Ideological bias on Wikipedia

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On Wikipedia, ideological bias, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability. [1] [2]

Contents

Wikipedia has an internal policy which states that articles must be written from a neutral point of view, which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant points of view that have been verifiably published by reliable sources on a topic. [3]

Collectively, findings show that Wikipedia articles edited by large numbers of editors with opposing ideological views are at least as neutral as other similar sources, but articles with smaller edit volumes by fewer—or more ideologically homogeneous—contributors are more likely to reflect an editorial bias. [4] [5] Multiple studies have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia in both article content and editor sanctioning. [6]

State of research

Research shows that Wikipedia is prone to neutrality violations caused by bias from its editors, including systemic bias. [7] [8] A comprehensive study conducted on ten different versions of Wikipedia revealed that disputes among editors predominantly arise on the subject of politics, encompassing politicians, political parties, political movements, and ideologies. These political topics accounted for approximately 25% of the disputes observed across all language versions studied. [9]

A 2012 study by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics as of January 2011, measuring their degree of bias on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro in 2010, to measure bias in newspaper media. [10] This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either the Democratic or Republican parties, based on key phrases within the text such as "war in Iraq", "civil rights", "trade deficit", "economic growth", "illegal immigration" and "border security". Each phrase is assigned a slant index based on how often it is used by Democratic or Republican members of U.S. Congress. This lean rating is assigned to a Wikipedia contribution that includes the same key phrase. The authors concluded that older Wikipedia articles were mostly biased to the left, although recent articles are more neutral. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles with contrasting viewpoints played a role in rebalancing the average perspectives among the entries. [11] [12] : 4–5 

In a subsequent study, the same researchers compared about 4,000 Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics (written by an online community) with the corresponding articles in Encyclopædia Britannica (written by experts) using similar methods as their 2010 study to measure "slant" (Democratic vs. Republican) and to quantify the degree of bias. The authors found that "Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased", particularly those focusing on civil rights, corporations, and government. Entries about immigration trended toward Republican. They further found that "[t]he difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions" and, when articles were substantially revised, the difference in bias compared to Britannica was statistically negligible. The implication, per the authors, is that "many contributions are needed to reduce considerable bias and slant to something close to neutral". [1] [6] [13]

A study published in 2015 focusing on the English edition of Wikipedia examined the removal of positive or negative information in biographies of U.S. senators. The researchers introduced positive and negative content, sourced from reliable references, into the biographical entries of U.S. senators. Their findings revealed that negative content was more likely to be removed and were removed at a faster rate compared to positive content. The researchers concluded that a significant editorial bias exists in Wikipedia entries related to current U.S. senators. However, when a similar test was conducted on the Wikipedia pages of recently retired and deceased senators, the same discrepancy in the removal of positive and negative content was not observed. This suggests that the bias identified is specific to the pages of active politicians and does not indicate a systemic issue within Wikipedia. The authors concluded that information generated through collaborative projects such as Wikipedia may be susceptible to an editorial bias that favors politically active individuals. [14]

In a 2017 report from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Wikipedia was identified as a center-right website in the study's "candidate valence" scale, which used the political orientation of Twitter users who shared content from the website to indicate the website's political lean throughout the 2016 U.S. elections. Wikipedia was one of only three websites identified as center-right by the report, the other two websites being RealClearPolitics and National Review . [15]

A 2023 study compared articles on controversial topics across multiple community-managed wikis: the study intended to test whether the policy orientation of a collaborative wiki project would produce a slant in the content, by selecting the crowd of contributors. The findings showed that the content of wikis with explicit ideological biases, such as RationalWiki and Conservapedia, is more unbalanced than that of wikis (such as Wikipedia) or encyclopedias (such as Encyclopedia Britannica) advocating neutrality. Wikipedia's content had no significantly bigger slant than that of Britannica, while both RationalWiki and Conservapedia were "more loaded with moral content". [16]

A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia cited a greater proportion of liberal sources than conservative sources, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias". To investigate whether this disparity could be the result of differences in reliability between liberal and conservative sources, the researchers compared news source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and metrics of political media polarization from the Media Bias Monitor. The study concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns. [17]

