A May 2023 RSN discussion about Healthline raises the question about whether Healthline should be deprecated as generally unreliable or blacklisted as fabrication and spam on many of its health-related article pages.

Healthline: [1]

Healthline is frequently used by novice editors to source medical, nutrition, and lifestyle content. Its name implies health expertise, and its author(s) or editors are identified as having "medically reviewed" articles, despite most having no medical expertise (BS or MS degrees in non-medical fields). Healthline commonly cites individual primary studies to extrapolate to an anti-disease effect or "health benefit", a term used in many of its articles on foods, phytochemicals, and supplements.

Previous RSN discussion: Feb 2022 goji berries

Examples of spam health misinformation are Healthline articles on coffee antioxidants ("Many of coffee’s positive health effects may be due to its impressive content of powerful antioxidants"), anti-disease effects of black tea, "proven health benefits" of ashwagandha, and "proven health benefits" of blueberries, among dozens of others. Search "antioxidant" on Healthline and browse any retrieved article for the extent of misinformation (where only vitamins A-C-E apply as antioxidants for the human diet).

Diffs on goji - this talk discussion on goji nutrition and health benefits; continued further here.

Numerous others under my history, here.

It may be justified to blacklist Healthline as a perpetual source of fabrication and spam. Similar to reputations in scientific publishing generally, blatant misinformation destroys confidence permanently in the rest of the source.

Seeing an edit containing a Healthline source is WP:REDFLAG for revising or reverting the edit. There are no circumstances where a Healthline source could not be MEDRS-sourced.

Healthline should be blacklisted. Zefr ( talk) 19:26, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

What's the evidence that Healthline is actually spam ("the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user", according to our article on the same subject), or even WP:REFSPAM ("a form of search engine optimization or promotion that typically involves the repeated insertion of a particular citation or reference in multiple articles by a single contributor. Often these are added not to verify article content, but rather to populate numerous articles with a particular citation")?

It sounds like the only thing happening here is that editors use a source that they believe is reliable, but that better informed editors disagree with them, not to mention the few especially strict MEDRS supporters such as yourself. That doesn't actually make it spam. It's a health news website. It shouldn't be used for any purpose that we wouldn't use a newspaper article for, but I've seen no evidence of it being eligible for inclusion in the MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. You could ask admins like Kuru or Ohnoitsjamie, but we don't normally add things just to keep people from complying with WP:SAYWHEREYOUREADIT.

P.S. Of course blueberries have "proven health benefits". One might wish for a Wikipedia editor to write something staid and obvious like "Blueberries, like basically all fruits and vegetables, contain Vitamin C, which is essential to human health" rather than something breathless about blueberries being uniquely near-magical, but it's still true that they have "proven health benefits", especially for anyone who doesn't fancy a case of scurvy. (Mmm, blueberry season is just starting here...). WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I always go to the medical topics I know best to check the source. For Tourette syndrome (FA Tourette syndrome), the following healthline statements are utterly wrong (not just subtly wrong) -- samples only:

• It is a syndrome that involves recurrent involuntary tics, which are repeated, involuntary physical movements and vocal outbursts. Vocal tics need not be outbursts at all; gulping is an example of a vocal tic. This information furthers a stereotype about TS.
• The symptoms include uncontrollable tics and spontaneous vocal outbursts. Ditto, plus see Tourette syndrome for how wrong the "uncontrollable" is.
• People diagnosed with Tourette syndrome often have both a motor tic and a vocal tic. No, they must have both for a TS diagnosis.
• Symptoms are generally most severe during your early teen years. Concocted from I don't know where ...

Stopped there. Moving on to Lewy bodies (FA dementia with Lewy bodies):

• Dementia with Lewy bodies, also known as Lewy body dementia, is caused by protein deposits in nerve cells. 1. Lewy body dementia and dementia with lewy bodies are not the same thing. 2. The cause of DLB is unknown.

So, again stopped there. Adding this to Zefr's examples, yes, this site is rubbish and should be blacklisted. We shouldn't have to run around removing potential rubbish added by unsuspecting or new editors. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 22:06, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

While I agree that it's not spam per se, there is a precedent for blacklisting poor sources that are frequently misued as references, NaturalNews being the first example to come to mind. Now NaturalNews is in a category of its own in terms of being complete rubbish. Healthline's own article suggests that there is mixed opinion as to it being a "good" source. I'm OK with blacklisting a link on the grounds of it being a frequently misused poor source, but on the conditions that (1) we have a strong consensus that it has no use in Wikipedia as a references and (2) the existing 500+ links are cleaned up prior to blacklisting. Neither of those conditions are currently met as far as I can see. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 22:23, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the Natural News discussion (not an RfC) resulted in adding to the spam blacklist. And Beetstra changed the spam-blacklist guideline to add "some sites which are persistently abused for shock effects, and some sites which have been added after independent consensus" after I had objected about adding ancient-origins.net. A more recent example is that my request to remove Breitbart from the spam blacklist (since spamming if it ever existed was stopped) was archived. Thus there are indeed precedents, and I regard them all as bad. Peter Gulutzan ( talk) 15:19, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

John's right about it being a big jump from nothing to deprecation or blacklisting, but another option is an AbuseFilter that says something like "Healthline.com is generally not a reliable source for medical information".

Another option would be to have a bot post individual messages ("I see you added <badsite> to [[Possibly medical article]]. This is generally considered a poor source for health-related content. Could you please replace it with a better source?") WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:47, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

it seems like overkill to jump immediately to deprecation or blacklisting. Why not start by clarifying on RSP that it is unreliable? I think we now have the necessary discussions and consensus for that. John M Baker ( talk) 23:22, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it technically qualifies until this RFC closes, but I've boldly added it as GUNREL for now. If anyone wants to amend or remove, feel free. As for an edit filter... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm not really sure. Alpha3031 ( t • c) 13:48, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, get rid of it.

Their articles are written almost entirely by random freelance writers with zero qualifications, and then "medically reviewed" by "medical advisors" who are very frequently quacks:

• This reiki [2] was written by a yoga teacher and "medically reviewed" by "doctor" with a PhD in psychology from for-profit online Walden University (their psych PhD program is unaccredited!). Her bio asserts she's a holistic nurse, professor (at Walden), reiki master, clinical hypnotherapist, and expert in "complementary and alternative therapies, autoimmune disease, stress and coping, and obstetrics". She was also the advisor for this pro-homeopathy article and this throat chakra article that starts out "Chakras play a role in the flow of energy in your body. Running from the base of your spine to the top of your head, the seven main chakras each correspond to specific nerve bundles and organs in your body."
• This pro-chiropractic article reviewed by a DPT (with degree from for-profit University of St Augustine) who has no publications and whose professional qualifications list is so weak he included CPR certification. The article cites case studies, Frontiers junk, and weak reviews in weak journals.
• This credulous piece on homeopathic arnica spends a lot of text uncritically summarizing its health claims and mechanism while minimizing the fact that there's no evidence it works ("however, more research is needed"). It was written by a dietitian and personal trainer and underwent expert review by another dietitian.
• What Are the 7 Chakras and How Can You Unblock Them?, written by someone with a master's in counseling and medically reviewed by a yoga instructor. JoelleJay ( talk) 23:57, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Based on your post, I went back to look at the Tourette syndrome healthline author, and what I found is really weird. She appears to be a legit neurologist, but that doesn't mean she knows anything about TS. But as an indication that there are deeper problems at healthline.com, here she wrote a mostly accurate article for healthgrades.com. At about the same time (2022). If she's capable of writing (generally) acceptable content about TS, what went wrong at healthline? Are they just paid to rubberstamp rubbish without really checking, or what the heck? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 01:12, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

The TS healthline author is actually a nurse practitioner; the article was just "reviewed" by a legit neurologist. JoelleJay ( talk) 06:16, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

I was just coming to correct that, and you beat me to it ... correct ... I was referring to the reviewer. In other words, she didn't even review. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 14:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes I would agree Healthline should be deprecated, or at least considered generally unreliable. I think I've probably been duped by the "medically reviewed articles" bit in the past, I bet I've added it somewhere I shouldn't have as a result, thinking it was high quality as an RS. But these examples and the general evidence above has convinced me we should not consider it reliable, as what they consider "medical expert" is clearly not what Wikipedia considers expertise. —  Shibbolethink ^{( ♔ ♕)} 15:25, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

• I think Healthline suffers from a problem with many health websites that see their audience wanting health-enhancing advice and not just health-fixing advice (compare with NHS). So they overstate the benefits and are overly credulous in much the same way as newspapers tend to be. Outside of that area, are they terrible? I know Sandy has VERY high standards for the topics she is concerned about, and many sources (including authors of reviews in professional journals) don't meet them. I had a look at their article on tuberous sclerosis and it is IMO absolutely fine. I had a look at epilepsy and didn't finish reading it but what I read seemed absolutely fine too. The language and style of the articles is heavily dumbed down. This has advantages (the general reader, wanting to add some sourced info on a disease, can at least understand the source) compared to what MEDRS might recommend (an -- often paywalled -- review using jargon and aimed at other neurologists). But when you start with dumbed-down source, it is difficult to raise the language level back up to more formal writing. But then that's not much different to the NHS website, and I wouldn't want to blacklist that.

Perhaps the best thing is to warn about its use for "wellness" topics. For general medical issues, it probably is ok, not ideal but not terrible. If someone wrote about "First aid for seizures" and cited Healthline, I don't think Wikipedia would be improved by an editor removing the source, removing the content or tagging the content as unreliably sourced. It would be fine, and a whole lot better than most people know about how to do first aid for seizures.

Btw, I get that blueberries are over sold as a superfood. But it isn't like someone is selling something harmful or just water or placebos. The claim above that they have "have meagre nutrient content" just just bunk. Of course fruit is mostly water, but these berries are packed with more of certain nutrients than other common berries and fruit that people eat as snacks or sides. We certainly want people/readers to eat them as part of a fruit & veg rich diet. Telling people their nutrient content is "meagre" is just as false as claiming they are "super" and more dangerous because the risk then is people think eat fruit-flavoured sweets or chocolate bars for their snack instead, telling themselves that blueberries are no better.

