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Perennial sources list
List of source ratings on Wikipedia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Reliable sources/Perennial sources (abbreviated as RSP or WP:RSP) is a community-maintained list on English Wikipedia that classifies sources by degrees of reliability.[1][2] The ratings, which are determined through public discussion and consensus, have received significant news coverage over the years.[3][4][5]
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RSP ratings are not meant to function as "pre-approved sources that can always be used without regard for the ordinary rules of editing", nor is RSP a "list of banned sources that can never be used or should be removed on sight".[2][4]
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Categorizations
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The Reliable sources/Perennial sources list buckets sources as being "generally reliable", defined as being "independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy"; "marginally reliable", defined as being usable only in "certain circumstances"; "generally unreliable", which "should normally not be used"; and "deprecated", which is "generally prohibited".[1][3] Deprecated sources are of questionable reliability[6] and include sources that are known for promoting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.[2] Separately, the list indicates when a source is "blacklisted" on Wikipedia due to "persistent abuse, usually in the form of embedded external links".[7]
Reliability discussions are held on the Reliable Sources Noticeboard public forum, where editors discuss how well a source complies with Wikipedia's guideline on reliable sources. Sometimes, debates are held within Wikipedia's Request for Comment (RfC) process.[3] The debates are public and archived, allowing people to see how a reliability assessment was reached.[5]
Examples
Sources considered generally reliable include news channels such as CNN, MSNBC[5] and Al Jazeera,[8] traditional newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,[4] The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times,[9] The Guardian and The Nation,[3] as well as Slate,[4] the Southern Poverty Law Center and Amnesty International.[8]
Sources under the "no consensus, unclear, or additional considerations apply" category include National Review, Jezebel and Salon.com. Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times is also included this category, with its entry stating, "given known practices of self-censorship and political meddling into coverage, news related to Singapore politics, particularly for contentious claims, should be taken with a grain of salt".[5] Sources that are considered generally unreliable include Rolling Stone on "politically and societally sensitive issues",[10] The Daily Wire,[5] the New York Post, the Jewish Virtual Library, NGO Monitor,[11] the Daily Kos, and BroadwayWorld.[2] Sites that incorporate user-generated content, including Amazon user reviews, Discogs, and TV Tropes, are also considered generally unreliable.[12][2]
Deprecated sources include Breitbart News and Infowars (which are also included on the spam blacklist),[13][5] Occupy Democrats, One America News Network, The Epoch Times, The Daily Caller, The Gateway Pundit, The Sun,[6] The Grayzone, Russian state media outlet RT[14] and Newsmax.[2] Other deprecated sources include Iranian and Venezuelan media outlets[6] and advocacy organizations that have taken overtly pro-Russia, pro-China or pro-Arab perspectives.[15] Blacklisted sources include the Hindu nationalist websites OpIndia, Swarajya and TFIPost,[16][17] as well as The Points Guy, ZoomInfo, Natural News[7] and the Heritage Foundation.[18]
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Notable ratings
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Daily Mail
In February 2017, pursuant to a formal community discussion, editors on the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a source in most cases.[19][13][6] Its use as a reference is now "generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist",[20][19][21] and it can no longer be used as proof of notability.[19] The Daily Mail can still be used as a source in an about-self fashion, when the Daily Mail itself is the subject of discussion.[22][4] Support for the ban centred on "the Daily Mail's reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication".[20][19][13] Some users opposed the decision, arguing that it is "actually reliable for some subjects" and "may have been more reliable historically."[23] The Daily Mail thus became the first deprecated source.[6]
Wikipedia's ban of the Daily Mail generated a significant amount of media attention, especially from the British media.[4] Though the Daily Mail strongly contested this decision by the community, Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales backed the community's choice, stating: "I think what [the Daily Mail has] done brilliantly in this ad funded world (is) they've mastered the art of click bait, they've mastered the art of hyped up headlines, they've also mastered the art of, I'm sad to say, of running stories that simply aren't true. And that's why Wikipedia decided not to accept them as a source anymore. It's very problematic, they get very upset when we say this, but it's just fact."[24] A February 2017 editorial in The Times commenting on the decision stated that "Newspapers make errors and have the responsibility to correct them. Wikipedia editors' fastidiousness, however, appears to reflect less a concern for accuracy than dislike of the Daily Mail's opinions."[25] Slate writer Will Oremus said the decision "should encourage more careful sourcing across Wikipedia while doubling as a richly deserved rebuke to a publication that represents some of the worst forces in online news."[23]
In 2018, the Wikipedia community upheld the Daily Mail's deprecation as a source.[4]
Fox News
As of 2022, thousands of articles on Wikipedia use Fox News as a source. Since 2010, Fox News has been the subject of numerous debates on Wikipedia regarding whether or not it can be used as a reliable source, with discussions running over hundreds of thousands of words in total and concerning the input of over a hundred editors. Many conversations have sought to establish or enforce a distinction between bias versus reliability, with the latter having more to do with fact-checking and accuracy, though some argued that a consistent amount of errors and retractions in reporting are normal conduct for even a reliable media outlet.[5]
In 2010, the Wikipedia community had its first major discussion on Fox News' reliability. The community decided that Fox News was politically biased, but generally reliable.[5]
In July 2020, the Wikipedia community announced that Fox News would no longer be considered "generally reliable" in its reporting of science and politics, and that it "should be used with caution to verify contentious claims" for those topics.[26][27] The decision was made due to Fox News downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as allegations of Fox News spreading misinformation about climate change and reporting on the false concept of "no-go zones" for non-Muslims in British cities. The decision did not affect Fox News' reliability on other topics.[27]
