The Daily Mail ban

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by sashi » Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:18 pm

Thanks for digging into that sad Dubai love story, Crowsnest. I thought you might find it interesting. In Archive 11, an IP arrives -- announcing herself as the girl's mother -- with a coroner's report substantiating the story. Obviously grieving, she is met with... complete silence, both the first and second time she writes on the talk page. Her comments are just swept into the archive. I guess wikipediants are not generally known for their bedside manners... and one could argue that nobody wanted to get involved (and suggest she post the coroner's report onto commons as an image file -- the Everipedia solution).

Still, not even one friendly word of reply in more than two years.

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Mar 31, 2018 12:10 pm

Thanks also due to Sashi for also spotting this......

http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... 17#p217317

A Mail hating Guardian loving incompetent cannot tell the difference between "grossly incorrect" information about this guy's childhood and medical history, and merely stuff that is a few clicks away and sourceable to The Times. BLP extremism is great, arguably the safest approach for potential victims, but when the potentially damaging information has been in the article for years, you should be intelligent enough to assume that it is probably correct, and searching for a few minutes will help Wikipedia way more than hacking it out and waiting another ten years for some schmuck to notice and add it back.

And incompetence aside, I'm sure his political views and rabid Mail hatred played no part in removing basic biographical information on his marital history at the behest of an email request he now refuses to divulge even the nature of. It's just surely coincidental that details he has left in about his family history, are sourced to a glowing Guardian profile. Unsurprisingly, the source provided doesn't fully support that information (and how could it, given it was published a year before the parts that the previous sentence contained, now removed because it was sourced to the Mail). It's noteworthy that even before this screeching fuck arrived at the article, it didn't tell the whole story of his marital history (sourceable to The Independent).

Later excisisons today as he completed the Mail purge, look even worse, even more nakedly political. The relationship between Leitch and Blair is sufficiently curious to have even been mentioned by......The Guardian! The horror. Now the article makes no mention of Blair at all. Ridiculous.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/200 ... .planning1

The correlation between polticial bias, incompetence, and Mail hatred, in the average Wikipediot, is pretty fucking obvious.

Still, let's not be too mean. Let's just marvel at the improvements made.

Before......

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =832666031

After.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =833388851

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:47 pm

The monkey selfie issue being in the news again reminded me that on the talk page of that Wikipedia article is an absolutely classic example of Guy Macon pursuing his campaign of defamation, with zero relation to fact, but zero consequences from the Wikipedia administration.

The clear facts in that dispute are that either the entire media were sloppy in how they reported Slater's accounts, not clarifying his potentially ambiguous statements and/or delineating separate incidents, or Slater has indeed changed his story to bolster his claim of creativity by introducing the tripod element. To me, it seems like the press are at fault, but I recognise the neutral view here is that a reliable source supporting that does not yet exist, and likely never will unless or until the initial transcripts are released and they explicitly contradict the tripod version.

There is absolutely no proof, not one shred, that the Mail has been any worse than the other outlets of high repute, and certainly no proof of fabrication of quotes. Yet Macon is shrieking absolutely that, to all and sundry. Worse, he is even arguing that Techdirt, the outlet which co-opted Slater's work, are a reliable source to support the idea Slater changed his story, i.e. he is lying when he says the press were merely being careless, or worse.

This is all clear proof that Macon is absolutely unqualified to be making any claims at all about the reliability of the media, and it is him, not Mail journos, who are more likely to be the cause of Wikipedia doing harm to living people.

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Apr 16, 2018 11:17 am

Good piece in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, a comment by Michael Burleigh......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... aders.html

New Cold War? No, it's far more perilous than that

This is the bit that caught my eye.....
The reason the Russians find it easy to interfere in our democratic systems is that these have already been debased by the likes of Breitbart, Fox News, and the hysterical echo chamber of social media. Ignorance of history and of international affairs is pervasive.
Just another reminder of the disgusting smear job perpetrated by the Wikipedians. Nobody who has seen any of their screeching, would assume they could find anything like this in the paper.