Another complaint. A "dietician" is a proper medical professional. Zefr's comment might make one think a GP or a cardiologist or a neurologist, being "properly medically qualified", might be better placed to talk about health effects of food. A dietician is absolutely the qualification one would want, and anyone who's dealt with a hospital dietician will know how professional and knowlegable they are. But like with anything, especially perhaps in the US, qualifications and learning can be put aside if one gets paid to write gushing articles about super foods. But I've been burnt by so called doctors writing on Wikipedia way beyond their area of expertise, to the point where what they write is nonsense and unintellible and they clearly don't understand the source text at all. So a "medical qualification" isn't a guarantee that someone is competent to write about all areas of medical knowledge. A cardiologist who once took a few lectures on epilepsy medications, aged nineteen and thirty years ago, is not imo an expert on epilepsy.

Lastly, wrt Healthline "cites individual primary studies". The rule against citing primary studies is a Wikipedia quirk because our editors are not assumed to have medical knowledge themselves. Applying that rule to other publications is wrong. The Lancet review that we might prefer to be used as a source also "cites individual primary studies", it just, hopefully, isn't so credulous and gushing. -- Colin° ^Talk 09:44, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Colin - addressing the nutrient content of blueberries, 1) compare the analysis of our blueberry article where the Daily Values (for a 100 gram amount) only of vitamin C, vitamin K, and manganese are at moderate levels vs. a more nutrient-rich plant food like spinach. The blueberry nutrient contents are meager.

2) Then read again the sensationalism of unproven anti-disease benefits for blueberries in the Healthline article, "medically reviewed" by a dietitian (not a medical expert). One needs no better example of fabrication and misinformation than this for deprecating/blacklisting Healthline, and there are dozens of Healthline articles with similarly deceitful anti-disease claims.

3) Note also that anti-disease effects of the Healthline article derive from primary research and leaps of interpretation from preliminary unconfirmed findings to a headline on disease prevention. That is WP:SYNTH.

4) on your comment, "For general medical issues, it probably is ok": find one WP medical article or statement where a Healthline source exists now, and where a better MEDRS source isn't readily available. This is where WP:MEDASSESS and WP:MEDORG sources are needed; reviewing them proves that Healthline has no place in any of these guidelines. Zefr ( talk) 14:37, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I hear you, Colin, but by allowing hosting of these marginal and sensationalized and inaccurate sources, we allow them to continue to exist (and in this case, they are doing nothing but paying professionals to rubberstamp rubbish). Wikipedia is big enough and important enough that we can be the factor that keeps them in business. If the student editors don't find these sources, they'll have to move on to real sources. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:33, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, readers would have no idea that we only consider Healthline "good enough" to cite for basic non-wellness things; what they would glean from a Healthline source being used in a medical article is that Healthline is an acceptable website for all medical information.

I also maintain there is a huge difference between a "medical professional" and a "medical expert", and another gulf between "expert" and "expert in the relevant field". A member of the American Society for Nutrition is what I would expect for the expert adviser on a medical nutrition article, not someone with a bachelor's in nutrition + internship (all that's required for an RD) or a master's. And I definitely would not want a dietitian who went anywhere near the Integrative and Functional Medicine scam. The blueberry article makes some egregious extrapolations from primary studies--like claiming a 4-week blueberry/apple juice regimen led to a 20% reduction in oxidative DNA damage when actually the study tested single-strand breaks induced by H2O2 tx in ex vivo lymphocytes collected after avoiding all antioxidant foods for 5 days and then again after the diet regimen (there was no separate control group), and the study itself states within the whole study population effects were modest and strongly biased by large inter-individual differences. Despite this, we did find a significant protection against H2O2-induced oxidative DNA damage. However, we also observed a significant increase in BPDE-DNA adducts induced ex vivo upon intervention.

Likewise, someone with a PsyD/PhD in psych is not qualified to be reviewing articles on TS written by a freelance writer, health reporter, and author with zero credentials. Predictably, there are several issues with the TS Healthline article, including the claim that There’s no known cure for TS, but most people can expect to have a normal lifespan. There is not enough longitudinal data to assert that "most" TSC patients will have a normal lifespan (certainly not without medical treatment! This source states Furthermore, although TSC patients are known to experience higher mortality than the general population, there are few reports on the death rate, standardized mortality ratio (SMR), and estimated life expectancy), and the article operates under the assumption that the patient is a child and will receive all necessary early interventions (as if universal healthcare is available everywhere). The writing suffers from the lack of sophistication expected of people with no training in biology, delivering such clumsy and ambiguous lines as Scientists have identified two genes called TSC1 and TSC2. These genes can cause TS, but having only one of these can result in the disease. Is this trying to say that a mutation in only one of the genes is needed for disease, or is it alluding to the fact that only one mutant allele of either gene is needed (autosomal dominant)?

There is legitimately no reason for Healthline to be used as a source anywhere when there are far better non-scammy sources available for every imaginable use-case. JoelleJay ( talk) 23:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Zefr compares blueberries with spinach and cites USDA raw data. The reason we don't allow editors to conduct original research is that they come up with misleading falsehoods based on their interpretation of primary sources, like "meagre" for the nutrient content of a healthy berry or do wrongheaded things like comparing a berry you eat as a snack with a leaf you typically eat in a cooked meal (compare instead with raspberry, strawberry or grapes if you want to consider an alternative). You cherry pick three nutrients out of dozens and compare 100g of each, when one might typically eat different weights of such things. If a source you wanted to attack did that, you'd use those mistakes against them. Later you accuse them of WP:SYNTH. Em, SYNTH is a Wikipedia only thing. Nobody outside of Wikipedia can ever commit that crime. They are allowed to do it. They might not be any good at it, but we let our sources do it, and if we didn't nobody would ever be able to draw conclusions.

You ask "find one WP medical article or statement where a Healthline source exists now, and where a better MEDRS source isn't readily available". That isn't how "reliable sources" or WP:V or even WP:MEDRS works. We have no rule anywhere on Wikipedia that editors can only ever use the best sources. Your opinion of "readily available" likely differs from most people and most potential editors. You might know to to use PubMed to find recent reviews that are freely available and to recognise decent journals from the predatory and dubious. Do you think many people using Pubmed to search for blueberry nutrition are going to pick the good stuff? Most people use Google, and that's what "readily available" means to them. And even assuming they find a good medical source, it may use jargon. Often it might just contain low-level information (like those USDA tables) that we absolutely can't just glance at and write things like "meagre" in our own words. In other words, those "MEDRS" sources are hard to find, hard to use and very easy to misuse. A source that tells it at a level our readers understand can have advantages for many editors wishing to write but as I said above, there can be problems with sources that lack depth.

Wrt picking holes in the TS article. These are minor flaws. Anyone here want me to review one of their Wikipedia articles and I can guarantee to find similar and write a whole paragraph about the flaws in one sentence. Again, that's not how we judge sources. For the record, I agree the two quoted sentences about the genes are wrong. It should say "A fault in one of these two genes can cause TS". (Essentially, you need both of these genes to be working to avoid TSC).

Wrt lifespan, its complex. The sentence you quote is essentially ok, and widely repeated in the literature ( The NHS says the same thing). It used to be thought everyone with TSC was badly affected and all had learning disability, epilepsy and skin manifestations. But that was only picking up people in hospital or institutions. Population studies show more have it and don't know until they have a child who gets it worse. The whole question of what percentage of people with TSC (in a population) have X, Y or Z symptoms is difficult to ascertain if you only really get studied if you present in hospital. So the extreme variability of the condition makes it hard to write one sentence about lifespan. This paper attempts to estimate and comes up with a lifespan from birth of 70 years. I don't know their statistical methods enough to know if they attempt to include people with TSC who didn't end up as TSC patients in their hospital. I don't know how they work that out for people dying age 70 then (2019) who would have been born in 1949 and faced a remarkably different medical outlook (no MRI, limited brain surgery capability, few epilepsy drugs, life in an institution). My mind boggles really about how you might work out how long someone diagnosed age 1, say, with TSC might live? You'd have to, for a start, assume there no more medical advances, which based on recent advances, seems both unlikely and unfairly pessimistic. They compare this to the US average of 79 using this source and it was indeed correct in 2019 but has fallen since to 76. This UK source shows how going back even to the 1980s shows a big drop, particularly for men. But what is "normal". You could put your statistical pedant's hat on, or you could say well I guess it means I will likely grow old. And, em, 70 is old.

But would a MEDRS sourced claim "The lifespan for people born with TSC in the US in 2019 is 70 years" be any more educationally helpful or better than what Healthline say in their whole section. Our reader thinks, "Wow, my child with TSC is going to live to be 70. That's not bad." But that's just not true though. If their heart tumour is too big, they'll die shortly after birth. They may develop a blockage in their brain ventricle that requires a shunt, and then that gets infected and they die. In early teenage they may get a tumour growing in the brain that needs removed and they die on the table. In their twenties, they might get sudden death in epilepsy. In their thirties, their blood-rich tumour on their kidney might suddenly burst and they bleed to death on the way to hospital. If female, in middle age they may well get LAM and may die horribly or get a lung transplant, with all the risks of that. Or they may be lucky and rich enough to get one of the newer $$$$ TSC-specific drugs like everolimus. And even if medically physically healthy, they are prone to neurological and psychological issues, with all the risks to health and self harm that involves. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another condition that comes with more "ways you might die, but might not".

Yes, Healthline is aimed at a US/Western audience who are encouraged to get the best healthcare and with that they might live a long life. The Healthline article has a section "What Is the Long-Term Outlook for People with Tuberous Sclerosis?" and does say "Because symptoms vary so greatly in each person, so does long-term outlook" but you didn't quote that bit, because it doesn't help the case against them. It doesn't differ, fundamentally, from the "Outlook" section in the NHS page.

So, apart from missing "A fault in one of " when they mention the genes, what's the problem. You claim the "The writing suffers from the lack of sophistication expected of people with no training in biology". Well, for a start it is aimed at a general audience. Please read some of the NHS pages and you'll find extremely unsophisticated writing, and deliberately so. But do you really think "training in biology" comes with a "writing medical/scientific articles for a lay audience" module? I've reviewed and read enough Wikipedia articles written by doctors to know that is no guarantee of quality writing (or even, seeming to understand what they are writing about, and not getting basic stuff like prevalence and incidence confused). Look, any one of us can rant and pick faults, and their Wellness material is definitely to be avoided, but I think in terms of Wikipedia's requirements for sources, for standard medical content, I'm not seeing a general problem that is sufficient for a blacklist. -- Colin° ^Talk 09:44, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I would appreciate it if you would address more specifically whichever editors you're calling "you" since I did not say many of the things you claim "I" (or any one person) said.

