This page is part of WikiProject Reliability, a collaborative effort to improve the reliability of Wikipedia articles. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ReliabilityWikipedia:WikiProject ReliabilityTemplate:WikiProject ReliabilityReliability
@Valjean: Completely removing MBFC categories is on the bucket list, though Ad Fontes doesn't really fulfill what we're still using MBFC for. The recent update was our first step to moving away from MBFC: the previous biased source icon, which was based on what MBFC classifies as being very far left or right, was removed in favor of the new advocacy + RSP icons (and what Ad Fontes would also be most useful for). The questionable and conspiracy/pseudoscience categorizations (excluding "mild" ratings) were left in, at least for now—while still subject to the same issues of course, I think they're a bit more grounded, and track numerous unreliable sources that are too uncommon and niche to appear in either RSP or MBC. Let me know if you know any other more reputable sources that could help out here.
I'm glad to see you have been thinking about this issue. Maybe just disable that part for now and see if that helps, even if there might still be a need for something. That something might get filled later with a better alternative than MBFC. Even just a step in the right direction would be good. -- Valjean (talk) 03:31, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
After looking into it some more, I've gone ahead and removed both MBFC categories. Most of the most commonly used sources recognized by MBFC are already marked with advocacy or RSP, and I've seen at least one case where a MBFC categorization influenced an action/discussion on Wikipedia, which is what we want to avoid. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs01:26, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
They seem to have 8 people. I did a big look at this because it was fun. And because I am trying to work out whether it's possible to give editors (especially newbies) a way of rating a page's truthiness. I live in Australia and am no way related to anyone that does not speak Strine
The difference in size in companies (see below where I rough counted and tried to exclude advisory boards) seems about countries covered, whether they are corporate, sell detailed information about news sources to advertising companies, whether it's a web protection tool or browser extension as well, and whether they are ranking individual journalists. They all seem to be disliked by the extremes, which is good. The critical articles mentioned on wikipedia are all linked via employment or publication to Poynter which has International Fact-Checking Network and journalism courses
NPR mentions this study which used a combination of Newsguard and Mediabiasfactcheck .
As much as I'm enthused at the idea of using the anarchist black flag to represent government, I think there are other versions of civic building icons that could fit here: (the same icon we use in maps). I think it's the long colonnades in the current version that most resemble the Internet Archive logo. czar21:46, 17 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Done Went ahead with Czar's suggested map icon. My main concern with the flag is that I don't think it's strongly correlated with government, and many may think of it as a source being "flagged" as problematic rather than simply a state-controlled source. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs06:16, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Valjean: Nice idea. One question is whether we want to limit it to TV programs, or just have an icon for all videos (including sites like YouTube). In terms of categorizing, looks like most news sites have a path or subdomain just for their video/TV content (bbc.co.uk/programmes/, cnn.com/videos/, video.foxnews.com, abc.com/shows, etc.), so matching most common TV programs by URL should be feasible. If we want to be inclusive of all videos, we can probably string match reliably on a few paths, such as /video/ and /videos/. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs05:22, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@SuperHamster Just wanted to pop this back on the agenda - Draft:Dave Oscillation is a good example of an article having references that at first glance, look 'legitimate' - because the BBC references show the reputable news agency symbol. In reality though, these are links to TV or radio programmes so should either be stripped out of the 'reputable news' tag, or given their own tag. Darren-Mtalk11:34, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Berrely: All have been added except for US Magazine - I'd like to look into this one a bit more, as I don't think it is as "gossipy" and unreliable as other publications. Thanks for the contributions! ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs01:29, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Citations to journal articles that link to PubMed are incorrectly marked as "state-owned media", presumably because PubMed has a .gov domain. For example:
Doneish, made a change so that any references using the cite journal template cannot be classified as government media, to prevent false positives like these. Might still get around to implementing an exclusions list for certain categories. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs06:19, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
But with citations like these, ResearchGate isn't actually the publisher, it's just being used to provide an open access link, which is specifically encouraged by WP:RSP.
