Here’s the wired article the submission linked to: https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...

I got the submission in my RSS reader (Feedly) which regularly shows me posts that end up getting flagged for removal. After seeing the linked article elsewhere, this seemed like an odd submission to remove.

Click the time-stamp of the submission. You should have a [vouch] link. Vouch for the post. If enough people vouch for the submission it should unkill itself.

Could be mobile safari but I still don’t see a vouch button. :(

I have 4 karma, my guess is that HN admins restrict who can vouch, which would help stem the tide of spam.

I’m not spam. If this is working as designed, I’d like anyone calling the shots at HN (if they read this) to know that I am vouching in spirit and wish I could vouch in reality. :)

Update: I’m dumb, this comment explains what I’m too lazy to search for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133425

I clicked on "vouch" and it removed the flag, but maybe just for me?

Not just you! I’m just HN illiterate. Had no idea that was a thing.

Thanks!

You need a minimal amount of karma to get the "vouch" button, probably 200 or 500.

I have 800 and I don’t see such an option. Also, it’s still flagged.

I’m having trouble finding concrete information about the vouch button. Seems like it shows for some users but not all. Do you happen to know if there’s any official information on this?

Thanks for your help! I will keep looking once I’m not on mobile.

I found this on the FAQ page:

Q: In my profile, what does showdead do?

A: If you turn it on, you'll see all the stories and comments that have been killed by software, moderators, or user flags.

If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it—when enough users do this, the post is unkilled. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear.

Maybe a lot of users flagged it because they aren’t interested in having continuous political discourse also on HN.

This isn’t about political discourse. It’s about information reliability and how websites are dealing with it.

Don’t flag important conversation starters about problems endemic to the internet!

'Fake news' stopped being newsworthy to anyone in tech probably many years ago. I find the following HN guideline to apply well to this:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Wikipedia questioning the reliability of a major cable news network is an interesting new phenomenon.

Fake news is an incredibly important topic of discussion for anyone in the social media side of the tech world.

I think you’re wrong. Debate me?

You'd probably find me a disappointing debate opponent - my opinion of modern news is loosely the following:

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/942367860709609472?lang=e...

I totally agree with your opinion of modern news.

Your opinion of HN and what deserves to be on here is what I take issue with. It felt initially like you argued that because Fox News was the subject of the link, it would start a shitstorm of garbage talk and therefore shouldn’t be on here. While it may start a shitstorm of garbage talk (it totally would, no doubt), I think this particular headline is interesting because it’s a move made by Wikipedia, one of the most widely used references on the internet.

I would argue that despite the shitstorm, we should still be allowed to talk about it on HN because it’s relevant to policy makers at various internet companies. We can see that Wikipedia did something they haven’t done before, and it might influence how others move forward. i.e. “If the good folks at Wikipedia doubt Fox News’ credibility as an information resource, maybe we should too? Let’s talk about that.“

It wouldn’t matter to me if it was Fox or CNN or MSNBC or what have you. What matters (to me) is that it’s Wikipedia, and I would love to know what people smarter than me think about this situation.

But how can I get their opinion if posts about this get flagged to oblivion?

Edit:

For example, if I could poll what information overlords at companies thought, here’s what I’d ask:

- At what point does a particular information resource deserve to have its reliability status revoked?

- What is a good summary of some of the internal discussions happening at Wikipedia regarding this problem and it’s surging importance?

- How do you, as a company, respond when the mob attacks with something along the lines of “Leftist/Rightist bad people at company XYZ told me my favorite news entertainment network wasn’t truthful, let’s cancel them!” (Personally, my answer to this one would be: nothing.)

- What do sociologists say about this, given historical context of misinformation and the cults that grow to protect it? How do we bridge existing knowledge about combating bad info with the instant-communication age we are in?

Honestly, I could go on forever. Might not be the kinds of discussions you personally want to see on HN, but as a long time lurker, these are exactly the kinds of discussions I’m looking for, and it’s disheartening to see that other people think they shouldn’t happen just because it ruffles feathers.

Because it would turn into a dumpster fire argued along party political lines.

A user emailed with the same question. I'll copy the answer here:

Users flagged it. This is the usual tug of war between upvotes, flags, and vouches.

We sometimes turn off flags if the article is substantive and we feel like it can support a thoughtful discussion. In this case, I'm wavering. I'm not sure how significant this information really is, given how many such things are happening right now (lots of moderation thoughts on that at [1] and [2]). The question is whether the resulting thread would be significantly different from previous discussions or not, or whether it would just get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest flamewar topic.

Wavering isn't a strong enough reason to override the community verdict so I guess we'll leave it as is. Sorry to disappoint—there's lots of room for disagreement about this stuff, and lots of interpretation involved. I'm not saying we're right, and certainly not always right, but someone has to make these calls.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...