User collaboration

A study conducted in 2013 focused on users who openly declared their support for either the US Democratic or Republican parties. The research indicated that these users tended to contribute more frequently to voices aligning with their own political orientation. However, they did not exhibit polarized editing behavior, as they were not inclined to avoid collaboration with political opponents while also not showing a preference for collaboration exclusively with allies. The authors proposed that the shared identity of being a Wikipedian might outweigh potentially divisive aspects of personal identity, such as political affiliation. This finding distinguishes Wikipedia from other social platforms, such as Twitter and blogs, where users often exhibit strong polarization by predominantly interacting with users who share similar political orientations. In contrast, Wikipedia can be characterized as a platform where users display a higher degree of interaction across political orientations, akin to forums and similar platforms. [18]

In a 2016 working paper focusing on the English Wikipedia, researchers investigated the behavior of users who contribute to articles related to US politics. Building upon the terminology introduced in their previous article from 2012, Greenstein, Zhu, and Yuan Gu found that editors are slightly more likely to contribute to articles with an opposite slant to their own—a tendency that the authors called opposites attract. They further found that debates on Wikipedia tend to exhibit a "prevalence of unsegregated conversations over time", meaning that the debates on Wikipedia tend to involve editors of differing views—which the authors called unsegregated—as opposed to debates involving only editors with homogeneous views (segregated). They also found that the degree of editor bias decreases over time and experience, and decreases faster for editors involved in very slanted material: "[t]he largest declines are found among contributors who edit or add content to articles that have more biases." They also estimated that, on average, it takes about one year longer for Republican material to reach a neutral viewpoint than for Democratic material. [4]

A study published in 2019, conducted among American users of the English version, produced similar findings. The study highlighted a significant political orientation bias among users contributing to political topics, finding a trend that the more edits made to an entry, the more balanced the average political orientation of the contributing users becomes. The study also indicated that the quality of articles, as recognized by the Wikipedia community, improves as the diversity of political orientation among contributors increases. User groups composed of politically polarized individuals generally produce better articles, on average, compared to groups consisting of highly politically aligned users or even moderates. Positive effects of polarization were observed not only in articles related to politics but also in those concerning social issues and even science. Politically polarized groups engage in frequent disagreements, stimulating focused debates that result in higher quality, more robust, and comprehensive edits. However, these findings are subject to limitations. The contributors who participated may suffer a self-selection bias, which can influence outcomes. [19] [20]

In a 2012 study focusing on edit wars within Wikipedia, it was suggested that consensus can often be reached within a reasonable timeframe, even in controversial articles. The conflicts that tend to prolong these edit wars are primarily driven by the influx of new users. It was observed that most edit wars are carried out by a small number of users who are frequently engaged in conflicts, despite their low overall productivity. In these debates, resolution is often reached not based on the merits of the arguments but rather due to external intervention, exhaustion, or the evident numerical dominance of one group over the other. [21]

Drawing from experimental research findings, Holtz et al. proposed a theoretical model of knowledge production in Wikipedia, employing the concept of "productive friction". This model posits that a certain level of interpretative conflict within a group is necessary for the collective process to generate knowledge. The model draws an analogy to the socio-cognitive conflict model used in psychology to elucidate individual learning. According to this hypothesis, if the tensions or friction within a group are too low, the potential for knowledge construction becomes limited since the existing knowledge is deemed sufficient to address the problem at hand. Conversely, if the friction within a community of contributors becomes excessively high, it can lead to the dismissal of respective ideas or even the division of the group, similar to how an individual may struggle to adapt and learn when confronted with an overwhelming amount of novelty. [5]

Another study found that a majority of editors on the French Wikipedia had a propensity to share equally in a dictator game. This propensity was correlated with their involvement on Wikipedia (as measured by the time spent and attachment). [22]

Claims in the media about Wikipedia's ideological bias

In 2016, Bloomberg News stated, "The encyclopedia's reliance on outside sources, primarily newspapers, means it will be only as diverse as the rest of the media—which is to say, not very." [23] In 2017, Wired magazine noted on article featuring views on alternative of Wikipedia as follows; [1]

"It’s true that the reach and impact of right-wing encyclopedias like Infogalactic and Metapedia remains muted, for now. Yet their mere existence is a sign that the appeal of a centralized forum for hashing out the truth is fading. Wikipedia might find that its days at the top are numbered."

— Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right, Wired, 21 June 2017

In 2018, Haaretz noted "Wikipedia has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, and has critics from across the spectrum", while also noting that Wikipedia is "usually accused of being too liberal". [24]

In 2020, The Critic , a British conservative magazine, published an article by two pseudonymous American academics which stated that discussions on Wikipedia's reliable sources noticeboard have resulted in the deprecation of a greater number of right-leaning sources than left-leaning sources. The authors asserted that Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee sanctions more right-leaning editors than left-leaning editors on four of approximately thirty contentious topics, and claimed that Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation only recognize "one acceptable opinion" on these topics. [25]

CNN suggested in 2022 that Wikipedia's ideological bias "may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem". [26] The Boston Globe opined, "A Wikipedia editor's interest in an article sprouts from their values and opinions, and their contributions are filtered through their general interpretation of reality. Edict or no, a neutral point of view is impossible. Not even a Wikipedia editor can transcend that." [27] Slate, in a 2022 article, stated "Right-wing commentators have grumbled about [Wikipedia]'s purported left-wing bias for years, but they have been unable to offer a viable alternative encyclopedia option: A conservative version of Wikipedia, Conservapedia, has long floundered with minimal readership", while also noting that conservatives "have not generally attacked Wikipedia as extensively" as other media sources. [28] Also in 2022, Vice News reported, "Researchers have found that Wikipedia has a slight Democratic bias on issues of US politics because many of Wikipedia's editors are international, and the average country has views that are to the left of the Democratic party on issues such as healthcare, climate change, corporate power, capitalism, etc." [29]

Liberal and left-wing bias

Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been critical of Wikipedia since he was laid off as the only editorial employee and departed from the project in 2002. [30] [31] [32] He went on to found and work for competitors to Wikipedia, including Citizendium and Everipedia. Among other criticisms, Sanger has been vocal in his view that Wikipedia's articles present a left-wing and liberal or "establishment point of view". [33] [34] [35] [36] Sanger has cited a number of examples for what he views as left-wing and liberal bias, such as that "Drug legalisation, dubbed drug liberalisation by Wikipedia, has only a little information about any potential hazards of drug legalisation policies" and that the Wikipedia article on Joe Biden does not sufficiently reflect "the concerns that Republicans have had about him" or the Ukraine allegations. [33] [34] [35] [36] Because of these perceived biases, Sanger views Wikipedia as untrustworthy. [36] He has also accused Wikipedia of abandoning its neutrality policy (neutral point of view). [37] [33]

Researchers [38] have analyzed the biases of Wikipedia's editors and how some changes at Wikipedia, including how "Pro-Fringe" editors tend to leave the project, have improved its credibility. These changes include improvements to the NPOV policy. They also noted that Sanger does not like those changes:

The English Wikipedia transformed its content over time through a gradual reinterpretation of its ambiguous Neutral Point of View (NPOV) guideline, the core rule regarding content on Wikipedia. This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse....
Furthermore, the founders of Wikipedia have not intervened to cause new interpretations of the guidelines among the userbase. Sanger, who crafted the core NPOV rule, has condemned the interpretations of the guideline that emerged over time. [38]

Conservapedia

American lawyer and Christian conservative activist Andrew Schlafly founded an online encyclopedia named Conservapedia in 2006 to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias present in Wikipedia. [39] Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias on Wikipedia, including assertions it is "anti-American", "anti-Christian" and "anti-capitalism". [40]

Responses from Wikipedia

In 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said:

The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that. [41]

In 2007, Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia "are not supported by the facts". [42]

During the Gamergate controversy in 2014, in response to an email from a computer science student claiming that Wikipedia has a "complete lack of any sort of attempt at neutrality regarding Gamergate", Wales allegedly wrote, "It is very difficult for me to buy into the notion that gamergate is 'really about ethics in journalism' when every single experience I have personally had with it involved pro-gg people insulting, threatening, doxxing, etc.", and that the movement "has been permanently tarnished and highjacked [sic] by a handful of people who are not what you would hope". [43] Wales defended his comments in response to backlash from supporters of Gamergate, saying that, "it isn't about what I believe. Gg is famous for harassment. Stop and think about why." [44]

In 2021, Wikipedia denied accusations made by Larry Sanger of having a particular political bias, with a spokesperson for the encyclopedia saying that third-party studies have shown that its editors come from a variety of ideological viewpoints and that, "As more people engage in the editing process on Wikipedia, the more neutral articles tend to become." [45]

In a 2023 interview with Lex Fridman, when asked if Wikipedia has a left-leaning bias, Wales said that: [46]

Yeah, so I don't think so, not broadly. And I think you can always point to specific entries and talk about specific biases, but that's part of the process of Wikipedia. Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that. But I see fairly often on Twitter, some quite extreme accusations of bias. And I think actually I don't see it. I don't buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they normally struggle and depending on who they are and what it's about. So it’s certainly true that some people who have quite fringe viewpoints and who knows the full rush of history in 500 years, they might be considered to be pathbreaking geniuses. But at the moment, quite fringe views. And they're just unhappy that Wikipedia doesn’t report on their fringe views as being mainstream. And that, by the way, goes across all kinds of fields.