The Wikipediots decrying the Mail as tabloid trash would probably have a fit it they read this profile of the author, written in 2008 in their favourite "reliable source", at least for British topics.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... ionprofile
If you bother to read what he has actually written, you find a liberal beating heart. Three of his recent Mail columns - in which he argues strongly against the west's use of torture, the Saudi monarchy, and threats to bomb Iran - wouldn't have been out of place in these pages. And alongside the polemic of Blood & Rage runs a finely nuanced argument that gets underneath the skin of accepted opinion.
There is simply no way to square the circle of the Wikipediot's smear job, a thinly disguised politically motivated attack, and the decision of people like this to walk away from academia in order to write columns for the Mail for a decade. Then answer, or course, is glimpsed in this paragraph......
Blood & Rage is far from the last word on terrorism, as Burleigh readily accepts, but he isn't that bothered. He'd much rather get his oar in with a first draft of history than tear into someone else's work. Not out of vanity, but because he has a low boredom threshold.

"I've always been much more interested in what I don't know rather than what I do," he smiles.
The Mail, perhaps more than any other current mass circulation British newspaper, takes this view of what a newspaper's job is. That is why the Wikiepdiots hate it. They believe this is their role. They can believe what they like, but their record speaks for itself. On that score, his Wikipedia biography, is, of course, completely shit.

It beggars belief the Mail has still yet to individually target Wikiepdiots for their smears in the courts or even to the WMF for their gross violations of BLP, for and on behalf of its contributors like this guy. All I can't think of as to why, is that they individually don't give two shits what the little jealous pricks think. Can anyone imagine this guy lowering himself to that?

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Apr 19, 2018 8:33 pm

CrowsNest wrote:Good piece in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, a comment by Michael Burleigh......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... aders.html
The Mail, perhaps more than any other current mass circulation British newspaper, takes this view of what a newspaper's job is. That is why the Wikiepdiots hate it. They believe this is their role. They can believe what they like, but their record speaks for itself. On that score, his Wikipedia biography, is, of course, completely shit.

In fact.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burleigh
Heavily "stepped upon" in 2015 by the ever-disgusting Beyond My Ken. Wait till he finds out Burleigh has been writing columns for the DM. This happy-face bio will start to turn dark. Originally created in 2007 by NBeale, who has done much good content work for Wikipedia. And his "reward" for it is still on his userpage:
A strange vendetta
For some bizzaire reason I appear to be the subject of a strange vendetta from SlimVirgin and Rjanag. In addition to creative wikilawyering and manifest untruths[2]to persuade editors to delete articles about me, they have now resorted to changing WP:AUTHOR to retrospectively legitimise their conculsions[3], and nominating articles I created for deletion[4]. What next, I wonder?

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Apr 20, 2018 10:26 am

ericbarbour wrote:Originally created in 2007 by NBeale, who has done much good content work for Wikipedia.
Interesting activity profile. One of the large influx of editors during peak Wikipedia, but after that, various periods of complete disinterest, sustained interest (but never reaching former peaks) and gnoming overwatch.

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipe ... nth-counts

One bizarre thing stands out - their only significant activity since 2011, was a period of sustained editing of Andrea Leadsom around the time she was standing for leadership of the Tory Party, in July 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK)_leadership_election,_2016

A few pertinent remarks for this thread are to be found in that period....
We should show the balance from Reliable Sources. And we should not quote headlines and esp. sub-headlines because they are NOT what the journalist wrote and are often highly misleading in relation to the (newspaper) article as a whole. NBeale (talk) 22:25, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree that the Mail is often biased and occasionally highly misleading, but it is (for better or worse) a very serious newspaper and is definitely a WP:RS NBeale (talk) 19:43, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
It isn't surprising that an editor with these sort of views can't seem to muster any sustained interest in Wikipedia anymore. The whole Daily Mail ban discussion was tainted by the sort of idiot who couldn't distinguish between a headline and article copy, couldn't fathom that tabloid (format) <> tabloid (reliability), couldn't distinguish between having a bias and being unreliable, and massively overplayed the significance of occasional errors (nor appreciate they might be misleading, without being false).

