The Daily Mail has been all but banned from Wikipedia after its editors decried the British tabloid Wednesday as “generally unreliable” and advised against using it as a reference.
Wikipedia’s volunteer editors agreed by consensus that the Daily Mail should be “generally prohibited” as a reference on Wikipedia, “especially when other more reliable sources exist,” they said in a statement.
The Daily Mail “should not be used for determining notability, nor should it be used as a source in articles,” the editors said Wednesday. “An edit filter should be put in place going forward to warn editors attempting to use the Daily Mail as a reference.”
The decision to effectively label the outlet as illegitimate was spurred by a discussion started online last month by an editor who called the tabloid “trash, pure and simple.” Other contributors then spent weeks offering arguments “centred [sic] on the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication,” before deciding to ban the outlet as a reference except when unavoidable, they said Wednesday.
Wikipedia’s parent group, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, acknowledged the volunteer editor’s decision to censor the outlet in a statement of its own Wednesday.
“This means that the Daily Mail will generally not be referenced as a ’reliable source’ on English Wikipedia, and volunteer editors are encouraged to change existing citations to the Daily Mail to another source deemed reliable by the community. This is consistent with how Wikipedia editors evaluate and use media outlets in general — with common sense and caution,” the foundation said in a statement, according to The Guardian.
The editors’ decision “will affect some 12,000 links” Wikimedia U.K.’s Lucy Crompton-Reid told The Huffington Post, “but obviously they won’t be changed overnight.”
Taking action against the Daily Mail has been debated by Wikipedia’s editors in the past, and the tabloid’s reputation for publishing false and misleading articles is widely documented alongside its history for spurring libel suits and other litigation on account of its content. Reputation aside, the longstanding outlet remains one of the world’s most well-read websites, boasting upwards of 69.5 million unique visitors during November 2016, according to analytics firm comScore.
The Daily Mail did not immediately comment publicly on the editors’ action.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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