Drawing clinical generalizations from single studies is discouraged for all tertiary health information providers, not just wikipedia. Healthline purports to be a tertiary source, not a secondary review article or medical journalism outlet (but medical reporters guidelines also strongly emphasize citing secondary evidence-based reviews over primary case control studies), so it should be held to higher standards in how it justifies an intervention. Wikipedia editors who do not know how to find and recognize high-quality readily-available biomedical sources should not be editing biomedical information in the first place, but when they do then having a filter to flag bad sources of info prevents us from unintentionally endorsing those sources.

Wrt picking holes in the TS article. These are minor flaws. Anyone here want me to review one of their Wikipedia articles and I can guarantee to find similar and write a whole paragraph about the flaws in one sentence. Again, that's not how we judge sources. For the record, I agree the two quoted sentences about the genes are wrong. It should say "A fault in one of these two genes can cause TS". (Essentially, you need both of these genes to be working to avoid TSC).

Stating in the first paragraph of a tertiary health information source aimed at laypeople that "people with TSC can expect to have a normal lifespan" is bad. The NHS source is orders of magnitude better because it faithfully reflects the heterogeneity in lifespan and morbidity and presents a realistic picture of potential treatment burden all in the same section:

The outlook for people with tuberous sclerosis can vary considerably.
Some people have few symptoms and the condition has little effect on their life, while others – particularly those with a faulty TSC2 gene or obvious problems from an early age – can have severe and potentially life-threatening problems that require lifelong care.
Many people will have a normal lifespan, although a number of life-threatening complications can develop. These include a loss of kidney function, a serious lung infection called bronchopneumonia and a severe type of epileptic seizure called status epilepticus.
People with tuberous sclerosis may also have an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer, such as kidney cancer, but this is rare.

This is in contrast to the outlook section on HL which is the last section. And the study that found a lifespan of 70 wouldn't be a MEDRS source anyway as it's primary (and focused on LAM), so how a hypothetical editor would use it on wikipedia is irrelevant. (Oh, and please do review my contributions to stable theory ;)).

If the extent of the problems with Healthline was just the tendency to dumb down material on disease overview articles to the point of ambiguity I wouldn't advocate for its deprecation. Of course I don't believe training in biology corresponds to effective lay medical writing; what I do believe is that a source that claims to provide "medically reviewed" medical information should be held to a higher standard than "psychologist/nurse with zero research background/expertise in anything relevant to the topic reviewing the output of an unqualified freelance health writer". The big issue is wikipedia implicitly endorsing the site as a whole by citing it for mundane statements that could easily be sourced from higher-quality MEDRS by any competent editor. Even if it has some accurate unobjectionable content, HL still contains thousands of articles directly platforming, promoting, or at least failing to criticize CAM nonsense (like natural treatments for Lyme disease, this What are the bet homeopathic treatments for tinnitus? article with the summary Homeopathy for tinnitus is not considered the first line of treatment, and research is mixed on its effectiveness (no, research is NOT "mixed"), or this mind-bogglingly uncritical and falsely-balanced article that presents debates over the safety and efficacy of administering diluted rabid dog saliva to a child (or as its blindingly disinformative search result summary states A homeopathic physician in Canada used saliva from a dog with rabies to treat a boy who was having behavioral problems after contracting rabies himself) as merely a difference in opinion among experts (quoting homeopaths (of course referred to as doctors) and a virologist as if they're on equal footing)). If a news site was spouting this type of shit it would be blacklisted immediately, we should not have a lower standard for MEDRS. JoelleJay ( talk) 19:55, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I thought it was fairly obvious who I was talking to about blueberries and who about TSC. But sorry if it was confusing. You say "Healthline purports to be a tertiary source". Does it? I can't see that term anywhere on the site or on our Wikipedia article about them. WhatamIdoing can probably comment better on this matter, but in my understanding the PST source categorisation is down to what exactly the writer is doing in those sentences we might cite and not in what JoelleJay or any editor thinks they are. Our examples of what each of these three source categories tend to include are just examples and a given source may be primary for some things and secondary for others. That HealthLine is taking primary research science papers and writing about them when extolling the virtues of blueberries, say, makes them a secondary source for that particular set of facts (dubious or otherwise) and there's nothing you and I can do to say "No, you can't do that, because I say you are a tertiary source".

The "Hierarchy of Evidence" that the guidelines you link don't correspond with Wikipedia's WP:SYNTH or WP:OR or guidelines about generally avoiding primary sources. That there is a hierarchy of evidence quality should of course be considered by any health writer, but their concern is not PST but the accumulation of weight of evidence in a statistically valid way using a scientific method of analysis.

At the top of the pyramid are "Systematic reviews and meta-analyses". These only cover, I don't know, a small percent of medical knowledge. Essentially, does it work, what harm does it do, and maybe when should I use it or avoid it. A meta-analysis might tell you that everolimus shrinks kidney tumours in TSC but won't tell you what percentage of people with TSC get them, why they get them, what they look like on a path slide or ultrasound or MRI scan, what the guidelines are for monitoring them, what the surgical approach is for handling a bleed... A systematic review won't tell you, other than as an aside perhaps, about the two genes involved and how TSC2 is contiguous with PKD1 so some people have faults affecting both. For that kind of information, we need literature reviews, fact sheets, advanced textbooks, etc. And those aren't mentioned in your journalism guidance because they aren't sources of news for a journalist to write about.

In medical writing outside of Wikipedia, there are no banned sources. Nobody wagging WP:SYNTH at you. There is indeed a hierarchy of evidence just as I suppose journalists have their views on whether they are being told political porky pies or reliable facts by their sources. But the point is whether someone is any good at it. The difference between the BMJ's news features covering the latest research findings and HealthLine's news features covering the latest research findings is down to how good their are, their degree of professionalism, and whether and how their readers respond to that quality or lack. They might both cite the same studies/sources. -- Colin° ^Talk 09:20, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

So far, what I've learned from this discussion is that our articles on foods are missing information about serving sizes. A typical serving of blueberries weighs about three times as much as a typical serving of spinach. The 100-gram standardization lets you quickly compare berries against berries, but not berries against leafy greens. One serving of spinach has approximately the same amount of protein and many vitamins (but more fiber, some vitamins, and most minerals, except for Zinc and Phosphorus) as one serving of blueberries. For a healthy person (e.g., not on Coumarin, no iron-deficiency anemia), the real-world effect of eating some blueberries and eating some spinach is not very different. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:53, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed someone had replaced a Healthline source with a ClevelandClinic source. So I followed that and found them pushing a story What You Should Know About Sugar Alcohols. That article cited several research studies of quite varying quality and size. For example "But a recent study shows that one sugar alcohol, erythritol, may be much worse for your health than anyone realized. It found that erythritol is closely associated with an increased risk for “major adverse cardiovascular events,” including heart attack and stroke." I can't read the whole paper, but just the abstract made me nervous. The Science Media Centre tears it apart. Another Are Spray Tans Safe at the bottom cites this study. Guess where that study sits at the hierarchy of evidence pyramid? I assume some medical editors think that source is fine as it is a big non profit health organisation, rather than just some money making website.

Wrt the Tuberous Sclerosis claim about "most people can expect to have a normal lifespan" your arguments now seem to boil down to a complaint that the section that fully covers the "outlook", mentioning that the disease "vary so greatly in each person, so does long-term outlook", is the "last section" as though putting "outlook" last in the order of sections is a crime worthy of blacklist. And you complain about the one sentence summary of that section being in the lead section (or as you put it "first paragraph of" -- it isn't the first paragraph, but actually the sixth, the very end of the lead). I'm not quite sure how the practice of summarising the body in the lead is also a crime worthy of blacklist.

The point of the 70-year-lifespan source wasn't that I thought a wikipedian should directly cite it, just that there is some evidence that 70-years might be an average. I'll leave citing a secondary source for that fact as an exercise for the reader, not important to our argument. I'm merely saying that we could describe the lifespan of TS in many ways and doing so in one short sentence is unlikely to give a full picture, and could be criticised. But then that's why it pays to read down to the end of the article.

Heathline sure has a lot of problems. But I think editors commenting here need to be very careful that their complaints stack up (e.g. there really wasn't anything wrong with the "normal lifespan" claim, and that's repeated by reliable sources) or that they are being used fairly (e.g. Cleveland Clinic is doing exactly the same thing as Healthline and while it likely isn't as credulous about the latest wellness rubbish, it makes exactly the same journalistic mistakes when citing weak studies and making bold claims). The Cleveland Clinic doesn't even name the "medical professional" who wrote/reviewed the work, so you can't go google them to trash their credentials. -- Colin° ^Talk 13:36, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

The Cleveland Clinic is well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic and shouldn't be cited for these claims either. JoelleJay ( talk) 17:59, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic, as evidenced by the fact that they fired the guy? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

With all due respect, I do think JJ is right about that particular point (otherwise not wading into this entire back and forth). I think there's quite a few HQRSes whicsh support The Cleveland Clinic is well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic.

E.g. scholarly and otherwise HQRS mentions that Cleveland Clinic has a long history of promoting pseudoscienceMoreover, contrary to what is implied in the SIO's response, reiki and homeopathy are far from irrelevant to the practice of integrative oncology. Reiki, in particular, is offered to cancer patients in many academic medical centres (for example, the Cleveland Clinic)... ^[1]

• The Cleveland Clinic, ranked the 2nd best hospital in the United States by U.S. News and World Report in 2017,40 runs multiple CAM centres, including the Wellness Institute, Centre for Integrative Medicine, Centre for Personalized Healthcare, Centre for Functional Medicine, and a Chinese herbal therapy clinic.41 Some of its CAM centres have received significant criticism over the years for having leaders that hold non-evidence-based beliefs that can cause harm to patients. ^[2]
• Nevertheless, Reiki treatment, training, and education are now available at many esteemed hospitals in the United States, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. ^[3]

CC is not alone in this, of course. But the overall trend for well-regarded academic medical centers to promote pseudoscience is precisely why we don't prefer such lay-facing sources in WP:MEDRS, as both you and Colin are definitely aware! —  Shibbolethink ^{( ♔ ♕)} 18:19, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

The comment above that banning a source prevents us from unintentionally endorsing those sources makes me think the community might have a difference in fundamental values – a different concept of the point behind citing sources.

