The URL on Daily Mail that you cite has "factcheck" in the domain name and calls itself "The Most Comprehensive Media Bias Resource". It has no about page and is exactly the sort of URL that I'd expect to get emailed from my impressionable 78-year-old mother.

Fair point. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia... is probably a better summary of how Daily Mail is perceived.

Wikipedia prohibits its use as a source, explaining: "volunteer editors on English Wikipedia have come to a consensus that the Daily Mail is ‘generally unreliable and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist.’"

They cited "the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication."

The Guardian article you link is simply reporting on the Wikipedia vote from a couple of years ago. Wikipedia keeps a unreliable sources list, and a perusal of it will show you that it's not an impressive exercise in fairness. In fact, Wikipedia's fairness standards are somewhat notorious.

As a minor funny/sad side point to all this, Peter Hitchens over at the Mail on Sunday -- owned by the Daily Mail, but with a separate editorial team -- has complained frequently about his Wikipedia page being defaced by this very policy. Apparently some enterprising editors thought that it was their duty to remove all Hitchens quotes from the article because his articles had appeared in the Mail on Sunday, and was therefore an "unreliable source" despite being a quote of what the man said. What a shitshow!

My own guess, as a sometimes Daily Mail reader from the States, is that the "unreliable" thing is simply a talking point somehow related to UK politics. The Daily Mail has a severe sensationalist bias, but their reporting is often quite good, and they have more than their fair share of scoops.

No. I didn't offer a biased position, or any position. I linked to 3 other sources with summaries of where they fall between purely factual reporting and opinion. The 2 opinions - which don't agree with one another - are from experts on journalism and have been widely cited by other sources.

Since you're new here, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html may be worth skimming, particularly "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

The Daily Mail is not a newspaper of record.

If you took a newspaper "of record" like the NYT and judged it for what they published the last 10 years, I wonder if you could consider it a newspaper "of record" anymore