Controversies

Croatian Wikipedia

From 2011 to 2020, [47] the user-generated editing model of Croatian Wikipedia was co-opted by far-right nationalists who falsified and promoted biased content on a variety of topics: fascism, Serbs of Croatia, as well as the Ustaše and LGBTQ community. [48] These slanted edits included historical denialism, negating or diluting the severity of crimes, and far-right propaganda. [49] This group of editors were banned by Wikipedia in 2021 [50] and received negative reception from the Croatian government, media, and historians. [51] [52] The small size of the Croatian Wikipedia in 2013 (466 active editors of whom 27 were administrators) was cited as a major factor. [53] That year, education minister Željko Jovanović advised students not to use Croatian Wikipedia; [54] [55] [56] [57] historians recommended using the English Wikipedia in the interim. [58]

English Wikipedia

In February 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published a research article in the Journal of Holocaust Research accusing a number of English Wikipedia editors of engaging in a campaign to "[promote] a skewed version of history on Wikipedia", claiming that their actions "[whitewash] the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and [bolster] stereotypes about Jews". [59] [60] [61] The English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee subsequently opened a case to investigate and evaluate the actions of editors in the affected articles. [60] Ultimately, the Committee ruled to ban two editors from contributing to the topic areas, although Klein criticized the proposed remedies as "[lacking] depth and consequence". [62]

Christoph Hube and Anna Samoilenko have criticized Wikipedia, in particular the English Wikipedia, for its insufficient representation of non-Western subject matter, which Samoilenko has deemed "Eurocentric". [7] [63] Anna Samoilenko has said that Wikipedia "reiterates similar biases that are found in the 'ivory tower' of academic historiography". [63]

Japanese Wikipedia

A number of scholars have criticized several Japanese Wikipedia articles for their description of various World War II events, including articles for the Nanjing Massacre ( 南京事件 ), Unit 731 ( 731部隊 ), and comfort women ( 日本の慰安婦 ). [64] [65] [66] [67]

Spanish Wikipedia

In 2022, several conservative cultural and political figures from Spain published a manifesto alleging a "lack of neutrality and ... obvious political bias in [the Spanish] Wikipedia" and claimed that the Spanish Wikipedia is "edited by people who, hiding behind anonymous editor accounts, take the opportunity to carry out political activism, either by including data erroneous or false, or selecting news from the media with a clear political and ideological bias, which refer to controversial, distorted, insidious or inaccurate information". The manifesto was signed by Juan Carlos Girauta, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Joaquín Leguina, Albert Rivera, Daniel Lacalle and Toni Cantó, among other personalities. [68] [ better source needed ]

The Spanish Wikipedia has been criticized for offering a whitewashed coverage of the president of Argentina Cristina Kirchner. [69] [70] [71]

In a July 2022 article, Claudia Peiró from Infobae criticized the Spanish Wikipedia's entry on Cuba for describing the country as a "democracy without parties" with a "free, direct and secret vote". [72]

CAMERA campaign

In April 2008, The Electronic Intifada published an article containing e-mails exchanged by members of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). The stated purpose of the group was "help[ing] us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors". [73] [74] Five Wikipedia editors involved in a CAMERA campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators, who wrote that the project's open nature "is fundamentally incompatible with the creation of a private group to surreptitiously coordinate editing by ideologically like-minded individuals". [73]

See also

Related Research Articles

Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that anyone can edit

A wiki is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Wikipedia</span> English-language edition of Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Croatian Wikipedia</span> Croatian-language edition of Wikipedia

The Croatian Wikipedia is the Croatian language version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, started on 16 February 2003. This version has 224,689 articles and a total of 7.11 million edits have been made. It has 324,157 registered users, out of which 508 have been active in the last 30 days, and 14 administrators. Throughout 2014, fewer than two dozen editors made more than 100 edits a month; around 150 made more than 5 edits a month. As of July 2024, there were about 135 editors making at least 5 edits a month. Around 750 articles are ranked as selected.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of Wikipedia</span> Controversy surrounding the online encyclopedia Wikipedia