Given the way that citation metrics are used in career advancement decisions, I understand that some academics are trying to cite only papers that they think are "deserving" (e.g., you cite the paper that already cited the hoax, instead of the hoax paper itself, to avoid boosting the citation impact for the hoax), and in some fields, to promote what's sometimes called citation equity by choosing papers, when you have a choice between reasonably equal options, that aren't from people who are already well up the existing structures of power and privilege (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing/Events/April&May23#Citation equity & justice and https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/ask-dr-editor/diversity-in-citation-practices-auditing-your-list-of-references-contributes-to-better-science/ for a little more on this). This has some tangible academic benefits (e.g., if you're writing about fertility, why wouldn't you mention the existence of single mothers, or poor people, or gay people, or teenagers, or child marriage, or religious minorities, or racial minorities, or immigrants, or prisoners, or all the other subgroups? Could it be that you didn't think about that subgroup because that's not part of your own personal background? Maybe if you took an hour to deliberate look for, e.g., what the women of color in your field are writing, you might discover something that would enhance your own work) but also has some non-academic effects (e.g., the authors of the paper you cite might have a slightly higher chance of getting tenure).

In this sense, I think there may be, among scholars, a sense that to cite a paper is, at some level, to endorse it.

On wiki, though, I think that we have traditionally cited sources just because they're convenient. Citing any plausible source (assuming it says the same thing that you put in the article) proves that your contribution is not original research, because even if the source is wrong or unsuitable, you didn't make it up yourself. Our significant bias towards open access sources is driven by practical forces: those are the sources that most editors can actually read. Citing a source isn't endorsing the source; it's just completing a relatively unimportant item on a basic checklist and moving on. After all, "smoking cigarettes raises your risk of lung cancer" is 100% true and WP:Glossary#verifiable regardless of whether the sentence is followed by a good source, a bad source, or no source at all. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:42, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

What does any of this have to do with the reliability of Healthline.

Wikipedia deprecates use of publications that routinely provide false or misleading material, even if not every article they put out suffers those issues. HL has a clear history of promoting harmful medical quackery, which is about as bad as you can get source-wise, and offers zero unique coverage that would warrant a whitelist since its articles are written by unqualified freelancers whose subjective interpretations we definitely DON'T want. JoelleJay ( talk) 22:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

We may not want it to use it, but I object to claiming that Wikipedia is "endorsing" any source that we cite. We use sources, but we don't endorse them. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 02:23, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. We aren't endorsing a source by using it. We also are not defaming a source in a legal sense by calling it "unreliable for our purposes". We, as a community, are making no claims wrt whether such sources are useful for other purposes outside of Wikipedia.

I think, in a colloquial sense, one could say that a pass at RSN is the community "endorsing" the source's general use in Wikipedia. But not an endorsement in any other meaning of the word. —  Shibbolethink ^{( ♔ ♕)} 18:22, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

I support a blacklist of Healthline. Healthline (which as a Red Ventures company has sister sites Medical News Today, PsychCentral, and Healthgrades) is not reliable. First, many of their articles will reference articles from PubMed Central with the annotation "Highly respected database from the National Institutes of Health". This is misleading because a listing in PubMed or PubMed Central does not indicate that a paper is reliable.

Second, many articles are low quality and " teach the controversy" about pseudoscientific topics. For example, Healthline has a "medically reviewed article "What Is Qi Deficiency, and How Is It Treated?" about a condition that does not exist. There are other articles legitimizing the pseudoscientific concept of Qi like this one "5 Acupressure Points for Gas and Bloating"

Third, Healthline has commercial ties to a number of dubious companies, and refers people to buy their products, sometimes contrary to mainstream medical recommendations. See this one: The 10 Best Vitamin B Complex Supplements, A Dietitian's Picks or their prominent supplement section. Worse, they have run sponsored content like this one: 5 Reasons To Love Integrative Therapeutics or this Here’s How This Next-Generation Probiotic Strain Can Transform Your Gut. There are also commercial links to some dubious at-home testing companies like Everlywell. Some tests, even if technically valid, should not be run without a doctor recommendation and high pre-test probability.

Fourth, many articles seem to have been created for SEO and social media sharing purposes rather than for any legitimate purpose. See examples by searching the site for the word banana.

ScienceFlyer ( talk) 17:23, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

More on Red Ventures and its priorities: Healthline was purchased by Red Ventures in 2019. To the extent that Healthline may have been reliable prior to the change of management, it is clearly not reliable now. Red Ventures also owns Bankrate, The Points Guy, CNET, Medical News Today, PsychCentral, Lonely Planet, and Healthgrades. After Red Ventures purchased CNET, it was reported that CNET was creating AI-generated content and content that was favorable toward advertisers and affiliates. In a 2021 NY Times article, a former Red Ventures employee said the company is “all about profit maximization.” Further:

The company [Red Ventures] found itself in the publishing business almost by accident, and is now leading a shift in that industry toward what is sometimes called “intent-based media” — a term for specialist sites that attract people who are already looking to spend money in a particular area (travel, tech, health) and guide them to their purchases, while taking a cut.

It’s a step away from the traditional advertising business toward directly selling you stuff. Red Ventures, for instance, plans to steer readers of Healthline to doctors or drugs found on another site it recently acquired, HealthGrades, which rates and refers doctors. Red Ventures will take a healthy commission on each referral.
—  New York Times, 2021

ScienceFlyer ( talk) 22:31, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Compelling information that speaks to how we evaluate reliability. CNET is already red-listed at WP:RSP; it sounds like we should be looking at all of Red Ventures rather than just Healthline. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 13:26, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support blacklist. Healthline have been cranking out articles and videos supportive of cholesterol denialism and also publishing dangerous misinformation that saturated fat consumption is not a risk factor for heart disease. They have also published articles supporting alleged benefits of coconut oil which are based on weak evidence [3], the ketogenic diet [4], [5] etc. Not a reliable source for medical claims about health. Psychologist Guy ( talk) 21:51, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• Support deprecation and blacklist. Another Red Ventures-acquired content mill. Like CNET and so many other Red Ventures properties, chances are quite a lot of this is actually being created by AI now. :bloodofox: ( talk) 22:43, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
• Support deprecation and blacklist The risk from allowing this source that I see is that it easily hoodwinks unknowing people into trusting its "medical review" and believing it's a reliable source, when it clearly isn't. ( t · c) buidhe 00:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. During the discussion, I noticed User:Zefr, who proposed the blacklist, had replaced a HealthLine source with one from ClevelandClinic. When I accused the latter source of some of the editing approach that voters here had criticised HealthLine for, User:JoelleJay appeared to suggest that one should be binned too for being " well-known as a pseudoscience apologetic". Maybe we should ban the Lancet as well for being a well known promoter of fraudulent MMR research. I think the statement above "Wikipedia editors who do not know how to find and recognize high-quality readily-available biomedical sources should not be editing biomedical information in the first place" indicates what's going on here. Elitism. Well Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia anyone can edit. What we've got here is a willy waving game by experienced Wikipedians with access to the finest sources who would rather that the great unwashed weren't allowed to edit here and pollute their articles with citations to publications they wouldn't be seen dead reading. I mean, HealthLine and Cleveland are clearly aimed at the general reader, not "experts like us". Finding flaws in others writing is an easy game and but this forum isn't here to boost our egos that we are better than that lot over there. They're the competition and so it seems we mustn't be seen to endorse them.

If folk want a medical encyclopaedia where only experts are allowed to edit, try MDWiki. I don't think Wikipedia should just give editors a bigger hammer with which to hit other (new) editors who haven't reached their level of expertise in policy and enjoy their privileged access to sources. This is not what Wikipedia is about. It is here for anyone to edit, and we live with that. -- Colin° ^Talk 11:27, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the right analogy. Lancet and Cleveland Clinic are top-notch at what they do (or at least in other areas of what they do), and make occasional mistakes (as does the NEJM from my typical Jankovic example). Lancet corrected their mistake (the NEJM didn't, but I digress). They aren't reliant on Wikipedia or search engine optimization to push their visibility or reputation or to gain links or clients.

These sources like Red Ventures publications gain traction via links on Wikipedia.

Regarding your concerns of elitism, I don't have journal access unless I travel an hour one-way. These days, there is so much open access publishing, and so many books available at archive.org or via google book excerpts, that I'm not convinced that there is as big of a problem in finding good sources as there was ten years or so ago. Yes, several times a year, I have to ask people if they can email me a journal source, but that's usually because I'm trying to take existing content to a higher level of sourcing (as opposed to the average student or new or casual editor). If a new or casual or student editor is doing a major rewrite or content addition to sources like healthline, the sooner their efforts can be reoriented, the better for all; they learn better sourcing sooner, we don't have to clean up later. I realize (and am frequently reminded that) I'm not a "typical" editor, but then those that are apparently considered "typical" don't seem to stick around for the long haul anyway (eg, Special:Contributions/Sm999). SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 13:51, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I stand by my statement that editors who lack the competence to edit medical articles shouldn't be editing medical articles. Part of that competence is understanding MEDRS. With sooo many open access sources, plus the likes of scihub, we don't have any reason to permit poor-quality sources just because they might be the ones hypothetical new editors will use. There is a gigantic difference between "knowing how to use and find MEDRS" and "being a topic expert", so don't act like expecting the former is elitism.

