lmao
One of the most accurate estimations it's made thus far though.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
170 points (94.7% liked)
BestOfLemmy
7135 readers
4 users here now
Manual curation of great Lemmy discussions and threads
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It hurt itself in its confusion
I see this as an absolute win
Next up just make the info glean-friendly
What does it say? I blocked that stupid bot ages ago.
They added a line to the bot that includes Wikipedia’s stance on a source. And Wikipedia doesn’t consider MBFC to be reliable, so the bot reports that.
If you scroll below that, MBFC rates themselves as maximally reliable, which I’m sure is based off of a rigorous and completely neutral assessment.
Edit: although, reading the links in question they don’t seem to correspond to what the bot is saying. Perhaps this is some sort of mistake in how it was coded.
It's not a mistake, just confusing UX. The text in question comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBFC
It doesn’t though. Or at least, I didn’t see anything resembling that on that page. If you can find it, let me know. It’s possible I missed it.
The text comes from this table.
Thanks, it seems to me like it should link here rather than to the main article.
sorry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MBFC. that's what i get for attempting type a link out on mobile
The post links both The Guardian and MBFC. The bot has picked up both links and posted the following (verbatim):
Media Bias/Fact Check - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Media Bias/Fact Check:
Wiki: unreliable - There is consensus that Media Bias/Fact Check is generally unreliable, as it is self-published. Editors have questioned the methodology of the site's ratings.
MBFC: Least Biased - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Very High - United States of America
The Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
Wiki: reliable - There is consensus that The Guardian is generally reliable. The Guardian's op-eds should be handled with WP:RSOPINION. Some editors believe The Guardian is biased or opinionated for politics. See also: The Guardian blogs.
Wiki: mixed - Most editors say that The Guardian blogs should be treated as newspaper blogs or opinion pieces due to reduced editorial oversight. Check the bottom of the article for a "blogposts" tag to determine whether the page is a blog post or a non-blog article. See also: The Guardian.
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Media Bias Fact Check | bot supportSearch topics on Ground.News
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/30/north-korea-troops-russia-kursk-ukraine-lloyd-austin
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
Interestingly enough, Wikipedia’s sourcing list counts Wikipedia as unreliable. It says you need to find information somewhere else so as not to create a self-referential loop. You have to justify it from a solid source that’s outside the system.
MBFC says that MBFC is incredibly reliable, and incidentally also tends to mark sources down if their biases don’t agree with MBFC’s existing biases, which are significant. It needs no outside sources, because it’s already reliable.
Good stuff.
Hahahah, so it's becoming self aware about how shit it is.
Personally, I'm just extremely irked that they refer to Wikipedia as "Wiki" when 1. that's not a proper noun 2. WP is right there
(don't swat my house with a slideshow, matt mullenweg, pretty please)
Sure, use something that already stands for WordPress.
context matters
Outstanding move
Where’s the critique coming from? The Wiki seems to have nothing but positive things to say. Might be an error. Ironic.
Scientific studies[23] using its ratings note that ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check show high agreement with an independent fact checking dataset from 2017,[8] with NewsGuard[9] and with BuzzFeed journalists.[10] When MBFC factualness ratings of ‘mostly factual’ or higher were compared to an independent fact checking dataset's ‘verified’ and ‘suspicious’ news sources, the two datasets showed “almost perfect” inter-rater reliability.
It’s from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Media_Bias/Fact_Check
There is consensus that Media Bias/Fact Check is generally unreliable, as it is self-published. Editors have questioned the methodology of the site's ratings.
I think the perennial sources list gets a lot more attention than the wiki page for MBFC itself, and probably the standards for judging it reliable are higher.
I read that. My best guess is that this is either an error that hasn’t been updated in light of empirical studies corroborating MBFC’s reliability, or more likely any self-published list gets the “unreliable” sticker automatically.
Also, making claims about “a consensus” without sourcing these claims is mighty suspicious. Disappointed.