If you believed those retards, the Mail is merely a mouthpiece for anti-immigrant sentiment, moronic cheerleader for all things Brexit. Strange then, that one of the Mail stories NBeale was trying to use in that biography, was this......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... No-10.html

What an odd way to treat the person Nigel Farage endorsed as the best Brexit candidate for the Tory Leadership.

The Wikipedia biography for Leadsom now simply euphemistically refers to how concerns were raised in the "media" about her credentials and integrity. It must absolutely kill the Wikipediots to be continually reminded that the Mail isn't what they claim it is, that it does play a prominent role in the investigative journalism of the UK, breaking many an exclusive and carrying a ton of original interview material (which, as in this case, can then be used to expose people seeking high office) and that while they have a clear ideology, as seen in this case, they don't take the sort of approach Fox News would and simply deny reality or defend the indefensible when to do so conflicts with their political agenda.

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Sat May 19, 2018 1:45 am

So, an editor is asking the Reliable Sources noticeboard if they can use the following as a source, properly attributed as the thoughts of the author.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/art ... ather.html

Just take a look at what one of the Administrators has to say for himself, as he registers his "oppose"....

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... Daily_Mail

the Mail have probably scanned it for libel (or at least libel they can't afford to get away with) but nothing else
This is exact the sort of thing that the "ban" is based on. He doesn't offer up anything by way of evidence to remotely prove this assertion, which since it directly relates to the supposed competence and ethics of identifiable people who work in regulated professions, is actually a clear cut violation of Wikipedia's own ethics code designed to prevent defamation, WP:BLP. He could and should be blocked for it if he cannot immediately provide proof, but he is an Admin, so that would be like arresting a policeman. Unlikely, if not impossible. Certainly impossible for someone who registered a Wikipedia account for the sole purpose of filing a complaint about that comment.

And as any lawyer will tell you, saying "probably" doesn't cover his ass here at all, except ironically if you convince a judge this is simply the opinion of an uninformed idiot who nobody should or would believe. Which would normally be the case for an internet random, but since Wikipedia took the extraordinary step of actually singling out the Mail for a ban, and the world's media (the Mail's competition) reacted as if this had been an informed decision which should carry some weight. Maybe the opinion of the courts will be different, maybe they will take the likely impact of such statements more seriously from now on, and adjust their rulings and damages accordingly.
After "Enemies of the People" I would not touch the Daily Mail with a barge pole.
Relevance? Yet another comment made on Wikipedia that shows their distaste for the publication was driven by bias. They hate the politics of the publication, and so have punished it accordingly, using the only means they had at their disposal.
As Slatersteven suggests, why did the Mail think it was important to mention, but no other newspaper did?
Well, there's this little inconvenient fact that the Wikipedians seem to always forget - the Mail is a huge, market leading, award winning, newspaper, who got that big in part because they actively seek out exclusives. Obviously in this case the author was paid a lot of money to write her story in the paper. Contrary to the Wikipedians belief, even if it is news gold, you don't go wasting your own money to procure the exact same words, or independently research and verify it all, just so you can publish the same stuff days later. Typically it will be run on the same day in other titles, but attributed to the Mail. And so, according to their own stupid ban, it would still be inadmissible.

This is just yet more proof the people who voted to ban the Mail, didn't understand a thing about how the industry works, or really have any idea what they were losing. And they can't claim ignorance here either, enough people tried to point out the basics to them, explain what an exclusive was for example, they just didn't care.

If this request is approved, it shows the Wikipedians know they made a mistake and they know their Mail ban is unworkable, they just don't want to admit it. The ban wording is clear, the Mail absolutely cannot be used to source this author's words, not even with attribution. We are meant to assume the entire thing is a fabrication.

And if it is declined, it will show they are absolutely prepared to omit information from Wikipedia solely because of their political bias and their unwillingness to accept that it was not remotely true that anything the Mail prints, if it has encyclopedic value, will have been picked up elsewhere, and in a way that involves independent verification. This was a convenient fiction. It only becomes true if they themselves define somethings encyclopedic value by whether or not it only appears in the Mail. Which they happily do, of course. Because they're not writing an encyclopedia and they have no ethics.