In 2022, the Wikipedia community announced that Fox News would now be considered "marginally reliable" in its reporting of science and politics, that Fox News cannot be used as a source for "exceptional claims", and that its reliability would be decided on an individual case-by-case basis for other scientific and political claims. The decision only applies to news articles on Fox News' website and does not apply to Fox News articles about topics that are not scientific or political.[5]
As of June 2024, Fox News is considered a generally unreliable source for its scientific and political coverage and its talk shows.[11][10]
The assessments do not apply to local affiliates owned by Fox.[5]
Red Ventures
In February 2023, Wikipedia editors downgraded the reliability rating of CNET, a technology website owned at the time by Red Ventures, to "generally unreliable" after it was revealed that CNET was publishing content generated by artificial intelligence. CNET's reliability rating is broken into three time periods: pre-October 2020 (generally reliable prior to the acquisition), October 2020–October 2022 (no consensus on reliability following the acquisition by Red Ventures, "leading to a deterioration in editorial standards") and November 2022–present (generally unreliable, after CNET began using AI "to rapidly generate articles riddled with factual inaccuracies and affiliate links").[28][29] The CNET incident resulted in editors expressing concern about the reliability of Red Ventures–owned websites, such as Bankrate and CreditCards.com, which also published AI-generated content around the same time.[29]
In 2024, following a discussion on the state of Red Ventures–owned tech website ZDNET, a discussion was initiated with regard to the reliability of all Red Ventures websites.[28] Red Ventures websites The Points Guy (TPG) and Healthline are on the spam blacklist, due to TPG having questionable relationships with credit card companies it covers and Healthline publishing misinformation.[28]
Anti-Defamation League
In April 2024, a discussion was initiated about the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League in three separate areas: one on the group's reliability on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; one on antisemitism more broadly and the third part on the advocacy group's hate symbols database.[3] The discussion engaged 120 editors over two months,[10] and included a wide range of perspectives, summarized by editors as "ranging from those who enthusiastically defended the ADL in all contexts, to those who viewed it as categorically unreliable".[3]
In June 2024, the discussion led to the ADL being downgraded to a "generally unreliable" source on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including "the intersection of antisemitism and the [Israeli–Palestinian] conflict, such as labeling pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic".[3][10] An English Wikipedia administrator who evaluated the community's consensus for this discussion said there was substantial evidence of the ADL acting as a "pro-Israeli advocacy group" that has published unretracted misinformation "to the point that it taints their reputation for accuracy and fact checking regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", as well as a "habit on the ADL's part of conflating criticism of the Israeli government's actions with antisemitism".[3] On the topic of antisemitism, the editors reached a consensus that "the ADL can roughly be taken as reliable on the topic of antisemitism when Israel and Zionism are not concerned". With regard to the organization's hate symbol database, editors determined that "the rough consensus here is that the database is reliable for the existence of a symbol and for straightforward facts about it, but not reliable for more complex details, such as symbols' history".[3] The RSP listing for the ADL was updated to state "that outside of the topic of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the ADL is a generally reliable source, including for topics related to hate groups and extremism in the U.S."[3][15]
The ADL condemned the downgrading of reliability, alleging it was part of a "campaign to delegitimize" the organization.[11] The decision was also criticized by over 40 Jewish organizations, including Jewish Federations of North America, B'nai B'rith International and HIAS.[30]
James Loeffler of Johns Hopkins University, a professor of modern Jewish history, commented that the English Wikipedia's decision was a "significant hit" to the credibility of the ADL. Dov Waxman, professor of Israel Studies, said that if "Wikipedia and other sources and the journalists start ignoring the ADL's data, it becomes a real issue for Jewish Americans who are understandably concerned about the rise of antisemitism".[11]
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Effects
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RSP affects whether sources are cited and how they are summarized in Wikipedia articles. According to political scientist Sverrir Steinsson, by classifying the reliability of news sources, "Wikipedia has accepted the use of contested labels and taken sides on contested subjects, ultimately producing a type of content that is distinctly anti-pseudoscience and anti–conspiracy theories, and which has the perception of a liberal bent in U.S. politics". This led to discontent and departures among the "Pro-Fringe camp" of Wikipedia editors, which Steinsson defined as "Editors who were more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism".[31][32]
A 2023 Association of Computing Machinery conference paper found that the median lifespan of a source citation on English Wikipedia decreased by over two-thirds after the source was designated as deprecated or blacklisted on RSP.[7]
Wikipedia editors who are pop culture fans have created lists of sources that are structured similarly to RSP but focus on specific topic areas, such as video games. These topic-focused lists are maintained by WikiProjects that evaluate sources using both Wikipedia's reliability guidelines and supplemental subject-related criteria created by the WikiProjects themselves. When a niche source that is designated as "reliable" in a topic-focused list receives sufficient attention, the source is added to RSP and listed alongside mainstream generalist sources.[12]
Reception
While the debates are public and archived, critics say it is not clear who the volunteer editors are and how they are vetted.[33]
In 2020, Omer Benjakob of Haaretz stated that with RSP, "Wikipedia offers greater transparency and a much better model for fighting disinformation than any social media platform has yet to do, simply by building a community of fact-checkers dedicated to keeping the site accurate". In 2019, the decision by editors to deprecate pro–Donald Trump outlets such as The Epoch Times, One America News Network, The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit led to the American right claiming that Wikipedia has a liberal bias.[6] In 2025, the list was criticized by American conservative group Media Research Center as a blacklist with a bias against conservative outlets.[9]
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References
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