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikipedia</span> Free online crowdsourced encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of December 2024, it was ranked fifth by Semrush, and seventh by Similarweb. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reliability of Wikipedia</span>

The reliability of Wikipedia and its volunteer-driven and community-regulated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservapedia</span> American conservative wiki-based online encyclopedia

Conservapedia is an English-language, wiki-based, online encyclopedia written from a self-described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. The website was established in 2006 by American attorney and activist Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias on Wikipedia. It uses editorials and a wiki-based system for content generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RationalWiki</span> Wiki criticizing religion and pseudoscience

RationalWiki is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective. Its stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document crank ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media." It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia, a Christian fundamentalist website, after an incident in which some editors of Conservapedia were banned. RationalWiki has been described as liberal in contrast to Conservapedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Schlafly</span> American lawyer and activist (born 1961)

Andrew Layton Schlafly is an American lawyer and Christian conservative activist. He is the founder and owner of the wiki encyclopedia project Conservapedia. He is the son of the conservative activist and lawyer Phyllis Schlafly.

Wikipedia has been studied extensively. Between 2001 and 2010, researchers published at least 1,746 peer-reviewed articles about the online encyclopedia. Such studies are greatly facilitated by the fact that Wikipedia's database can be downloaded without help from the site owner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Sanger</span> Co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1968)

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia and the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikipedia community</span> Volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia

The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Wikipedia</span> Overview and topical guide to the free online crowdsourced encyclopedia

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender bias on Wikipedia</span>

Gender bias includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial bias on Wikipedia</span> Bias on Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."

Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting or altering of information to make a political position or political candidate seem more attractive. With a distinct association with media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organisation, or TV show covers a political candidate or a policy issue.

Coverage of American politics in Wikipedia is a subject that has received substantial attention from the media. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia has provided coverage of six United States presidential elections, six mid-term elections at the federal level, and numerous "off-year" state elections and special elections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deletion of articles on Wikipedia</span>

Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).