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by Paul Bedson » Fri Jul 20, 2018 4:41 pm

I just don't get how about 50 editors out of a community of tens of thousands can decide for that community. It all sounds a bit Stalinist to me!
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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:46 pm

Paul Bedson wrote:I just don't get how about 50 editors out of a community of tens of thousands can decide for that community. It all sounds a bit Stalinist to me!
In a way, it was Salinist. The lies and half truths masquerading as proven/proveable fact, the politically motivated bullshittery and general thuggery committed against those who spoke out, even the offer from the Dictator to personally assist in the matter, once he spotted the angle which profited him personally.

Most of all, the sheer brass cheek it takes to declare your mighty officialdom, in its infinite wisdom, acting for and behalf of all world citizens, has banned a publication due to its supposed unreliability, while in actual reality, years later, with no less than 3,830 instances of "dailymail.co.uk" still present in the mainspace, the whole world can see what a total lie it all was.

More to the point, everyone outside the land of the cult, is allowed to call it what it is, while those tiny few within who dare to try and bring Western ideals of academic truth and objective reality to a supposedly evidence based discussion, are sent to the gulag, while the rest of the ignorant masses are told it is a done deal, a settled issue, and rather than looking into it, much less ask the basic question of why it is still only the Mail who have been subjected to this farce by the fat pigs in their filthy pigsty, they would be much better off if they just kept their noses to the grindstone doing their poinltess busywork out in the farmyard.

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Re: The Daily Mail ban

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Jul 23, 2018 3:13 pm

Look at this disgusting lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =846605215

Replaced Daily Mail w/ BBC per WP:DAILYMAIL: less shock! horror! but little change to story required.)
Read the two stories, side by side......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ement.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-13428382

Is there anything in the difference of those two stories that backs up this devious bitch's highly misleading justification for her edit? Where is this supposed "shock! horror!" in the Mail piece? And was the "little change" she made in the content, really because of any discrepancy in the different stories, or the lazy stupidity of a Wikipedian who failed to accurately convey the contents of the Mail story into their giant shit pile?

This is what the ban has been all about. Continual, repeated, and fucking in your face obvious, smears about the true content and editorial standards of the Mail, and how it stands up to supposedly more reliable sources. It is born of nothing but hatred of their political stance. They have been signed out, targetted, by lying scum like this.

The real takeaway here is that when she swapped a Daily Mail reference for a BBC one, she found no material difference in the factual information being conveyed, but chose to lie and make out like she had. In Wikipedia's version of the permanent record. And even though it wasn't remotely relevant to the specific case, she justified it with DAILYMAILRFC, a.k.a everything they write has to be assumed to be a total fabrication. She could have simply said, not WP:RS, while admitting she found no errors in the Mail source.

People who understand how the media works, would get why she didn't find any differences relevant to an encyclopedia, certainly for this particular instance. Mail hating Wikipediots, whether quite willingly or because they are morons, do not. They know jack shit about how the media works.

It isn't a coincidence that this same Mail hating editor, of ten years service and 42,000+ edits, is having to be told by a nOOb that in reality, most university bio pages are simply posted as they were submitted, with minor copyedits, so treating it as if it were reliable simply by virtue of that third party hosting, while the very same posted on a personal website is not, is nuts. Indeed, I think that is probably backed by a close reading of sourcing policy, and common sense. Mail haters are not known for either.

That is really no shock. It is rather horrific.

On a final note, what is this little factoid even doing in an encylopedia? If this doesn't qualify as trivial run of the mill news reporting, what does? Indeed, why do they even have this collection of news trivia as an actual article? Is there any actual evidence that the existence of pink cats as a genre of news, has been studied as an encyclopedic topic? I'm guessing not, hence it probably qualifies for immediate deletion, not manicuring by this freak. But you know how the minds of these Wikipediots work. Swiss cheese.

What tremendous service they are giving to the world. Any suggestion they all need to be dyed pink, so that we might isolate, neuter, maybe even drown them in sacks, is entirely a bad idea. I do not condone it.

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