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Ideological bias on Wikipedia

January 13, 2023

Real or perceived ideological bias on the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, especially on its English-language edition, has been a frequent 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 ideology of its volunteer editors, and the effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.[1][2]

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]

Analyses

Bias in content in relation to U.S. politics

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School have authored several studies examining Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics and the editors that work on them to identify aspects of ideological bias within its collective intelligence.

In Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012), the authors 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.[6] This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican 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 vs. Republican members of U.S. Congress and this lean rating is assigned to a Wikipedia contribution that includes the same key phrase. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.[7][8][9]: 4–5 

In a more extensive American follow-up to the 2012 study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia (2018), Greenstein and Zhu directly compare about 4,000 articles related to U.S. politics between Wikipedia (written by an online community) and the matching articles from 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][10][11][12][13]

Collaboration on contested or slanted content

Research shows that Wikipedia is prone to Neutral Point of View violations caused by bias from its editors, including systemic bias.[14][15]

The study Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians (2016) by Greenstein, Zhu, and Yuan Gu was a working paper that was not peer-reviewed.[4] It focused on the behaviors of contributing editors themselves. Working again within a subset of articles related to U.S. politics and using terminology introduced in Is Wikipedia Biased?, the authors offer several significant findings.[4][13][16][17] They found that editors are slightly more likely to contribute to articles which exhibit 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 view—which the authors called unsegregated—as opposed to debates involving only editors with homogeneous views (segregated). The unsegregated conversation is supposed to favor the convergence towards a neutral point of view.[4] They also found that the degree of an editor bias decreases over time and experience, and decreases faster for editors involved in editing 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.

A subsequent peer-reviewed study found that a model of this productive friction, which is defined as the collective resolution of socio-cognitive conflicts, can explain and predict the dynamics of knowledge production on Wikipedia, further supporting the hypothesis that collaborative work from multiple editors with opposing views help reach neutrality.[5] Furthermore, another study found on the French Wikipedia that a majority of editors had a propensity to share equally in a dictator game, and that this propensity was correlated with their involvement on Wikipedia (as measured by the time spent and attachment).[18]

Claims of bias

According to Bloomberg News in 2016, "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."[19] According to Haaretz in 2018, "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".[20]

According to CNN in 2022, Wikipedia's ideological bias "may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem."[21] According to The Boston Globe in 2022, "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."[22] According to Slate in 2022, "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.[23]

Liberal and left-wing bias

Larry Sanger

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia ever since he was laid off as the only editorial employee of Wikipedia in its early stages and left the project in 2002.[24][25][26] 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".[27][28][29] 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.[27][28][29][30] Because of these perceived biases, Sanger views Wikipedia as untrustworthy.[30] He has also accused Wikipedia of abandoning its neutrality policy (neutral point of view).[31]

Conservapedia

American Christian conservative activist Andrew Schlafly founded the online encyclopedia Conservapedia in 2006 based on his view of "liberal bias" on Wikipedia.[32] 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".[33]

Infogalactic

American far-right activist[34] Vox Day founded the online encyclopedia Infogalactic in 2017[35] to counter what he views as "the left-wing thought police who administer [Wikipedia]".[36][37]

Croatian Wikipedia and right-wing bias

Main article: Croatian Wikipedia § Controversy about right-wing bias

In 2013, Jutarnji list reported that the administrators and editors of the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia were projecting a right-wing bias into topics such as the Ustasha regime, anti-fascism, Serbs, the LGBT community, and gay marriage. Many of the critics were former editors of the website who said they had been exiled for expressing concern. The small size of the Croatian Wikipedia (as of September 2013, it had 466 active editors of whom 27 were administrators) was cited as a major factor. Two days after the story broke, Croatian Minister of Science, Education and Sports Željko Jovanović advised students not to use the website.[38][39][40][41] In 2018, historians with the University of Zagreb told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) that the Croatian Wikipedia has "many shortcomings, factual mistakes and ideologically loaded language" and that students are often referred to the English Wikipedia instead of their native Croatian, especially for topics on Croatian history.[42]

Japanese Wikipedia and historical revisionism

In a March 2021 article, Yumiko Sato from Slate criticized the Japanese-language version of Wikipedia for spreading historical revisionist misinformation about the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women and Unit 731.[43]

