[whycome]

It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth. I’ve noticed a couple incidents recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more relevant sources being available.

[patates]

Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.

[csours]

More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....". It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....". Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and comprehensive, that is another matter.

Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.

A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.

Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.

[cogman10]

This is the important part of a media diet.

You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.

A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.

News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.

[hunterpayne]

I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.

So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.

I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.

[jacobr1]

Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.

[underlipton]

I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.

Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.

[BeetleB]

> Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story.

For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.

For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287

One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.

For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.

[rixed]

Match my experience as well. For every event I've been part of that's also been reported in the news, I've found the news wildly wrong. Not innacurate, wrong. And lately, on top of that I've also had the terrifying experience of wikipedia opting for the wrong reported news and dismissing several objections from people actually involved in the actual events.

The worse is that it's oftentime not even attributable to some malicious agenda, or gross incompetence of someone in particular. It's just how this industry functions.

Someone down the thread is asking "what's the alternative". The alternative is to admit that you are not informed beyond your immediate horrizon.

[BeetleB]

BTW, another HN submission demonstrating how inaccurate news articles can be:

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/i-have-no-facts-and-i-must-...

[Braxton1980]

They said usually. There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.

[BeetleB]

And I'm saying it's "usually" only for major stories that have continued coverage.

For the rest (which may be close to the majority), I'm saying "No".

> There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.

I've had insight in a number of unrelated events that were covered by journalists. Each time they get important details wrong.

There is an alternative. Don't trust the articles on these stories.

[Braxton1980]

What's the alternative that is reasonable?

Is trust binary?

I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives

[BeetleB]

> What's the alternative that is reasonable?

Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.

The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.

> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives

Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.

It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.

Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.

[lazide]

I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.

If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.

[Zarathruster]

On a related note, everyone should know about Gell-Mann amnesia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

[jacobr1]

That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.

[willdr]

Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.

While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).

[jowea]

I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent events. That's when you're going to get most editor interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.

Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...

[willdr]

Not every topic will be covered yet. While *The deadline is now* is an essay, *WP:NOTNEWS* is policy — and inherent in an encyclopedia.

[jowea]

Yeah WP:NOTNEWS is policy, and it starts with

> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.

There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine

And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.

[johannes1234321]

Wikipedia isn't aiming for an objective truth. That barely exists, but a common understanding. See this essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...

[Braxton1980]

What should they do instead? Any source can wrong.

If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.

[tchalla]

Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.

[hunterpayne]

I'm not sure that the media lately has been 100x times more accurate than a Ouija board, but I'm going to ignore that for now.

The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.

For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's

Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.

[tchalla]

Your personal opinions and conclusions aren’t facts, you cite the “basic metrics” from a reputable source and Wikipedia will accept it. It doesn’t have to be a news article. Many of examples that you gave don’t stand a cursory scrutiny of being “facts”. Wikipedia has multitude of information citing basics metrics about the world.

[hunterpayne]

The 3 facts I presented are all from well attested sources, either government GDP numbers (although the Euro exchange rate changes impacts the MS vs Germany comparison) or from solar PV makers themselves. That you want to use scare quotes for them is why this is a problem. We are far more certain about those 3 example facts that almost anything reported in the media. You can look up those numbers quite easily and find that they are correct.

Facts like these influence your life far more than most of the things reported by the media. Yet you still want to use scare quotes because they don't match your personal opinions that are largely informed by mostly irrelevant things reported about. That's the problem being described by the article. You still don't seem to understand that.

[BeetleB]

This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.

The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.

Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.

[Spooky23]

My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.

For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.

[stuffn]

> It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth.

Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.

[0xEF]

I don't know for certain, but I believe it's because newpapers (aka "The Press") are at risk of libel or slander charges if they don't get their facts straight. That may also be a US-centric thing, too, I am not sure. To put a pin on it, we want to believe that the possibility of punishment for misrepresenting facts imposes some level of accountability on a print publication.

Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.

I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.