3. Abolish source blacklists.

An anonymous “MrX” proposed a list of so-called perennial sources [a] just seven years ago, which determine which media sources may, and may not, be used in Wikipedia articles. The page is ideologically one-sided and essentially blacklists disfavored media outlets. Wikipedians now treat this list as strict—but unofficial—policy. This approach must be reversed. Wikipedia should once again explicitly permit citations even from sources that the page currently blacklists. Rather than outright banning entire sources that can contain valid and important information, Wikipedia articles should use them when relevant, while acknowledging how different groups assess them. Neutrality requires openness to many sources; such openness better supports readers in making up their own minds.

Note: The first four theses all concern different aspects of neutrality. This involves some repetition and expansion of analysis, because the issues involved are so central and important.

The Problem

In the early days of Wikipedia, we were not quite so uptight about sources. Directly quoting primary sources was quite acceptable, as long as one did not do so as part of an original analysis (i.e., one that would require peer review). Citing Fox News and Daily Mail was permitted, although the source would probably be named and any controversial opinions might be pointed out, if not obvious. Even citing blog posts could sometimes be appropriate. But in all such cases, the nature of the source was clearly documented and intelligently handled. Conservative and liberal news sources were often labeled as such. Self-edited “blogs” could be cited, if the author was worth citing, and the authorship had to be clear.

This common-sense approach to sourcing allowed Wikipedia to report a wide variety of opinions, making it possible to represent the full breadth and depth of thought found in the world.

But Wikipedia’s bizarre and arcane rules about sourcing have ruined this charming policy. The current rule set is, in short, an unbalanced overreaction, based on partisan ambitions and a certain narrative about the recent decline of the news media.

So, let me tell this narrative myself. It is a story about the impact of the internet on the way the news media is run, and it is the kind of story that Wikipedians generally tell themselves today. I will format the story as a quote, but only because I am not asserting this myself; I am only attempting to reconstruct the progressive media narrative. Here goes, then:

Once upon a time, there were Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. They became very popular by pioneering a novel “news talk” format. They were built around sharing mere opinion—right-wing opinion—mixed with news. They were frequently offensive and, worse, purveyors of misinformation. Matters grew worse from there. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in the wake of Limbaugh, other talk radio figures emerged. Then, as the profile of the internet rose, came the Drudge Report; ten years later came Breitbart and the Daily Caller. These spread misinformation further. They took the same sort of right-wing news-talk format and put it online, where it thrived. In the 2010s, social media began to dominate the news cycle, allowing consumers to bypass corporate gatekeepers. Thus, misinformation actually began to drown out legitimate news.
Against this, Wikipedia gradually took a stand. As the media landscape changed, Wikipedia’s rules for reliable sources sensibly adapted, by becoming more restrictive of those sources that mixed news and opinion and especially those that had a reputation for misinformation. There have been some who complained of bias in the restriction of sources, but mostly because of wrong-headed expectations of false balance.
Matters really changed, however, in 2016. Responsible and distinguished international organizations like the United Nations had begun to sound the alarm about misinformation. But their warnings had fallen on deaf ears. Donald Trump’s election and the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU, called “Brexit,” showed just how dire the problem was. That year, the gloves really came off. Because of just how egregious the misinformation had become, formerly staid, objective news sources had to do things they had never done before, such as saying that the president was lying, openly questioning the legitimacy of major political decisions on flagship news programs, and framing their reporting around moral urgency rather than detached observation. But still more sources of misinformation emerged or became radicalized.
The responsible volunteer editors at Wikipedia noticed these events with alarm, debating about sources of misinformation. [a] Finally, in 2017, they began tabulating a list of frequently discussed sources that could—and could not—be trusted. The page is now called the perennial sources list. [a] While sometimes mischaracterized as a “blacklist,” it was badly needed. Within a few years, it had been embraced by the Wikipedia community as a tool for responsible and consistent editing. Today, apart from far-right critics, of whom there are only a few remaining in the community, Wikipedia is celebrated for its fairness and remains cautiously optimistic about its ability to identify and eliminate misinformation.

