I found Molly White's video here really useful for helping me understand the Reliable Sources policy: https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/
> The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.
Love the use of the "we" word here. :) What is counted as a reliable source is voted on on one of Wikipedia's meta pages. So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost. And you can trivially game that using sock/meat puppetry. Notwithstanding, White's claimed policy heavily favors Western media giants such as The New York Times and The Washington Post which many editors know about. However, the actual information they publish are often much less accurate than what is published in specialized trade magazines or even activist blogs.
> So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost.
Those voters (with the exception if bad actors) are working on the basis of "factual circumstances", which they debate extensively before voting.
Yeah. Also, if a specific source is used a lot, it often gets put on a discussion where people vote on how reliable it is. If it's considered unreliable, the use of it will be banned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/P...