Regarding Cleveland Clinic, several of its centers peddle alt med propaganda. [6] [7] JoelleJay ( talk) 21:13, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

You are not going to find a medical journal or website dealing with nutrition that is entirely devoid of fringe science or pseudoscience. At some time or another journals make mistakes and publish nonsense, it is all down to quantity (in this case how often they do it). The British Medical Journal has a good tract record but have published a minority of papers supportive of acupuncture and have an editor who promotes vaccine misinformation. This does not mean the journal is unreliable. Cleveland Clinic may have published an article supportive of functional medicine but this doesn't invalidate the website or the good work they do, just like The BMJ is not invalid because they published some stupid papers on acupuncture. 99% of the time they are not doing this. Healthline is different because they are promoting fringe science, pseudoscience and nonsense about nutrition pretty much all of the time, similar to Frontiers Media. I don't think we should compare Healthline to the Lancet, BMJ or Cleveland Clinic. Psychologist Guy ( talk) 01:49, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

I didn't compare HL to any journals. I'm just saying the Cleveland Clinic panders to alt med junk with its functional medicine centers and therefore is not a good source for anything touching on the fringe stuff it offers. JoelleJay ( talk) 17:53, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Sandy, the accusation of elitism was specifically at JoelleJay who quite explicitly stated that until editors reach their standard they should not edit at all. That isn't how Wikipedia works. Look, I get it that Healthline is awful for wellness stuff. But I also get that someone adds to our article what the symptoms excess sweating are or whether a drug is legal in the US or some other non-wellness fact, and currently they are having their edits removed or their source removed (making the claim unsourced) with a notice about "Healthline SPAM" which is a bad-faith accusation. When this proposal passes, as it seems to be, presumably they'll be unable to press the Save button or something like that. So, totally unable to edit Wikipedia with a non-contentious fact.

Did this edit improve Wikipedia? The article was unsourced entirely. The citation to Healthline was added six years ago by an editor who is a general practitioner and it appears a highly experienced Wikipedian (on multiple projects). We now again have an article that is entirely unsourced. I clicked on the source that was removed. It has a fantastic 3D diagram of the muscle in the neck that you can rotate about. Are their pages (they appear to have many) on the "Human Body" unreliable. I suspect not. Are their pages on general human body processes and diseases and disorders unreliable. I reckon generally they are not. But we are now going to prevent new editors from improving Wikipedia until they've achieved expert MEDRS status.

When I started on Wikipedia, I was translating a patient information leaflet that was in French into English (with Google Translate) and adding information about a drug that wasn't available anywhere in English. I made lots of mistakes about sourcing. It took me a while to realise you needed to read the whole paper and which kind of paper we wanted. I don't think I'm alone in having that kind of editing path. But the attitude of some here is to attack the newbies for not being perfect. In the fight against wellness nonsense and alternative crap, we end up making this the encyclopaedia only experienced exiting editors can edit, and the encyclopaedia with entirely unsourced random stuff. WP:MED went bad when it forgot to allow people to be imperfect. When having a list (as Zefr has linked to above) with which to go around removing good faith contributions and accusing others of adding "SPAM" to Wikipedia. Remove the wellness shit because it is shit, not because you are concerned with SEO.

Wrt open access, those editors with easy access to paid journals continue to have a huge advantage. But elitism is not just about access. It is about drawing up the ladder once you've made it. About denying a new editor base a chance to get on board. WP:MED went really bad in that regard, praising editors who spent all day bashing newbies. I don't want that mentality to return. Sure, we have a battle against misinformation and promotions of nonsense, but we also have a project that simply does not have enough editors to write and maintain what we have built. -- 09:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC) Colin° ^Talk 09:52, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Look, I get it that Healthline is awful for wellness stuff. But I also get that someone adds to our article what the symptoms excess sweating are or whether a drug is legal in the US or some other non-wellness fact, and currently they are having their edits removed or their source removed (making the claim unsourced) with a notice about "Healthline SPAM" which is a bad-faith accusation.
@ Colin, it seems to me this is a good argument for classifying Healthline as "Option 2" or "Option 3", but not blacklisting it. Particularly "additional considerations" option 2. Since it could still be useful for uncontroversial health claims outside of the wellness sphere. And, most of all, that it's use as a MEDRS has a lot more to do with the credentials and reputation of the author rather than HealthLine. Fair? —  Shibbolethink ^{( ♔ ♕)} 18:24, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Pretty much all articles on HL are written by freelancers with no expertise in medicine or science at all, let alone the specific subject. Each article is supposedly "medically reviewed", but the HL network of "experts" includes acupuncturists; people with degrees from Bastyr, Walden, Saba, Capella, etc; personal trainers; NPs; physician assistants; RDs; RNs; "holistic nurses"; social workers; yoga teachers; and plenty of people with real doctorates who nevertheless also promote quackery. JoelleJay ( talk) 02:19, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Restricting usage of an, at best, low-quality lay-source is not gatekeeping wikipedia editing, come on. No one has to be a MEDRS expert to find alternative sources for the very basic information someone would be using HL to cite. The "spam blacklist" explicitly encompasses links that were never spammed (some sites which have been added after independent consensus), so a notice saying

Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist or Wikimedia's global blacklist. [...] Blacklisting indicates past problems with the link, so any requests should clearly demonstrate how inclusion would benefit Wikipedia. The following link has triggered a protection filter: healthline.com

is not a "bad-faith accusation" of anything, it's a non-judgmental request to replace the offending link with a better source. JoelleJay ( talk) 00:49, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Em, the bad faith accusation was fairly clearly pointed at Zefr, who proposed this, based on their edit summaries that accuse editors of adding SPAM links. And the "gatekeeping" was about your explicit statement: "Wikipedia editors who do not know how to find and recognize high-quality readily-available biomedical sources should not be editing biomedical information in the first place". If the green text you have above is a correct reproduction of what potential editors will see, have you actually tried clicking on the link about blacklist. It links to Wikipedia:Spam blacklist. For real? They are told Healthline, one of the biggest health sites on the web, is SPAM? Not that it is "low quality" or "peddles wellness nonsense" but that the link they tried to add was SPAM. Is this really what you are proposing? And the second link is to some regexp list that only a nerdy programmer would love. That editor is going to think Wikipedia is nuts. How on earth are they going to get from receiving that message to linking to a better (but still readable) source? They aren't. They've just been told they tried to break the rules, by adding a spam link, and were blocked from doing so.

Wrt Shibollethink comment leading to JoelleJay's attacks on the authors, Well JoelleJay is talking rubbish when we step outside the wellness articles we all agree on. The muscle source was written this chap who seems far more qualified to talk about muscles than well any of us. And the Cleveland Clinic and Drugs.com and NHS and many other lay-friendly websites we aren't blacklisting don't mention their authors at all. What annoys me the most about this discussion is attack-shit about the authors or rubbish about these sources not being allowed to cite primary research and so on. This is nonsense argumentation, like saying anything just to attack something you hate. We can be better than that. There are articles on that site written by people qualified to do so and qualified to cite the research literature. We should separate the wellness rubbish from the other stuff. -- Colin° ^Talk 07:50, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

"Fairly clearly addressed to Zefr"...in your response to MY comment, which you start by addressing Sandy...

And I stand by my statement that some bare minimum competence should be expected of editors editing biomedical articles. It is not difficult to find lay material on the basic concepts a non-med-savvy editor would be adding.

The text I quoted is not all the blacklist filter says. It gives way more instructions and information than that, and it doesn't "accuse" the editor of trying to break rules. And obviously I've visited the spam blacklist page, that's the origin of the green text stating that some blocked links are not spam but instead were blacklisted by consensus.

I don't see where the author is listed for the anterior tibiotalar ligament; the byline just says "medically reviewed by the Healthline Medical Network" and "by the Healthline Editorial Team". That doesn't mean it was written or reviewed by any particular person. And it's not only limited to "wellness". JoelleJay ( talk) 20:07, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

What gets me is that intelligent folk here are complaining about a site that, in parts, spreads mistruths and exaggerations and such, and in order to attack it, they spread mistruths (the blueberry "meager nutrient content" nonsense) and claim, I don't know, that articles on brain function are being written by herbalists. Two wrongs don't make a right. You focus on the wellness stuff to ridicule them but have failed to land any serious blows on them wrt tuberous sclerosis or neck muscles. And all Zefr has done is demonstrate he doesn't know how to compare the nutritional value of blueberries and spinach. I'm just getting "Boris Johnson vs the EU" vibes, where really any old crap is written to attack something you hate, and it doesn't seem to matter that the crap isn't true or isn't really a proper criticism. Like the idea they can't cite the primary research literature.

I see this sort of thing over the years at MEDRS when folk want to raise the bar really high to win a particular argument they are in (usually against alternative medicine), forgetting that all the other sources they used on another article didn't meet that bar. You know, most of western medical practice is not supported by meta analyses of randomised controlled trials, ... the evidence is missing or lacking. But if you are in a fight, suddenly anything the other guy claims must be supported by meta analyses of randomised controlled trials. The same thing here. Suddenly, it seems, nobody can write an article on the brain unless they are a not only a neurologist or brain surgeon but have published many research papers on that specific issue with the brain. That's not the rule we apply to other sources we accept. For example, you attack their TS article for being reviewed by "a psychologist/nurse with zero research background/expertise in anything relevant to the topic reviewing the output of an unqualified freelance health writer". According to Healthline it was reviewed by "-- ----, PhD, PsyD board-certified as both a geriatric and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and is also a licensed psychologist." JoelleJay, perhaps you aren't aware that tuberous sclerosis is a very multi-disciplinary condition, and I'd expect someone with his qualifications to know something about it just as a neurologist or nephrologist or geneticist or so on. It is the most common single-gene cause of ASD and often comes with numerous behavioural issues. One specialist isn't going to know the whole thing. A geneticist wouldn't have made that mistake about genes but then they'd perhaps have screwed up when writing about autistic spectrum. Since when did we demand that the authors of our sources actually published research directly on the topic, as you just did. That's a bar so high it makes me boggle? Have you read any Cochrane reports? Because many that I have read are written by people who may well know how to do a meta analysis, but are not even in that field of medicine, never mind published any research on it. And yet we consider Cochrane reports as one of the best sources.

The discussion here has yet to established that outside of wellness and nutritional claims, and health-news stories, the body of material at Healthline on the human body, and human diseases, is so seriously lacking in reliability that it needs put on a spam blacklist. I would be happy to see it barred in some form for the former stuff. For the latter, no, you really need to do a lot better than that, like finding me an article that shows they don't know their arse from their elbow. -- Colin° ^Talk 08:35, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

An article being certified as "medically reviewed" is a stronger claim than mere authorship, especially when the article itself is written by someone with zero credentials. We should expect expertise in the relevant domain for such a claim. And again, it's not limited to "wellness" topics. This article on the "vaccine debate" uncritically gives the views of antivax loons more space than those of what it calls "vaccine proponents", presenting it as if there are reasoned arguments on both sides.