This is their story, as they tell it to themselves. All I have to do is repeat it for you to see just how problematic it really is. It is just one possible perspective on how the media landscape changed. Let us consider the same events from a very different perspective, which is my own:

Many of my conservative and libertarian friends and I are old enough to remember the bad old days of three broadcast television networks and a univocal press; we heard only one side of the story routinely being told, or the Republican side being misrepresented, and the libertarian side—and other anti-Establishment views—being entirely ignored.
In 1996, Fox News was received as a novelty: a conservative alternative to all the other networks. In the years leading up to that, many conservatives had found Rush Limbaugh and the talk radio format to be a breath of fresh air. It was nice when new voices came along, people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. Still, the news media world was almost entirely dominated by Democratic editors.
Many of us who valued open debate were initially delighted that the internet was devoted to liberty. In the 1990s, we thought that feature was “baked in” and would never go away. It was no great surprise when Wikipedia launched with a genuinely neutral standpoint: that was to be expected. Nor were we surprised when Drudge, Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and others began to break new stories, though we did not take them very seriously.
Still, as the 2000s and 2010s progressed, we were increasingly disturbed at the growing increase of bias in the mainstream media. It began as MSNBC and CNN switched to Fox News-style opinion reporting—as if the left-wing narratives needed to be pushed even harder, even though they already dominated the media. Online, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox were launched as more openly biased leftist outlets. Social media and search engine algorithms also began to curate stories to favor left-wing and generally Establishment narratives. This slowly became noticeable—until it was entirely in-your-face.
At the same time, Wikipedia’s neutrality evaporated, being replaced by a pro-Establishment editorial stance. It now sounded like the New York Times and the BBC of that period.
It was still unexpected when, between 2013 and 2016, the left undertook a change that was utterly bizarre to old-guard free speech absolutists, both old-fashioned liberals and libertarians alike. International NGOs and major internet corporations (“Big Tech”)—now almost uniformly aligned with the left—began to signal their openness to censorship of what they found easy to dismiss as “misinformation.” In many cases, such “misinformation” was simply a disfavored opinion, or one critical of those in power. Then, during the 2016 presidential election and Brexit, the media landscape changed practically overnight. Most news outlets simply dropped all pretense of journalistic neutrality. It was breathtaking.
Soon, some huge stories were simply no longer being covered, not even by Fox News. This created a massive opening for reporters and podcasters on “new media.” In the years that followed, outlets like Breitbart, the Daily Wire, the Blaze, Epoch Times, BitChute, and Rumble grew aggressively, becoming a new vanguard of alternative media. Members of Fox switched to online production, including, most famously, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman soon became dominant in a way they had not been before. Social media influencers effectively promoted these sources. Soon they were serious competitors of the former gatekeepers of the mainstream news, which in turn was soon dismissed as “the legacy media.”
During the Trump and Biden administrations, it became obvious that Wikipedia’s once-vaunted neutrality was entirely gone. It imitated the now-partisan reporting of Establishment left news outlets. Larry Sanger took to calling himself “ex-founder” of Wikipedia and made a series [a] of three [a] posts [a] revealing how biased the encyclopedia had become. Among other things, Sanger revealed that there was now a highly partisan blacklist [a] that blocked the use of the more traditional conservative news sources as well as the new media. Wikipedia, once defined by neutrality, had enshrined the editorial biases of “legacy media” outlets by policy.¹

The first narrative, above, is associated with the Establishment left; the second is associated with the anti-Establishment right. The first can boast of institutional backing. The second can boast of faithfulness to Wikipedia’s original principles. The reason I tell both stories is to make it abundantly clear that the Establishment view is, indeed, only one story. Doubtless, matters look different still, if you are from Eastern Europe, India, China, or Russia.

Both stories mention this Wikipedia page: Reliable sources/Perennial sources. [a] It claims to be an “information page”—not official policy. It is de facto binding nonetheless, consisting of “a list of repeatedly discussed sources, collected and summarized for convenience.” The discussions mentioned here take place on Reliable sources/Noticeboard. [a] Wholly “deprecated” sources include, for example, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Epoch Times. “Generally unreliable” outlets include much of Fox News reporting and all of the New York Post and The Federalist—again, just as some examples.