They're saying the parts mbfc uses other data from is fine, like the fact checking matching others as they all use the same source. But the rest like bias can't be trusted as it's just their own unscientific methods.
They're not saying that. How did you summarize 23 words using 39 words, and get the summary wrong?
They're saying that there is no external professional vouching for MBFC's conclusions, which is their usual gold standard for things being "reliable." And that, on top of that, people within Wikipedia have specifically pointed out flaws with how MBFC does things, without any of the qualifications and categories that you added.
I'm trying to summarize the wiki reasoning/what's in the wiki page about mbfc criticisms
Got it, that does make sense. You should know, though, that Wikipedia on the content side is a different thing from Wikipedia on the talk page side.
People can have nice things to say about a source in their Wikipedia page about the source, on the content side, while there’s still a consensus on the talk page side that the source is unreliable and shouldn’t be used for sourcing claims about other matters on other Wikipedia pages. The big table that I and someone else linked to are good summaries of the consensus on the talk page side, which is what’s most relevant here.
A 2018 year-in-review and prospective on fact-checking from the Poynter Institute (which develops PolitiFact[27]) noted a proliferation of credibility score projects, including Media/Bias Fact Check, writing that "While these projects are, in theory, a good addition to the efforts combating misinformation, they have the potential to misfire," and stating that "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[6] Also in 2018, a writer in the Columbia Journalism Review described Media Bias/Fact Check as "an armchair media analysis"[28] and characterized their assessments as "subjective assessments [that] leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in".[29] A study published in Scientific Reports wrote: "While [Media Bias/Fact Check's] credibility is sometimes questioned, it has been regarded as accurate enough to be used as ground-truth for e.g. media bias classifiers, fake news studies, and automatic fact-checking systems."[19]
Yes! You have successfully found the content page. If only someone had kindly explained to you that there's a whole other side of Wikipedia which is more relevant to this discussion. It would have been nice for you to be able to have a whole patient explanation about how it all works.
Fuck off back to reddit
Yes! That is an extremely productive attitude when someone tries to explain to you how Wikipedia works, and then when you seem to miss the point, gets a little more pointed about it in hopes that you will pick it up and realize that you missed something, and learn a useful nugget of information relevant to our current discussion.
It seems you're happy with how much you already know, in life, because you are committed to not learning anything else beyond your present level of achievement. Congratulations! I hope this approach serves you well, and I look forward to seeing how much and how far you can get with it.
Treating others like a child and being a pedantic asshole will usually get you that response.
It's amazing how many words you use to also say nothing
Actually: I changed my mind. I'm going to give this a real response.
I didn't treat you like a child. I explained what was going on, and you seem to have a mentality where someone who's explaining something to you that you don't know is "treating you like a child" or "being a pedantic asshole."
That's entirely on you. Most people, once they reach adulthood, are able to listen to something even if they don't already know it, able to learn from the world. I was a little bit snarky talking to you initially, but then I felt bad when I realized you just didn't know how Wikipedia worked, and were operating on some bad assumptions, but what you were thinking made actually perfect logical sense. Go back and read my "Got it, that does make sense" message. I read your message, I got where you were coming from, and like I said, I realized you just didn't know something, and I tried to help you understand it.
You have to let go of that mentality where someone who's telling you something you didn't already know is offensive, and you have to try to seize the upper hand and try to explain something back to them, or decide they're being a jerk or something or it needs to be a hostile interaction. That's going to make it impossible for you to learn. It also makes a lot of interactions more stressful than they need to be.
I realize that this whole message is explaining more stuff to you, which you probably won't react well to. But like I said, that's on you. If you were willing to absorb this, it would help you.
Yes!
I said plenty, you just can't hear it. Oh well. I tried.
Tell me you have no idea how Wikipedia works, without telling me you have no idea.
You're putting trust in the stuff that doesn't mean very much, and "best guess"ing that the stuff that is dependable is not.