Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Uncle]

In that regard, it should be based entirely in Wikipedia policy about this rather that if the killer deserves the pronouns. That’s the whole point of having a editing policy. 

wikipedia policy is a maze of inconsistencies, applied at random depending on who is doing the editing

maybe policy is "pages should reflect the current, most up-to-date identity the individual expresses preference for"

sounds simple enough, right? but now you have to prove they are expressing that preference, and you must use "reliable sources," you can't use "original research," often not even words out of the person's own mouth

if a subject is not that controversial, articles will go for decades without dispute from accurate-but-less-respectable sources

if it is controversial, editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent perfectly reasonable sources from being used to make claims which go against their narrative, until evidence becomes overwhelming, like in the case of Sacheen Littlefeather's questionable heritage



what if Fox News states that the Philly shooter was trans?

Kevin Li recently faced a daunting task. Wikipedia contributors had just spent nearly two months locked in a heated debate over whether Fox News’ website should be permitted as a reference for the encyclopedia’s political and scientific content. More than 150 users weighed in, leading to a thread more than 82,000 words long, roughly the length of an average novel.

Li, a volunteer Wikipedia administrator and public policy graduate student at Stanford, had offered to close the discussion, meaning that he had to read the entire thing, plus the dozens of sources linked by participants, and boil all of it down to a single statement expressing the community’s rough consensus. It took him between 10 and 15 hours to do so, he told me.

The final result: Li found consensus that Fox be deemed a “marginally reliable” source for information about politics and science. This means that its use as a reference in Wikipedia articles will not be permitted for “exceptional claims” that require heightened scrutiny, but that its reliability will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for other claims.

It also comes with some important caveats (a staple of Wikipedia bureaucracy). It applies only to reported news articles on foxnews.com, not to opinion articles or to opinion talk shows, which are considered generally unreliable. (Wikipedia tries to avoid using opinion sources to cite anything other than information about the beliefs of the source’s author.) It also does not apply to news from local affiliates owned by Fox, nor to Fox articles about nonpolitical and nonscientific topics, which are considered generally reliable.