The common thread in this and the problem with PubMed above is that the tool seems to only be considering the url parameter. Maybe for {{cite journal}} it should instead, or also, look at work? – Joe (talk) 15:37, 4 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A follow-up after many moons: As CiteUnseen doesn't currently distinguish by journal, I've removed ResearchGate, as I believe it being marked as generally unreliable is more confusing than helpful. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs06:43, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
According to WP:RSP, The Guardian is flagged as "generally reliable" (except for opinion pieces). However CiteUnseen marks it as "the status of this source depends on one or more..." as CiteUnseen already marks opinion pieces from The Guardian as opinion pieces, wouldn't it make more sent to mark The Guardian as reliable? — Berrely • Talk∕Contribs09:37, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
{{better source needed}} (and other tags regarding sources) usually go after the end of the reference tag, i.e. <ref>Something</ref>{{better source needed}}. This is also what the template documentation says. Not inside the tags, since this defeats the point of them by hiding them away in the citation... Easy fix, I'd hope. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 23:32, 1 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @RandomCanadian: Cite Unseen doesn't modify articles at all or provide any sort of editing automation, GenQuest is doing their own thing there. I'm guessing their mention of Cite Unseen is simply to say that they evaluated the source using Cite Unseen (albeit not accurately since Cite Unseen does not call the removed sources unreliable). ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs08:01, 2 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, SH! I'm wondering if it might be worth adding the self-publishers who pop up in a warning template, like Xlibris.[1] They get caught by Headbomb's, but not by CU, so anyone using only CU to scan an article's references won't see it. (I noticed because I have both installed.) —valereee (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@SuperHamster: Unionpedia is used more and more often as source on Wikipedia (and also wikidata). It is a wiki, and therefore should be categorized "Editable" by CiteUnseen. Often it causes circular references. Tomastvivlaren (talk) 20:49, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hello. I was wondering if it was possible to make links to the Charleston Daily Mail not flagged as deprecated. The news site source used to be dailymail .com, which is now the Daily Mail per this RSN discussion. As the Daily Mail is deprecated, any matching URLs are flagged even if they are by the Charleston Daily Mail. For example, please see You Get What You Give (album). Thanks! MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 00:55, 21 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@137a: Quite late, but I've added a bunch of your suggestions above, and have also introduced the new sponsored and satire categories. Great suggestions. I haven't trawled through the WikiProject sources lists you linked; that's still on the to-do. Thanks, ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs06:46, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
At User:Doug Weller/Archaeology and racism (going live today) it shows this journal [1] with a stop sign. I'm confused. I see I can still use it, but of course the stop sign is a bit unfortunate. I don't mind it for YouTube which I'm also using as a source but where I know there's no problem with the particular videos. Thanks. Doug Wellertalk14:58, 13 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Joe Roe and Doug Weller: I know this is a very late follow-up, but I've removed ResearchGate from CiteUnseen (it'll no longer be marked as generally unreliable). Until CiteUnseen has a way to distinguish journals, it sounds like marking it as generally unreliable is more confusing and inaccurate than it is helpful. Please let me know if this is change isn't desirable. Thanks, ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs06:48, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Doug Weller: I've also been thinking about letting users whitelist sources in their configurations e.g. ResearchGate could be marked unreliable by default, but if a user doesn't like that, they can turn off the marker for ResearchGate. That might be a better compromise. ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs14:39, 31 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Amigao: Thanks, glad you like the script! Radio Free Asia wasn't being tagged as generally reliable simply because Cite Unseen had fallen out of sync with WP:RSP. I've updated the script so you should now see Radio Free Asia (and many other sources) correctly tagged per WP:RSP. Please let me know if you spot any more discrepancies.
As for being tagged as advocacy: most of the advocacy domains list was actually generated from Wikipedia categories (e.g. I pulled articles under Category:Advocacy groups and similar, extracted their official external links, filtered out links that weren't being used as citations, and then did some manual filtering and checking). Given that RFA is a reputable news source, I think it's a bit of a gray area, but given its mission ("promoting democratic values and human rights") and the note at RSP about attributing its point of view and funding by the U.S. government, I think it's reasonable to keep it marked as an advocacy organization. Happy to consider arguments otherwise. Thanks, ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs07:11, 2 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like the script might not also be entirely in sync with everything listed as deprecated at WP:DEPS. Again, it's a very helpful script overall. Great work! Amigao (talk) 00:42, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Not all news sources under Category:Chinese Communist Party newspapers have been classified in CiteUnseen as state media/government but some have been. Would recommend that they all be classified as such. Thanks again for the fantastic and very useful script. Amigao (talk) 12:28, 2 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hello SuperHamster! Thank you for your hard work on CiteUnseen; it is a *very* useful script. I use it as a way to triage sources individually, not holistically, if that makes sense. Is there a way to disable the (useful for many people!) "Categorized References" banner? Best,HouseBlastertalk20:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@HouseBlaster: Thank you! Yes, I was about to add an opt-out flag, but just decided to make it opt-in, at least for now. You should no longer see the dashboard, unless you add cite_unseen_dashboard = true; to your CiteUnseen-Rules.js. Cheers, ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs20:20, 12 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, SuperHamster, and just a reminder that WP:DEPS might need another review for the purposes of updating the script as the list of deprecated sources has been through some important changes and additions in 2024. - Amigao (talk) 16:10, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many of the dark icons used in this script are not compatible with the new night mode being introduced. Making adjustments to make them compatible may be welcomed as it starts to become used. Cheers, Sdkbtalk17:08, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]