User:LuckyLouie/sandbox

"But reliable sources say..."

We're all familiar with over-the-top tabloid sensationalism such as "Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby" and "Elvis Alive On Mars". Of course, tabloid media isn't ever a reliable source for encyclopedic content. But even serious journalistic outlets recognized as WP:RS can contain subtly ironic coverage of fringe ideas, bizarre claims presented at face value in "News Of The Weird" sections, or articles written by "guest writers" who are fringe science advocates or paranormal enthusiasts. If content significantly departs from a source's normal editorial standards, it's worth taking a closer look to determine why, especially if such content is proposed to support encyclopedic statements of fact in Wikipedia articles.

Sensational claims are occasionally confined to regional sources. Let's say Freedonia's equivalent of The New York Times publishes reports that pigs have been proven to have the ability to fly. Even if a majority of otherwise sedate Freedonian media have reported these claims without comment, or concluded that spaceships from another planet, ghosts, psychics, cryptids, wizards, etc. were likely responsible, Wikipedia is still bound by WP:EXTRAORDINARY and WP:FRINGE. The national media of Freedonia is, after all, a minority opinion within the context of the larger world. The same applies to stories found in local newspapers and regional media. Extraordinary claims always require serious, widespread coverage in reliable sources.

Detecting it
We know that pressure to increase readership and revenue can influence even the most reliable and established sources. UFO topics are often sensationalized in media, and paranormal, supernatural, and other fringe topics typically get treated with some degree of hype, which can usually be identified by the following attributes:


 * Headline hype: for example, "US Has No Explanation for UFOs, Does Not Rule Out Aliens" was an actual New York Times story headline. However if you read the body of the story you find that there are a great number of explanations for UFOs, some more plausible than others, and naturally, no single explanation can cover every case. (But that would make a very dull headline wouldn't it?)
 * Dramatic presentation: emotionally immersive, chronological narrative of “the incident” or “the events” (often with ridiculously exact times, e.g. “at 12:47 PM…”) told from the claimants point of view. (Newspapers and book publishers know they need to grab the reader right from the start, and an immersive style can help do that.) Sometimes seemingly corroborating anecdotes from people unrelated to the claimant are featured.
 * Over-emphasis on anecdotal evidence: lengthy “eyewitness testimony” with lots of compelling detail. Often 2/3 of the article is devoted to this.
 * Conspiracy as a tantalizing option: official statements that contradict claimant narratives are subtly or overtly framed as “denials”, e.g. “the Freedonian government denies…”.
 * Token skepticism, sometimes omitted or rebutted: if experts offer alternative views, they are immediately followed by anecdotes from “eyewitnesses”, e.g. “I know what I saw”.
 * Open-ended conclusion: i.e. “nobody can know for sure what happened”. There are many variations of this closer, e.g.“…the only thing we can know for certain is that on (date) John Doe’s life changed forever”. Or, “….today, twenty one years after the incident, 69-year-old John Doe is still convinced he experienced something extraordinary that day in June”.

You can’t blame Wikipedia editors for following that same structure when summarizing what these sources say — we are taught that if something is WP:RS sourced then it must be given due weight. However that doesn’t mean we must be an echo chamber for sensationalism.

Example
This fictional example uses a news story about a UFO sighting, but it can be applied to most any story involving fringe claims like hauntings, psychic powers, time travel, etc.

Addressing it
Some editors might use the example story above to construct an "Events" or "Incident" section of the article where the extraordinary claims above are simply narrated in Wikipedia's voice. A more NPOV approach is to clearly distinguish claims from verifiable events. In other words, we can verify that John Doe made certain claims, but not that what he claims is what actually happened. The only verifiable events are that Doe showed up at the police station on a certain date with a certain story and the police responded with certain actions/conclusions. So the best approach is to construct a "Claims" section along these lines:

The idea is to report the essentials of who claimed what, report events where Doe interacted with authorities, and report authorities statements and actions concerning Doe's claims.

Conflicting statements and criticism
Sometimes sources will contain statements by authorities that critique or conflict with the claimant's story. Rather than have competing “he said/she said” sections, it's best to weave these into the same section containing the claims, for example:

Or:

This kind of treatment works best for short statements of the kind typically featured in news stories. If there are more in-depth critiques, or critiques from multiple sources, it may then be appropriate to cover these in a separate "Criticism" section.