[the_fall]

FWIW, this is a fairly common problem on Wikipedia in political articles, predating AI. I encourage you to give it a try and verify some citations. A lot of them turn out to be more or less bogus.

I'm not saying that AI isn't making it worse, but bad-faith editing is commonplace when it comes to hot-button topics.

[mjburgess]

Any articles where newspapers are the main source are basically just propaganda. An encyclopaedia should not be in the business of laundering yellow journalism into what is supposed to be a tertiary resource. If they banned this practice, that would immediately deal with this issue.

[mmooss]

A blanket dimsissal is a simple way to avoid dealing with complexity, here both in understanding the problem and forming solutions. Obviously not all newspapers are propaganda and at the same time not all can be trusted; not everything in the same newspaper or any other news source is of the same accuracy; nothing is completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy.

I think accepting that gets us to the starting line. Then we need to apply a lot of critical thought to sometimes difficult judgments.

IMHO quality newspapers do an excellent job - generally better than any other category of source on current affairs, but far from perfect. I remember a recent article for which they intervied over 100 people, got ahold of secret documents, read thousands of pages, consulted experts .... That's not a blog post or Twitter take, or even a HN comment :), but we still need to examine it critically to find the value and the flaws.

[abacadaba]

> Obviously not all newspapers are propaganda

citation needed

[tbossanova]

There is literally no source without bias. You just need to consider whether you think a sources biases are reasonable or not

[troyvit]

See you should work for a newspaper. You have the gumption.

[the_fall]

That's not what I'm saying. I mean citations that aren't citations: a "source" that doesn't discuss the topic at all or makes a different claim.

[snigsnog]

That is probably 95% of wikipedia articles. Their goal is to create a record of what journalists consider to be true.