In an effort to make the information provided on their website more credible, Wikipedia has decided to ban users from citing the Daily Mail as a source of information.
Now, contributors will no longer be able to cite the news website as a source for any sort of information.
The Daily Mail is one of UK’s biggest newspapers and its online readership far surpasses that of most other news websites worldwide.
The decision has been carried out after a group of Wikipedia editors voted to ban the website except under exceptional circumstances because the information provided on the website has been ‘generally unreliable’.
In a statement, Wikipedia justified the action by calling out “the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication.”
Further explaining the decision, the editors said that the daily mail shouldn’t be cited as a notable source for anything. They also said that the website had been removing the daily mail as a source from all existing articles and replacing them with more reliable sources wherever possible.
The decision initiated when an editor proposed a ban on the website earlier in January, and thus, triggered a debate over the credibility of the publication as a worthy information source. Since then, editors have been called forth to weigh in on the ban with arguments for and against it.
Some of the opponents of the ban weighed in by saying that there are numerous other unreliable sources, other than the Daily Mail, that are still allowed to be cited on the website. The maintained that the ban would be a result of a general dislike for the publication and an act of bias by the editors rather than an attempt to actually make sure that the sources cited on the website are reliable ones.
Interestingly enough, even though Wikipedia has decided to ban the Daily Mail for being an ‘unreliable’ source, the website still hasn’t said anything about banning state-backed news sources such as Russia Today and Fox News.
IMAGE: DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
