of many ways of interpreting the letters (with others) but does not repeat nor discuss the Dickinson argument. Mackensen (talk) 12:56, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

INCORRECT PHOTO

SEE ELSEWHERE
See Talk:Jimmy Cleveland#INCORRECT PHOTOGRAPH; Also, Musicians wikiproject notified --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:24, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

First: That is not a photograph of Jimmy Cleveland. I know this because I have seen several pictures of him and I have his lp's. In addition, he was not a left-handed trombonist. Your picture could be one of Slide Hampton. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.18.34.253 (talk) 16:24, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints: Selva J. Raj on "Being Catholic the Tamil Way" in Uvari

I am trying to cite this book under the History section of Uvari but User:MrShortCircuit keeps removing it under the pretense that it is a "promotional book". User:MrShortCircuit has not acknowledged my requests for him to discuss the validity of the citation on the Talk:Uvari page or User_talk:MrShortCircuit. In fact, he has removed my direct notification to him on his user page to discuss the matter too.

The citation is a book.

Vernacular Catholicism, vernacular saints : Selva J. Raj on "Being Catholic the Tamil way". Raj, Selva J.,, Locklin, Reid B.,. Albany. ISBN 978-1-4384-6505-0. OCLC 956984843.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: others (link)

The paragraph being supported in the article is as such:

Legend has it that the crew of a Portuguese ship that sailed near Uvari in the seventeenth century contracted cholera. In an attempt to avert death, a carpenter aboard the ship carved an image of Saint Anthony. Soon after, the entire crew were restored to health. When the ship docked at Uvari, the sailors placed the statue inside a hut in the village. In the 1940s, the villagers built a church with the original statue of St. Anthony holding the infant Jesus in his hand. St Anthony is said to perform many miracles daily for the people who flock there with faith in his intercession, therefore the church was upgraded to a shrine. Uvari is visited by Hindus and Christians from all over South India.

I need clarification on how the book is considered promotional. The book is written and edited by academics specialized in theology and religious studies. Soggmeister (talk) 17:20, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

I fail to see how it is promotional, but i would suggest attribution.Slatersteven (talk) 17:24, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you. I will see what I can do to make the citation valid for the quoted section. Soggmeister (talk) 18:26, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Business Insider

Is Business Insider a reliable source for the following claim at China–United States trade war?

According to Capital Economics, China's economic growth has slowed as a result of the trade war, though overall the Chinese economy "has held up well", and China's share of global exports has increased.[1]

References

  1. ^ Khan, Yusuf (August 29, 2019). "China is blunting the blows of Trump's trade war and just grabbed an even bigger share of global exports".

Thanks for your input. —Granger (talk · contribs) 07:07, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

As a direct participant to the debate, I say no. It may be reliable, but it's not reliable enough. RSP makes it clear that there's no consensus over the reliability of Business Insider, so a second, (reliable) source is at the very least needed for the material given above. Flaughtin (talk) 07:57, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
@Mx. Granger: Business Insider's reliability isn't at question here, since there's no dispute that Capital Economics said these things (they linked Capital Economics' website which agrees with their summary). The question should be whether or not Capital Economics is a reliable secondary source. I would say based on my surface-level assessment of Binging them that they are, and the statements that China's economic growth has slowed and China's share of global exports increasing are likely true factual statements. That being said, this statement is also an opinion, as saying China's economic growth is slowing because of the trade war or that China's economy "has held up well" are both qualitative statements that are analyses of the facts. I think Capital Economics is a good source due weight wise for this opinion. Chess (talk) (please use {{ping|Chess}} on reply) 17:56, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
The author is a "reporting fellow" (https://www.businessinsider.com/author/yusuf-khan).
The article seems a warmed over press release providing nothing beyond a summary of what was released by Capital Economics. The author seems to specialize in such articles.
This seems reliable with the qualification it's coming from Capital Economics. It may not deserve any mention with such a poor source, but that's a POV issue. --Hipal/Ronz (talk) 16:59, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Journal of Young Pharmacists

According to Ayurveda, panchakarma are techniques to eliminate toxic elements from the body.[1]
Extended content

References

  1. ^ Ajanal, M; Nayak, S; Prasad, BS; Kadam, A (December 2013). "Adverse drug reaction and concepts of drug safety in Ayurveda: An overview". Journal of Young Pharmacists. 5 (4): 116–20. doi:10.1016/j.jyp.2013.10.001. PMC 3930110. PMID 24563588.

Related:

So my questions are:

  1. Is the Journal of Young Pharmacists a WP:MEDRS source?
  2. Is the Journal of Young Pharmacists a generally reliable source even if it fails MEDRS?
  3. Is the specific page linked above reliable for the specific claim listed above?

--Guy Macon (talk) 13:36, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

They're published under Phcog.net, which has several publications on Beall's list and was itself listed 2012–2015 (the citation in question was published in 2013). The plurality of the chief editor's publications are in this journal (which is a bad sign), with the majority of the rest in other Phcog.net journals and OA MedKnow affiliates (iffy status). It hits quite a few of the 13 characteristics of potential predatory journals identified in this article recommended by Harvard -- for example, their article processing fee for Indian authors is ridiculously low ($90 for the priciest submission) (characteristic #11: "The Article processing/publication charge is very low (e.g., < $150 USD)"). JoelleJay (talk) 19:26, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Based on JJ's information, I would say no, no and no. (t · c) buidhe 03:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
I agree with Buidhe --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 16:07, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
agree w/ above two editors--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:57, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Irrespective of the weaknesses of the currently cited source, I think the only change I'd make to the sentence is to say that they "are techniques meant to..." From a quick search, the sentence appears to be factually correct, in that Ayurveda understands the purpose of its panchakarma techniques as doing (altmed-style) detoxification. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
This is the "reliable sources noticeboard", not the "content disputes noticeboard". If the statement is not in a more reliable source, we cannot just say it is "true". (t · c) buidhe 02:17, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
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