References

  1. 1 2 3 Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right". Backchannel. Wired . Archived from the original on January 17, 2018. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  2. ↑ Burnsed, Brian (June 20, 2011). "Wikipedia Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms". U.S. News & World Report . Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved June 2, 2018.
  3. ↑ Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press. pp. 11, 55–58. ISBN   978-0-262-01447-2. LCCN   2009052779.
  4. 1 2 Greenstein, Shane; Gu, Yuan; Zhu, Feng (March 2017) [October 2016]. "Ideological segregation among online collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians". National Bureau of Economic Research . doi: 10.3386/w22744 .
  5. 1 2 Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim; Cress, Ulrike (2018-10-23). "Using big data techniques for measuring productive friction in mass collaboration online environments". International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. 13 (4): 439–456. doi: 10.1007/s11412-018-9285-y . S2CID   54459581.
  6. 1 2 Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (September 2018). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia". MIS Quarterly . 42 (3): 945–959. doi:10.25300/MISQ/2018/14084. S2CID   44151904.
  7. 1 2 Hube, Christoph (2017). "Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW '17 Companion. pp. 717–721. doi:10.1145/3041021.3053375. ISBN   978-1-4503-4914-7. S2CID   10472970.
  8. ↑ Yan, Hao; Das, Sanmay; Lavoie, Allen; Li, Sirui; Sinclair, Betsy (2019). "The Congressional Classification Challenge". Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. EC '19. pp. 71–89. doi:10.1145/3328526.3329582. ISBN   9781450367929. S2CID   146802854.
  9. ↑ Yasseri, Taha; Spoerri, Anselm; Graham, Mark; Kertesz, Janos (2014). "The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis". In Fichman, P.; Hara, N. (eds.). Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-cultural Issues in Online Collaboration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 25. arXiv: 1305.5566 . ISBN   978-0-8108-9101-2. S2CID   12133330. SSRN   2269392.
  10. ↑ Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" (PDF). Econometrica . 78 (1): 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 14, 2019. Retrieved June 4, 2019.
  11. ↑ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (May 2012). "Is Wikipedia Biased?". American Economic Review . 102 (3): 343–348. doi:10.1257/aer.102.3.343. S2CID   15747824.
  12. ↑ Shi, Feng; Teplitskiy, Misha; Duede, Eamon; Evans, James A. (2019). "The wisdom of polarized crowds". Nature Human Behaviour. 3 (4): 329–336. arXiv: 1712.06414 . doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0541-6. PMID   30971793. S2CID   8947252.
  13. ↑ Blandling, M. (2015, January 19). Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica? Working Knowledge. Harvard Business School. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/is-wikipedia-more-biased-than-encyclopdia-britannica
  14. ↑ Kalla, Joshua L.; Aronow, Peter M. (2015-09-02). "Editorial Bias in Crowd-Sourced Political Information". PLOS One . 10 (9): e0136327. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1036327K. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0136327 . PMC   4558055 . PMID   26331611.
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  16. ↑ Krebs, Marie-Christin; Oeberst, Aileen; von der Beck, Ina (22 April 2023). "The Wisdom of the Crowd is not a Forgone Conclusion. Effects of Self-Selection on (Collaborative) Knowledge Construction". Topics in Cognitive Science. 16 (2): 206–224. doi: 10.1111/tops.12647 . PMID   37086058. S2CID   258276697.
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  18. ↑ Neff, Jessica J.; Laniado, David; Kappler, Karolin E.; Volkovich, Yana; Aragón, Pablo; Kaltenbrunner, Andreas (2013). "Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia". PLOS One . 8 (4): e60584. arXiv: 1210.6883 . Bibcode:2013PLoSO...860584N. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060584 . PMC   3616028 . PMID   23573269.
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  36. 1 2 3 Aggarwal, Mayank (July 16, 2021). "Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia". The Independent . Retrieved September 17, 2021. He argued that there should be at least a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal but there is very little of that.
  37. ↑ Harrison, Stephen (June 9, 2020). "How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice". Slate . Retrieved August 17, 2021.
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  40. ↑ Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right". IT Wire. Archived from the original on March 31, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  41. ↑ Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate: Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia". Mediashift. Archived from the original on October 5, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
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  57. ↑ "Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays". Gay Star News . September 17, 2013. Archived from the original on May 26, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
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  67. ↑ Sato, Yumiko (2021-01-09). 日本語版ウィキペディアで「歴史修正主義」が広がる理由と解決策 [Reasons Why "Historical Revisionism" is Widespread on Japanese Wikipedia and Solutions for It]. Yumiko Sato's Music Therapy Journal (in Japanese). Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  68. ↑ "Denuncian el sesgo político encubierto de Wikipedia en español". ABC (in Spanish). 2022-09-16. Retrieved 2022-09-20.
  69. ↑ "Wikipedia. La tendencia prokirchnerista que esconde la enciclopedia virtual". La Nación (in Spanish). 2020-05-20. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  70. ↑ Fontevecchia, Agustino (2020-08-08). "Cristina vs. Google and the invisible battle for Wikipedia". Buenos Aires Times . Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  71. ↑ "¿Kirchnerpedia? La militancia copó las definiciones políticas de Wikipedia". La Nación (in Spanish). 2021-07-22. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  72. ↑ Peiró, Claudia (2022-07-14). "Insólita definición de la Wikipedia sobre el régimen de Cuba: "Estado unipartidista convencional" y "democracia sin partidos"". Infobae (in Spanish). Retrieved 2023-06-29.
  73. 1 2 Beam, Alex (3 May 2008). "War of the virtual Wiki-worlds". The Boston Globe . Archived from the original on 1 January 2009. Retrieved 4 May 2008. In what was probably not a very smart idea, Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst for CAMERA, put out an e-mail call for 10 volunteers "to help us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors". [...] More than 50 sympathizers answered the call, and Ini put his campaign into motion.
    In follow-up e-mails to his recruits, Ini emphasized the secrecy of the campaign: "There is no need to advertise the fact that we have these group discussions", he wrote. "Anti-Israel editors will seize on anything to try to discredit people who attempt to challenge their problematic assertions, and will be all too happy to pretend, and announce, that a 'Zionist' cabal . . . is trying to hijack Wikipedia."
    [...] Someone leaked four weeks' worth of communications from within Ini's organization, and the quotes weren't pretty. Describing the Wiki-campaign, a member of Ini's corps writes, "We will go to war after we have built an army, equipped [sic] it, trained." There is also some back-and-forth about the need to become Wikipedia administrators, to better influence the encyclopedia's articles.
  74. ↑ McElroy, Damien (7 May 2008). "Israeli battles rage on Wikipedia". The Telegraph . Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 5 April 2021.

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