Spanish Wikipedia

In 2022, several Spanish cultural and political figures 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".[44] The manifesto signed by Juan Carlos Girauta, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Joaquín Leguina, Albert Rivera, Daniel Lacalle and Toni Cantó among other right-wing personalities.[45]

The Spanish Wikipedia has been criticized for offering a whitewashed coverage of Cristina Kirchner.[46][47][48]

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."[49] In 2007, Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia "are not supported by the facts".[50]

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".[51]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right". Backchannel. Wired. 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. 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. ^ a b c d Greenstein, Shane; Gu, Yuan; Zhu, Feng (March 2017) [October 2016]. "Ideological segregation among online collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians". National Bureau of Economic Research. No. w22744. doi:10.3386/w22744.
  5. ^ a b Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim; Cress, Ulrike (October 23, 2018). "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.
  6. ^ Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" (PDF). Econometrica. The Econometric Society. 78 (1): 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195. (PDF) from the original on March 14, 2019. Retrieved June 4, 2019.
  7. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (May 2012). "Is Wikipedia Biased?". American Economic Review. American Economic Association. 102 (3): 343–348. doi:10.1257/aer.102.3.343.
  8. ^ Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Wikipedia perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. from the original on May 23, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ "Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased?". BizEd. AACSB. May 1, 2015. from the original on May 22, 2018. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  12. ^ Bhattacharya, Ananya (November 6, 2016). "Wikipedia's not as biased as you might think". Quartz. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
  13. ^ a b Guo, Jeff (October 25, 2016). "Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws". The Washington Post. from the original on May 23, 2018. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  14. ^ Hube, Christoph (2017). "Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW '17 Companion). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 717–721.: 717–721. doi:10.1145/3041021.3053375. ISBN 9781450349147. S2CID 10472970.
  15. ^ Yan, Hao; Das, Sanmay; Lavoie, Allen; Li, Sirui; Sinclair, Betsy (2018). "The Congressional Classification Challenge: Domain Specificity and Partisan Intensity". EC '19 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. EC '19: 71–89. doi:10.1145/3328526.3329582. ISBN 9781450367929. S2CID 146802854.
  16. ^ Bernick, Michael (March 28, 2018). "The Power Of The Wikimedia Movement Beyond Wikimedia". Forbes. from the original on March 30, 2018. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
  17. ^ Gebelhoff, Robert (October 19, 2016). "Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet". The Washington Post. from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
  18. ^ Nguyen, Godefroy Dang; Dejean, Sylvain; Jullien, Nicolas (February 2018). "Do open online projects create social norms?" (PDF). Journal of Institutional Economics. 14 (1): 45–70. doi:10.1017/S1744137417000182. S2CID 91179798. (PDF) from the original on August 27, 2019. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
  19. ^ "Is Wikipedia Woke?". Bloomberg News. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  20. ^ Benjakob, Omer (May 27, 2018). "The Witch Hunt Against a 'pro-Israel' Wikipedia Editor". Haaretz. Retrieved March 16, 2022.
  21. ^ Kelly, Samantha Murphy (May 20, 2022). "Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started". CNN. Retrieved May 24, 2022.
  22. ^ Cammack, Shaun (2022-07-08). "I quit Twitter and discovered Wikipedia's righteous, opinionated, utterly absorbing battles over The Truth". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
  23. ^ Breslow, Samuel (2022-08-11). "How a False Claim About Wikipedia Sparked a Right-Wing Media Frenzy". Slate. Retrieved 2022-08-12.
  24. ^ Duval, Jared (November 14, 2010). Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 80. ISBN 978-1-60819-484-1. Retrieved August 7, 2022.
  25. ^ Schwartz, Zach (November 11, 2015). "Wikipedia's Co-Founder Is Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic". Vice. from the original on November 14, 2015.
  26. ^ . The Australian. AFP. October 19, 2006. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014.
  27. ^ a b Freddie Sayers (July 14, 2021). "Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created". UnHerd (Podcast). UnHerd. Retrieved May 25, 2022.
  28. ^ a b Sabur, Rozina (July 16, 2021). "The Left has taken over Wikipedia and stripped it of neutrality, says co-creator". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved December 2, 2021. Mr Sanger added that "very little" reference to scandals and allegations against the Bidens, for instance relating to their business dealings in Ukraine, could be found on Wikipedia.
