Wikipedia talk:Breaking news sources

Mine disaster

Resolved

What happened to our article about that mine disaster when it was reported that there were survivors and there weren't? I forget when and where in the USA.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:01, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not actually familiar with that case, but it sounds like that might be another good example. --j⚛e decker^talk 00:05, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Sago_Mine_disaster#Miscommunication_and_wrong_reports Found it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 00:11, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try and incorporate it. It's nice to have an example like this that's not quite as recent, lest anyone think this wasn't a problem in "the good old days of Wikipedia." --j⚛e decker^talk 00:15, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, we probably couldn't have avoided that particular mistake, it was too widely reported. Still a good reminder of the stakes, though. --j⚛e decker^talk 00:17, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

It was a 10pm to 3am (local time) error, I think. We could request a 6-12 hour delay on talk pages before adding material. I doubt a policy change is worth the effort. Should we add that link to the talk page in the update section so the twitchy ones have something else to read for 6-12 hours?--Canoe1967 (talk) 00:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I doubt we'd be able to immediately get consensus on any specific rule. What I do think is that continuing, in example after example, to hammer out just how often we have problems like this might tip the judgment of editors at bit. I haven't traced down the original reports, but I found that we had misinformation for about three hours, I've included that span with more or less the appropriate diff. No matter what we do, we will make mistakes in both directions, I'm sure, but perhaps we can at least do a little better. --j⚛e decker^talk 00:45, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Have you seen The Paper? A fictional movie about a newspaper and accuracy versus deadline. Don't read the plot in our article or it will spoil the ending. Very good movie, but I would hate to mention it to others that haven't seen it and spoil the ending. We should add a note to keep it out of this essay for that reason.--Canoe1967 (talk) 01:17, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Nope, but it's on Netflix streaming, so it's on my instant queue now.  :) I'll check it out, thanks! Let me know if you have any thoughts to the addition I made to the essay, I really appreciate the extra example. --j⚛e decker^talk 02:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

You are very welcome. I will mark this section resolved.--Canoe1967 (talk) 02:48, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

More examples

First of all, I couldn't agree with this essay more, and I am sure there are many more examples. There would be even more examples, if Wikipedia had existed at the time of certain events. There is no doubt in my mind, for example, that if Wikipedia had existed on March 30, 1981, it would have reported, for some period of time, that James Brady had died, and that President Reagan had not been struck by a bullet. This was what was being reported by major news organizations. Much more recently (and this probably is a real example of Wikipedia reporting incorrect "breaking news", though I have not looked into the article history to see for certain), we have the Newtown shootings. When the news of that event first broke, I happened to be in my car, listening to an all-news station on the radio. The number of "facts" that I heard that later turned out to be incorrect is staggering. The wrong name of the shooter; the fact that there was a second shooter, and/or that the shooter's brother was on the school property; the fact that the shooter's mother had been one of the teachers killed at the school; conversely, the fact that both the mother and father had been killed at the shooter's home; and the fact that the mother and father had been killed in New Jersey before the shooter traveled to Connecticut -- which particularly caught my attention, since I was (and am) in New Jersey. I heard all of these "facts" in about a 20-minute span, and they were all wrong. I would be shocked if none of these "facts" made it onto Wikipedia for at least a few minutes. So, yes, special care is definitely needed in these situations. I am sure that today's Boston Marathon bombing (the event that led me to this essay) will turn out to be another example. Neutron (talk) 21:21, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I was at work at the ski hill in Jasper when we heard about 9/11 on our radios. I told the manager that they should fill the fuel tanks because the price would probably go up. He laughed and didn't, whined later, and followed my advice with more care after.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:39, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm sure it'd be possible to load this up with examples. In the long run, I'd rather keep it to 3-5 that "sell the message" as well as possible. And yeah, false reports are nothing new to the internet, they happen faster, and are debunked faster than they used to be, that's all--I'm sure that happened with the death of JFK for that matter. In a sense, the CNN arrest thing turned out to be another example today, but at least, probably, no one was hurt as a result of our mistake. *shrug* Thanks for the kind words, and feel free to share/edit/improve, etc. Thanks! --j⚛e decker^talk 00:17, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Promote Move?

IMHO, this is ready to be moved to WP: space as essay WP:Breaking news sources. Then it can have a snappy shortcut like WP:BNS (WP:BREAKING appropriately links to WP:Notability (events)#Breaking_news). Any objections? Joe? --Lexein (talk) 02:02, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Cool by me. And in particular the primary usage of this (a reminder when the serious Big News happens), is the sort of thing that would be well served by a shortcut. Thanks! (However, I'd probably look funny at attempts to promote it to guideline or more, per WP:KUDZU.) --j⚛e decker^talk 03:58, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

 Done, +WP:BNS, yay. --Lexein (talk) 04:09, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Yay! --j⚛e decker^talk 04:16, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Yay! x 2. Did you want to wikilink a coal mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia in its section? You also may wish to look at User:Canoe1967/Gun debates in article space that I walked away from because of all the hassles I was getting in over it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:32, 23 April 2013 (UTC)