I also have no idea what you're referring to re: HL pieces on neck muscles (or muscles in general). The only article you linked was a non-bylined one on a completely different tissue. JoelleJay ( talk) 19:34, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Depracate and blacklist per this article: [8]. This article does nothing but push pseudoscientific nonsense. In my opinion, Healthline does not maintain a lot of rigor. NW1223< Howl at me• My hunts> 04:19, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

• We're getting into TL;DR territory here, so I just started querying various topics that could be problematic, following the indications at the top. First test: crystals. Crystals for Sleep says there's no scientific evidence, but spends most of the article interviewing a "modern alchemist" as though they're an expert. Crystals for Manifestation. [...]. Next test: Reiki. How to use Reiki Principles to Boost Well-Being doesn't address the [lack of] science. Next test: GMOs. GMO Apples, Potatoes Hitting Store Shelves appears to serve the primary purpose of casting doubt on the safety of GMO foods. This one isn't too problematic, but does spend a lot of time talking about things that it then says aren't backed up by research (e.g. The main concerns around GMOs involve allergies, cancer, and environmental issues — all of which may affect the consumer. While current research suggests few risks, more long-term research is needed sure makes it sound like there are substantiated concerns). None of this is particularly promising, even if it's not as bad as the worst offenders in this space (Natural News, etc.). The thing is, it's already a site that focuses on biomedical content which fails WP:MEDRS, so the only reason to deprecate/blacklist is if (a) there aren't other uses for it (I haven't seen any), and (b) it's frequently added (that sounds like the case). Support deprecation, no strong opinion about blacklisting. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:50, 9 June 2023 (UTC)
• Depracate for sure and likely need blacklist. Pretty plain as day based on the evidence presented here it's more than just not reliable and pushing fringe ideas quite broadly. It's not clear why so much text has been deidcated to such a WP:SNOW case either. Not really much more that needs to be said that hasn't been said already. KoA ( talk) 04:54, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate Colins argument that "it publishes good content some of the time, therefore it should't be deprecated" misses the point of why sources are deprecated in the first place. The Daily Mail certaily publishes good content some of the time, but this is heavily outweighed by its other coverage. The same is true here. Red Ventures is a company whos business model is essentially to create voluminous content farms for SEO, rather than to produce carefully written advice by actual medical experts. The stuff brought up by other contributors is shocking, and doesn't appear to be confined to wellness. This source should really not be used for any reason. Hemiauchenia ( talk) 05:26, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate and blacklist: In my time reviewing RfC:Reliability of La Patilla beside this section and making some comparisons, it is apparent that Healthline does not exist to provide accurate information and instead may promote dubious medical information in a method that targets readers searching topics, expanding upon topics that may or may not be scientifically valid. Reviewing WP:MEDASSESS, Healthline content can be described as "expert opinion" at best, though with its questionable review process and the use of advertisements, etc., this raises even more concerns. Given the prominence and potential of Healthline being used on the project, a blacklisting is appropriate to prevent not only the placement of unreliable information, but to also deter future discussions which will continue to arise when users attempt to cite Healthline.-- WMrapids ( talk) 05:24, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
• Deprecate and blacklist per copious evidence above. That some articles may be unproblematic is entirely beside the point and is if anything a point in favor of expungement - the problem is that they are not practically always accurate and that many inexperienced editors need help to avoid such bad sources that masquerade as reliable. To prevent accidental misuse we need deprecation and blacklisting. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:06, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi peeps, not sure how this works to be quite honest, but as self-published sources, I wanted to nominate TikTok and Instagram to be generally unreliable (with the usual expert/uncontroversial caveats). Surprised these haven't been red-ed on the source board yet, to be honest. If they are deemed oddly different from other social media networks and this discussion has happened already, feel free to let me know or close it ( WP:SNOW). Mattdaviesfsic ( talk) 20:40, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

• Currently there are 581 cites to tiktok and, uh, 19,719 citations to instagram. At a glance at least some of them are possibly WP:ABOUTSELF but the massive number for the latter is probably worth looking at more closely and suggests it might be worth putting it in RSP. I'm not sure an actual RFC is needed because it's glaringly obvious that both are WP:USERGENERATED and not usable as sources; the main question is how to word it specifically. -- Aquillion ( talk) 20:58, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• We don't need an RfC about this. It's no different from any other WP:SOCIALMEDIA/ WP:RSSELF. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:44, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
• Speedy close pointless RFC. Per Rhododendrites. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 22:03, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think that Mattdaviesfsic's point is that neither is explicitly described at WP:RS/P (although a number of other social networking sites are), and the directions on that page are to discuss it here, on this page. That said, we do have WP:INSTAGRAM. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 22:34, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I hope I'm doing this right as I don't have any experience doing WP:RfC, but I often come across RT being used a source for an actor's DOB and I revert them since they seem like a rather poor source when it comes to WP:DOB as they have the incorrect one for other actors and there are some actors that have age disputes on Wikipedia, the DOBs that RT have are most certain incorrect because other info for those actors such as what year they graduated high school or college are on their pages(with legit cited sources) and those years don't match up to the DOB RT has listed. I asked this a few months ago and pretty much all of the editors that replied agreed that since RT is not a journalism site and that it's main purpose is film criticism, it shouldn't be used as a source for WP:DOB.

/info/en/?search=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_403#Rotten_Tomatoes_reliabilty Kcj5062 ( talk) 21:14, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@ Kcj5062: I have removed the RFC tag from this discussion since the question you asked is not really contentious enough IMO to require that level of debate. The answer you received during the previous discussion that RT is not a good source for biographical information such as date of birth appears correct. Why do you think it needs to be re-addressed? Abecedare ( talk) 22:18, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@Abecedare Well somebody in the last discussion suggested a RfC since they're still people using RT as a ref for bio info and some will actual argue that it's a valid source. Kcj5062 ( talk) 22:28, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @ Gråbergs Gråa Sång: who had suggested an RFC at that previous discussion. If they, or any other board regular, believes that an RFC is needed, I would request them to start one afresh (instead of simply reverting my RFC tag removal) since they would know how to frame it neutrally etc. Cheers. Abecedare ( talk) 22:39, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

If it is unreliable for DOB and other biographical information – and I share that impression – then maybe that should be added to the Rotten Tomatoes entry in the list of perennial sources. Since the site is listed as generally reliable people may assume that that applies to all content. -- Random person no 362478479 ( talk) 23:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@ Random person no 362478479 That's what I was thinking. On the perennial sources it says it's a good source film and tv info. But nothing about bio info. Kcj5062 ( talk) 23:25, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I would appreciate having that added to the Rotten Tomatoes entry in the list of perennial sources, also (with a shortcut, if possile). I would like to be able to include a link to the perennial sources content, as I do when I remove citations to IMDb. Eddie Blick ( talk) 01:28, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

• In order not to leave this discussion hanging, I'll start an RFC at this board in 12-24hr with the question, "Can Rotten Tomatoes be used a source for biographical information, such as date of birth, for film and television personnel?" Please let me know if their are any objections or suggested modifications. Pinging @ Kcj5062, Random person no 362478479, and Teblick:. Abecedare ( talk) 02:05, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you, @ Abecedare. That sounds good. Eddie Blick ( talk) 02:11, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

AfterEllen was last discussed in July 2020. The reliability of this site has come into question due to three related discussions at Talk:Dana Rivers, Talk:Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and Talk:Camp Trans, with a focus on a November 2022 article on Rivers.

Is AfterEllen a reliable source for BLP reporting? Sideswipe9th ( talk) 20:52, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I would argue no, they are not reliable, particularly for trans and non-binary BLP reporting due to their strong bias. As noted in the last discussion, the site underwent a severe editorial change in 2016, after firing all of their staff, pivoting towards a focus on anti-trans content. As a result the publication was condemned by a coalition of editors from other mainstream lesbian publications ( [41]) and was a focal point of a piece by NBC News in January 2019. In one academic paper the site's editorial shift towards trans exclusionary content has been described as an oppressive and dangerous theoretical stance that disparages and denigrates some of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community: trans women.

Currently, according to their about us page, they have only a single editor and contributing writer. It's unclear whether the remainder of the contributors to the site are freelancers, or bloggers who have been given a platform. There is no editorial, fact checking, or corrections policy published anywhere on their site. Their terms of service states that the site does not warrant that the content is accurate, reliable or correct or that any defects or errors will be corrected.

While the site does have an opinion section, the opinion articles are also unidentifiably mixed in with their news section. While some opinion articles are clearly marked as such in the article header ( [42]), there are many opinion articles that are not and are otherwise indistinguishable from their news or celeb reporting without manually checking the opinion section ( [43], [44], [45]).

The publication is also known for pushing and amplifying harmful myths through its reporting and opinion articles like the cotton ceiling ( [46], [47]), that being trans is an ideology ( [48], [49], [50], [51]), and that LGBT teachers are grooming children ( [52])

When taken in combination; the heavy anti-trans bias, lack of fact checking, editorial, and corrections policies, and the difficulty in separating opinion articles from factual reporting makes AfterEllen an unreliable source. Sideswipe9th ( talk) 20:52, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Is the cotton ceiling a myth per se? There seem to be sources on the topic. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:02, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Biased sources aren't inherently unusable; in this case the apparent lack of fact-checking (indeed, as you point out, the notice that they don't warrant that the content is accurate or that it will be corrected if it turns out to be inaccurate) seems like the bigger issue which makes clear it's not a RS. It's depressing how many sources have fired all their staff and dispensed with fact-checking and around the same time as taking on a strong bias. The uses above also run into a ton of other issues, like whether a very marginal and very biased source would actually provide any wp:weight if the fact-checking issues magically disappeared, but the latter seems like the straw that makes it unusable. Do we have any articles that cite pre-2016 pieces? If so, we should also look into what the editorial status of the site was before the firings and change. -sche ( talk) 05:40, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

It is unfortunate that they haven't made their fact checking or corrections policy available on their site, it doesn't prove that they don't exist. Relying on legalese from the ToS misses the mark completely - the NYT also say that it "DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. THERE MAY BE DELAYS, OMISSIONS, INTERRUPTIONS, AND INACCURACIES IN THE CONTENT OR OTHER MATERIAL MADE AVAILABLE THROUGH THE SERVICES" in their ToS.

So are there any examples of them getting facts wrong and not correcting them? Alaexis _¿question? 07:32, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

If AfterEllen have corrected or updated any articles after the 2016 editorial change, they have done so silently as I've not been able to find evidence of any articles that contain any sort of correction notice from a few searches.

