Media Bias / Fact Check bot declares itself as unreliable
Media Bias / Fact Check bot declares itself as unreliable
North Korean troops wearing Russian uniforms and carrying Russian equipment are moving to the Russian region of Kursk, near Ukraine, according to the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, who described the deployment as a dangerous and destabilising development. Austin was speaking at a press conferen...
lmao
One of the most accurate estimations it's made thus far though.
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
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
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
I usually don't like it when people get too caught up in little details like this, but I actually agree with you in this case. Hmmm, maybe I'm getting old after all.
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.
In c/politics there was a vote to keep or get rid of the bot. Votes to get rid of it won!! Which I'm sure the mods are mad about--because they really realy like it! So it will be interesting to see if they actually follow thru and get rid of it.