By contrast, consider the dyed-in-the-wool progressive sources marked as “Generally reliable” and green-lit: The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, even far-left stalwarts like The Nation, Mother Jones, and GLAAD.

Wikipedians, both rank-and-file and top administrators, deny that this page is policy while treating it as exactly that. Consequently, this blacklist matters. In practice, it determines what can and cannot be cited on Wikipedia. This poses several obvious and enormous problems:

Facts are omitted. Legitimate stories and facts that are reported only by the sources listed in yellow, red, or grey will rarely appear on Wikipedia (or if they do, only to be dismissed). That this can occur is shown by any number of examples of stories broken in disfavored conservative and new media sources, which are only later admitted by mainstream sources. Such stories have included the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origin, censorship and coordination between government and Big Tech platforms, the issues with biological males competing in women’s sports, etc. Such stories have been, as a result, not covered, dismissed as “fringe” views, [a] or deferred for years. There is, by the way, a similar silencing on any academic theories (or details thereof) that appear only in primary [a] sources [a], which secondary sources have not discussed—regardless of how influential. In both types of cases, Wikipedia is dumbed down by policy.
Legitimate opinion is ignored. Conservative, libertarian, and generally non-Establishment opinion pieces, which can be important to cite as sources in any articles that touch on current socio-political issues, are generally dismissed as being from a deprecated or unreliable source. As a result, such opinion often simply does not exist, as far as Wikipedia goes. Similarly, opinion (that certainly does originate with a certain well-known commentator) is disallowed if it originates in a blog. [a]
Religious doctrines are essentially asserted to be false; leftist pieties are approved. Important religious sources, including Christian (such as CBN and World Christian Encyclopedia, published by Edinburgh University Press), Jewish (e.g., Jewish Virtual Library and much Anti-Defamation League content), and Hindu (e.g., OpIndia and Swarajya), are deprecated or blacklisted.
Alienates conservatives. The vast majority of conservatives working on political topics have, predictably, left Wikipedia in disgust, since they repeatedly have the experience that legitimate information simply cannot be shared in Wikipedia because it happens not to appear in a supposedly “reliable source.”

The fact, plain to every fair-minded observer, is that the “Perennial sources” list is deeply partisan. It favors left-wing media sources; it hamstrings right-wing and religious media sources.² There are similar issues with the restrictions on use of primary sources. Such policies make it impossible for the original reporting done in much of the new media, as well as new research done in academia, to be catalogued in Wikipedia. This includes some of the most vital reporting and relevant research done today. This is wrong, and it flies directly in the face of the neutrality policy [a] itself.

The Reasonable Solution

My proposal has three simple parts:

(1) Jettison the perennial sources [a] list, which is simply a censorious blacklist. Stop linking to it; stop relying on it. Move it to a subpage of its original author’s user page. [a] Compared to other of the nine theses, it might be easier to make this change, since the blacklist is comparatively new among Wikipedia policies.

(2) Permit sources to be cited much more broadly. In keeping with the original and genuine neutrality policy, do attribute controversial views to their owners or sources. Do not simply deprecate entire points of view because they do not appear in mainstream media sources or in secondary sources. It is cynical and simply wrong to use policy to silence dissent and suppress ideas.

(3) If you embrace the competing articles proposal of Thesis 2 (q.v.), then you might retain the perennial sources list, [a] but only within the “Status quo (GASP) framework” (see the table toward the bottom)—not for any other frameworks.

(4) After adopting these more open, tolerant, and inclusive policies, Wikipedians must set aside and completely rethink the conclusions they formerly reached on Reliable sources/Noticeboard, [a] many of which were likely reached without the full and real input from the greater global editor community at large.³

One of the Nine Theses on Wikipedia series

3. Abolish source blacklists.

The Problem

The Reasonable Solution

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Footnotes