As for just getting facts wrong with or without correction, this is difficult to quantify because the site's opinion articles are otherwise unidentifiably mixed in with their factual reporting. For example this article pushes the harmful myth that trans men are erasing butch lesbians, and is categorised as factual reporting despite from the text clearly being the opinion of the article's author. Do we want to count factual inconsistencies in marked and unmarked opinion articles against the publication? Sideswipe9th ( talk) 20:43, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this counts as getting facts wrong, rather than having different opinions about a phenomenon. Anyway, the article is clearly an opinion by a non-expert and I can't imagine it ever being used on Wikipedia. Alaexis _¿question? 07:18, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Do we have any articles that cite pre-2016 pieces? If so, we should also look into what the editorial status of the site was before the firings and change. Out published an article in February 2019 with some details on how AfterEllen moved from being a mainstream lesbian focused publication in the early 2000s to the relative fringe publication that it is today. While it names key articles that corresponded to the publication's shift towards transphobia, it doesn't cite or name any specific pre-2016 articles.

In fact it is difficult to cite all manner of articles, especially for those published pre-2016, because as the Out article states, the archives and the work of some contributors [disappeared] overnight and some contributors witnessed their bylines simply changed to "staff" with no reasoning offered. A former contributor to AE speculated that it was a punitive thing when you tangle with AfterEllen's Twitter or publicly take issue with their current editorial direction.

The research paper (I can provide by email if needed, it's not in WP:LIB and I received a copy through WP:REREQ) that I cited above also documents some of the site's history. While it mentions a couple of articles that were published prior to 2016, the one article (no archive available) that it links to in the bibliography, by Julia Serano, is no longer available. Likewise the one penned by Jack Halberstam in 2015 was also removed.

Byline erasure was mentioned in the 2020 discussion on this source, see Hemiauchenia's comment at 23:33, 2 July 2020, but not discussed in any real depth. Sideswipe9th ( talk) 21:30, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• The consensus in the July 2020 RfC about AfterEllen was: "There is general agreement that AfterEllen is reliable, but that it should be used with context." The key word here is context.
  This RfC was opened because there was an edit (by a non-experienced editor) to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival article that added Dana Rivers as an activist at Camp Trans. It was poorly worded and the three sources provided were an article by Dana Rivers published in 2000, the tabloid Toronto Sun, and the New York Post. However, since Camp Trans is included in the lead and in the "Exclusion controversy" section (where other trans activists are included), I saw no reason why Dana Rivers' involvement in Camp Trans could not be added to the article.
  In my response at Talk:Michigan Womyn's Music Festival#Dana Rivers, I provided several sources that mention Dana Rivers' association with the Camp Trans protests at Michfest. Among them is an article by AfterEllen that says: "Rivers had also been active in “Camp Trans,” a campaign against Michfest, a female-only festival in Michigan that Reed and Wright attended frequently." – AJ (November 28, 2022). "Trans Activist, Dana Rivers, Found Guilty of Murdering Lesbian Couple and Their Son". AfterEllen.
  User:Sideswipe9th dismissed all the sources as not being acceptable and said about AfterEllen that it " is not a reliable source for BLPs, and its anti-trans bias also needs to be accounted for." To which I responded: "As for your comment that AfterEllen has an "anti-trans bias" ... so what? PinkNews is pro-trans and I haven't seen you reject PN as a "reliable source" because of its pro-trans bias. Besides which, per WP:BIASED: "reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective....Although a source may be biased, it may be reliable in the specific context."" This is the reason behind why this RfC has been opened.
  As a lesbian-centric website, AfterEllen is a knowledgeable source about the lesbian community, lesbian culture, and lesbian history. In the past it published articles about MichFest. In 2018, it published an interview with Lisa Vogel, the co-founder of MichFest. Therefore, if it involves MichFest, AfterEllen can be used as a source.
  Dana Rivers' involvement with Camp Trans has been documented by several sources, including Rivers. There is no reason why the AfterEllen article cannot be used as a source in this matter. (I also provided this source: mantilla, karla; Vogel, Lisa (October 2000). "festival: Michigan: transgender controversy… …and right-wing attacks "americans for truth" claims MWMF endangers children" (PDF). Off Our Backs. 30 (9): 8–9. ISSN  0030-0071. –(via JSTOR), which published the following: "More than 60 gender activists from these groups [Camp Trans Planning Committee, Boston and Chicago chapters of Lesbian Avengers] plus members of Transsexual Menace, supportive attendees and renowned activist Dana Rivers gathered across the road from the Festival this year to do outreach and education on what they viewed as a discriminatory policy being unfairly applied....").
  The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival article is not the Dana Rivers biography article — and the AfterEllen source was not going to be used in the Rivers BLP.
  Let's not kid ourselves here, this RfC is just an attempt to censor AfterEllen and stop it from being used as a source in Wikipedia, even in lesbian-related subjects. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 12:38, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• PinkNews is pro-trans and I haven't seen you reject PN as a "reliable source" because of its pro-trans bias. Since I noticed you brought this source up several times, I thought I'd respond to this (though I can't speak for Sideswipe9th - as I mentioned, my view is that the problem isn't simply that AfterEllen has a particular bias but that, post-2016, it is only known for that bias; it doesn't seem to have any meaningful coverage or usage in any other context.) Of course, if you want an in-depth discussion of PinkNews you can start another discussion for it, but even just at a glance there seem to be 300+ citations to it on Google Scholar, demonstrating strong WP:USEBYOTHERS; high-quality academic sources treat it as reliable source of information about LGBT issues. In comparison, AfterEllen has almost no coverage or citations post-2016 (when the site's new owners replaced literally all its employees, effectively turning it into a new publication with no relation to its previous self); virtually all coverage after that point is either discussing its pre-2016 incarnation or just discusses the way it was suddenly changed. Trying to equate AfterEllen to PinkNews is WP:FALSEBALANCE. -- Aquillion ( talk) 11:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

"Trying to equate AfterEllen to PinkNews is WP:FALSEBALANCE." No, it is not. Because PinkNews is slanted in favor of pro-trans and it is used by some editors as a source in LGBT-related articles. It is blatantly hypocritical to take a stand against sources that are anti-TRA, yet favor sources that are pro-TRA. You are indulging selective reasoning.
If you want proof of PinkNews' partisanship all you have to do is search "Dana Rivers" in its website, and except for a 2016 article ("Woman arrested over violent triple murder of lesbian couple and adopted son") you will not find anything about River's 2022 trial and conviction. The self-proclaimed "world's largest and most influential LGBTQ+ media brand" which declares it "exist[s] to inform", suppressed coverage of the trial and conviction of a prominent trans activist who murdered two lesbians and their son. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 10:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

At the minute I see opinions which are disagreed with, not really any evidence of factual errors. The argument that all RS clearly label and separate opinion and fact, therefore as this publication doesn't it is not RS is entirely without merit. Loads of sources mix the two, and we just say "this bit is factual, this bit is opinion, it needs attributing if the opinion's inclusion is due". Boynamedsue ( talk) 21:29, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

• I should note that the July 2020 discussion was never a formal RfC (see [53]), and the close was a non-admin one, so there isn't the same weight behind it as if it had been an actual RfC close. One of the people supporting its reliability, Gleeanon409, was later determined to be a sock of the LTA Benjiboi, so their opinion should be discounted. My opinion that AfterEllen post 2016 is a such a minor outlet that there is little reason to cite remains the same as the 2020 discussion. It's barely more than a glorified group blog at this point looking at the authorship credits for recent posts. We wouldn't cite other minor gender critical outlets like Reduxx for the same reason. (though AfterEllen is a lot less bad than Reduxx). Hemiauchenia ( talk) 21:53, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

  I was going to make a follow-up to my somewhat-vague comment above, to more clearly say things you've now said better than I could've, so I'll comment here instead of next to my earlier comment: what Hemiauchenia says above (and what Silver seren says below) is my read too: after the 2016 firing of staff, deletion or reattribution of old articles, and mixing of opinion in with other 'reporting', the site has declined so much in quality and stature and increased so much in bias that (from a V / RS perspective) I wouldn't trust it as a source for a statement in a Wikipedia article unless other RS were backing up the same statement ... and in that case it'd make more sense to just cite the other RS (because even from a WEIGHT perspective I don't know what things "marginal biased source" would attribute much weight to).
  If any of our articles cite pre-2016 pieces and we have archived versions of those which survived the site's deletions of them I would evaluate the reliability of them separately, since it was different back when it used to be, as Pyxis says, a decent source for lesbian news. I would even be careful about using the post-2016 site for the ABOUTSELF purposes Silver seren mentions, since we can see that after the change the site not only fired old staff but e.g. reattributed their work, so I wouldn't necessarily rely on its post-2016 statements about the pre-2016 site. (Post-2016 ABOUTSELF statements about post-2016 site should be fine.) -sche ( talk) 03:14, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

• No, it is well-established that failing to separate opinion and fact is enough to render a source unreliable. From WP:QUESTIONABLE: Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, that are promotional in nature, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions. When a source labels its opinions clearly, we can wall them off and use the non-opinion parts; but if opinions are a heavy aspect of everything it publishes, without a clear separation, then the entire source has to be walled off - at a bare minimum that puts it below the level that we could ever consider citing for WP:BLP-sensitive statements. Also, of course - WP:RS is something that ultimately must be positively shown; that is to say, if you think a source is reliable you have to show that it has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, which I don't think is evident in coverage here. We focus on inaccuracies in situations where a source might otherwise meet that bar but had glaring problems; but there's no need for it here, because nobody has really presented an argument for how the source could be a WP:RS aside from "well it's biased and that doesn't disqualify it, right?", a misapprehension which often happen in situations like these where a source's only coverage comes from the fact that they've published a bunch of inflammatory stuff and where the only reason it's here at all is because it has a strident opinion that some editors really like and other editors really dislike. Looking past that, if you want to - at the very least, use the source for WP:BLP-sensitive statements, but really, to a lesser degree, if you want to use it for anything but opinion at all - then you need to show strong WP:USEBYOTHERS or other evidence of a good reputation, evidence of a decent editorial policy, reasons to believe they perform fact-checking, and so on. And also convincingly argue that the majority of its coverage does not rely on opinion, I suppose. (Preferably, for all of this, from after the 2016 turnover because coverage makes it clear that management was completely replaced at that point.) These are not obscure points of policy. -- Aquillion ( talk) 23:48, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

• A lack of editorial and fact checking policies is usually a red flag for sources. Add in the mixing in of opinion articles and general "contributor" articles makes it seem highly likely that the site has lost it reliability post-buyout. While we can discuss the extent of reliability on the site prior to the buyout, it seems quite clear that it's become more or less a tabloid since. And I agree with Hemiauchenia above that even outside of that, it is such a minor web-based site that it shouldn't be used in any of our articles outside of the one on itself. Silver seren ^C 01:44, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
• The July 2020 closure carries some weight, and I don't see that the outlet has changed significantly since then. I don't see a need to treat it as blanket unreliable, but rather it depends on context and what it's being used for. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:59, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

It is obviously not reliable for BLP reporting - this is clear-cut enough to be remove-on-sight. If anyone has restored it in contravention of WP:BLPRESTORE, I'd suggest taking them to WP:AE immediately. It's a blog with no reputation for fact-checking and accuracy and no editorial policy. While being a WP:BIASED source does not necessarily render a source unusable, being biased doesn't make a source usable, too; the only coverage of the blog elsewhere is to discuss its bias. Sourcing heavily focuses on its 2016 acquisition as wrecking what credibility it had (something previous discussions seem to have overlooked) - see eg. the paper Sideswipe linked above, or [54]. Likewise, the arguments made in defense of it in this and previous discussions seem to be focused more on its bias than on actually trying to find decent WP:USEBYOTHERS, or discussing its editorial policy, or explaining how it has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, all of which would be obvious first steps before we could use a source to eg. imply that a living person is guilty of a crime. Either way, any experienced editor would know at a glance that this is not a source that can be used for BLP-sensitive statements - the threshold we'd need to use a blog for statements like this is well above anything presented here. I would more generally say it's not an WP:RS for anything - there's just nothing to suggest that it would be; it seems to be a blog primarily notable for changing hands several times and, post-2016 acquisition, suddenly experiencing a drastic change of direction and publishing a bunch of inflammatory stuff, none of which really suggests that it has the reputation for fact-checking and accuracy WP:RS requires - but the idea that anyone could seriously argue that it's reliable for BLP reporting (which was not the focus of previous discussions, most of which had the same tiny handful of editors contributing to them anyway) is unfathomable and I suspect not one that WP:AE would look kindly on. -- Aquillion ( talk) 23:25, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

"but the idea that anyone could seriously argue that it's reliable for BLP reporting (which was not the focus of previous discussions, most of which had the same tiny handful of editors contributing to them anyway) is unfathomable and I suspect not one that WP:AE would look kindly on." Um ... who has said that AfterEllen was to be used in a BLP? The AE article was suggested as a source in the MICHIGAN WOMYN'S MUSIC FESTIVAL article. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 09:55, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Look at Talk:Dana Rivers; it was suggested there as well. But its use in Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was also focused on connecting Dana Rivers the topic. And Rivers, of course, does fall under BLP. BLP applies to mentions of living people in other articles, not just in their own articles, so you need a high-quality source to make that connection, which all else aside this clearly is not. One only has to look at the article in question to recognize that the connection being made here is ultimately about BLP-sensitive details regarding Rivers; obviously we cannot rely on a lurid blogpost from a blog with no discernible reputation beyond becoming an axe-grinding culture-war venue post-2016 for something like "MASS-MURDERER PARTICIPATES IN PROTESTS" or the like. I don't think it should be used in as a source at all, for anything - the problem isn't just that it's an axe-grinding culture-war venue, the problem is that that is all it is known for, not for fact-checking or accuracy - but at the very least it obviously cannot be used to say anything about living people. -- Aquillion ( talk) 11:40, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, it's like this: I'm only interested in Michfest, and didn't know until you pointed it out that the AE article had also been suggested in the Dana Rivers BLP talk page. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 09:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, the mixing of fact and opinion with no boundaries means that a site is inherently unreliable. But even when something is clearly news, is it reliable? Well, no, as you can see from this story which tries to claim that Nicola Sturgeon's resignation as Scottish First Minister was something to do with a controversy about a transgender rapist. In reality, it was absolutely irrelevant to it. I note that someone's inserted the note about the controversy into Sturgeon's article, together with a nice bit of editorialising about pronouns ... what a surprise. Black Kite (talk) 11:13, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

"this] story which tries to claim that Nicola Sturgeon's resignation as Scottish First Minister was something to do with a controversy about a transgender rapist." Responding to this is simply irresistible:

– Nicola Sturgeon Resigns As Scottish Leader After Trans Rapist Scandal, The European Conservative (February 15, 2023).

– Estranged wife of trans rapist Isla Bryson 'delighted' Nicola Sturgeon has quit after gender reform plans, LBC (15 February 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon facing calls to quit as poll shows voter fury over trans rapist scandal, Express (February 13, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon urged to resign after refusing to say if double rapist is a man or a woman, Express (February 2, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon brought down by trans row as SNP prepares to rip up her gender Bill, The Telegraph (15 February 2023).

– Adam Zivo: Scotland's woke government self-immolates over trans rights: Nicola Sturgeon badly miscalculated over controversy surrounding rapist born as a male being placed in a women's prison, National Post (February 15, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon facing demands to resign as 40 PER CENT of Scots want her gone over trans row, GB News (12 February 2023).

– The trans rights row sparking a crisis for Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, The Sydney Morning Herald (February 12, 2023).

– Nicola Sturgeon faces fortnight of criticism over trans prisons policy: Critics claim her career is ‘over,’ while trans Scots worry about sensationalised coverage after trans rapist put in women’s prison, The Guardian (11 February 2023).

– Confusion from Nicola Sturgeon over trans prison row, ITVX (31 January 2023).

"she ended up promoting a policy of allowing trans people to change their legal sex by self-declaration alone – a policy that, when rolled out in the prison’s service, led to a double rapist being placed in a women’s prison....Most of the Scottish media have, like the BBC, been observing informal self-censorship on the trans issue."
– Nicola Sturgeon: a cautionary tale, Spiked (22 February 2023).

"After that, a new row erupted over a trans woman who was to be put in a women's prison -- even though she had raped two women before she transitioned."
– Scotland: Why did Nicola Sturgeon resign and who will replace her?, Euronews (17 February 2023).

"It was Nicola’s failure to be able to say a rapist was a man that turned it in the end. If you can’t say that, why should anyone trust anything that comes out of your mouth? She made the mistake of ignoring women, and listening to lobbying groups that held to one view."
– Women’s rights activists celebrate Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, The Times (February 16, 2023).

"Back in 2021, the fissures over Sturgeon’s embrace of transgender issues as the next great civil-rights cause were already apparent. She has always dismissed feminist concerns that predatory men who are not really trans will cynically exploit relaxed gender-recognition rules to gain access to women’s spaces....Bryson had also just been convicted of rape, the quintessential male crime against women’s bodily autonomy. How could the Scottish government believe that such a person belonged in a female jail?."
– What Happens When Politicians Brush Off Hard Questions About Gender, The Atlantic (February 15, 2023).

There are more sources that also connect the same dots — AfterEllen was not the only one, nor the exception. Its article about Sturgeon's resignation was similar to what was reported in numerous British media sources. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 05:29, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

• Well, you've wasted your time there, since it became very clear later on that the trans rights row was completely irrelevant to her resignation. Of course all the right-wing sources leapt on it at the time ... and were wrong. Incidentally, for your future reference, many of your links are from unreliable sources (Express, GB News, Spiked etc.) Black Kite (talk) 11:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, I wasn't adding sources to an article, was I? And everyone knows that shooting the messenger is a sport in Wikipedia. AfterEllen's Sturgeon article was published on February 17, 2023. Whatever became "clear later on" happened later on — after the article by AE and those I listed with similar reports were published. However, as the proverb says: where there's smoke, there's fire. Pyxis Solitary (yak yak). Ol' homo. 11:16, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

That's some high-quality gibberish, that is. -- JBL ( talk) 00:06, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

• I fail to see what distinguishes the post-'16 site from any other random "news" blog with inadequate editorial standards. Like any such blog, it might be usable on a case-by-case basis for very non-controversial claims, but should generally be avoided and is absolutely unacceptable for any contentious claim about a living person. Note that there's a pretty healthy ecosystem of LGBTQ-oriented journalism, from prestige sources like The Advocate to lots of blogs like what AfterEllen once was: broad-scope and, while not top-tier, passing our minimum expectations for editorial standards. I doubt there are many claims that can be sourced only to post-'16 AfterEllen, and if there are, that in itself is a reason to be suspicious of the claim. -- 'zin ^{is short for Tamzin} (she|they|xe) 21:33, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
• Just to note, I've requested a closure of this discussion, as it seems to have died down and I think one would be helpful going forward. Sideswipe9th ( talk) 21:56, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

RTÉ is Ireland's public broadcaster. It features general news, and I'm not aware that it has faced any heavy criticism regarding its reliability. RTÉ has been around since 1960, and is thus a long-established outlet. Media Bias/Fact Check considers it to be reliable, but as is noted right here, Media Bias/Fact Check itself is not a reliable source. Thoughts on RTÉ's reliability are welcome. Cortador ( talk) 09:28, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Is there any disputed use of this source? In general, yes, this source is reliable, but there may be topics, where better source would be required (eg. medical claims). Pavlor ( talk) 10:13, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

I've used RTÉ a couple of times. There aren't specific disputes regarding RTÉ that I'm aware of. However, I also couldn't find any discussion regarding its reliability here or via the new page patrol source guide so I decided to open the discussion here because I thought I would be good to have clearity regarding this source. Cortador ( talk) 11:35, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

I never seen any reason not to consider RTE to be reliable. Canterbury Tail talk 13:29, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know, RTÉ is known as a typical, editorially independent public broadcaster and therefore in the top tier of journalistic RS. This year's scandal about undisclosed bonuses for a presenter doesn't reflect on RTÉ's editorial judgement (and is also pretty minor, in the global context of recent scandals at unquestionably RS outlets). Newimpartial ( talk) 13:38, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm guessing there's no previous discussion on RTE because noone has ever questioned their reliability, and I can't see any reason why anyone should. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆ transmissions∆ ° co-ords° 19:25, 19 July 2023 (UTC)