  29. ^ a b Spence, Madeleine (August 1, 2021). "Larry Sanger: 'I wouldn't trust Wikipedia — and I helped to invent it'". The Sunday Times. London. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  30. ^ a b 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.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  31. ^ Harrison, Stephen (June 9, 2020). "How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice". Slate. Retrieved August 17, 2021.
  32. ^ Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Rightwing website challenges 'liberal bias' of Wikipedia". The Guardian. from the original on June 16, 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2018.
  33. ^ Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right". IT Wire. from the original on March 31, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  34. ^ Robertson, Adi (October 9, 2017). "Two months ago, the internet tried to banish Nazis. No one knows if it worked". The Verge. from the original on April 4, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2019.
  35. ^ Coren, Giles (July 22, 2017). "Game of Thrones is Tolkien with chlamydia". The Times. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  36. ^ Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right". Wired. from the original on January 17, 2018. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  37. ^ Huetlin, Josephine (October 8, 2017). "How a Nazi Slur for 'Fake News' Became an Alt-Right Rallying Cry". The Daily Beast. from the original on June 21, 2018. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  38. ^ Sampson, Tim (October 1, 2013). "How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history". The Daily Dot. from the original on June 16, 2018. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  39. ^ Penić, Goran (September 10, 2013). "Desničari preuzeli uređivanje hrvatske Wikipedije" [Right-wing editors took over the Croatian Wikipedia]. Jutarnji list (in Croatian). from the original on March 25, 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  40. ^ "Fascist movement takes over Croatian Wikipedia?". InSerbia Today. September 11, 2013. from the original on April 11, 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  41. ^ "Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays". Gay Star News. September 17, 2013. from the original on May 26, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  42. ^ Milekic, Sven (March 26, 2018). "How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear". Balkan Insight. Zagreb: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. from the original on March 31, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
  43. ^ Sato, Yumiko (March 19, 2021). "Non-English Editions of Wikipedia Have a Misinformation Problem". Slate. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  44. ^ "Denuncian el sesgo político encubierto de Wikipedia en español". abc (in Spanish). 2022-09-16. Retrieved 2022-09-20.
  45. ^ "Denuncian el sesgo político encubierto de Wikipedia en español". ABC (in Spanish). 2022-09-16.
  46. ^ "Wikipedia. La tendencia prokirchnerista que esconde la enciclopedia virtual". La Nación (in Spanish). 2020-05-20. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  47. ^ Fontevecchia, Agustino (2020-08-08). "Cristina vs. Google and the invisible battle for Wikipedia". Buenos Aires Times. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  48. ^ "¿Kirchnerpedia? La militancia copó las definiciones políticas de Wikipedia". La Nación (in Spanish). 2021-07-22. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
  49. ^ Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate: Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia". PBS Mediashift. from the original on October 5, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  50. ^ "Conservative wants to set Wikipedia right". The Toronto Star. March 11, 2007. ISSN 0319-0781. Retrieved December 16, 2021.
  51. ^ Spence, Madeleine (August 1, 2021). "Larry Sanger: 'I wouldn't trust Wikipedia — and I helped to invent it'". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.

Further reading

  • Margolin, Drew B.; Goodman, Sasha; Keegan, Brian; Lin, Yu-Ru; Lazer, David (August 5, 2015). "Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability". Information, Communication & Society. 19 (8): 1029–1045. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1069871. S2CID 55283904.

January 13, 2023
ideological, bias, wikipedia, real, perceived, ideological, bias, free, online, encyclopedia, wikipedia, especially, english, language, edition, been, frequent, subject, academic, analysis, public, criticism, project, questions, relate, whether, content, biase. Real or perceived ideological bias on the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia especially on its English language edition has been a frequent 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 ideology of its volunteer editors and the effects this may have on the encyclopedia s reliability 1 2 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 Contents 1 Analyses 1 1 Bias in content in relation to U S politics 1 2 Collaboration on contested or slanted content 2 Claims of bias 2 1 Liberal and left wing bias 2 1 1 Larry Sanger 2 1 2 Conservapedia 2 1 3 Infogalactic 2 2 Croatian Wikipedia and right wing bias 2 3 Japanese Wikipedia and historical revisionism 2 4 Spanish Wikipedia 3 Responses from Wikipedia 4 See also 5 References 6 Further readingAnalysesBias in content in relation to U S politics Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School have authored several studies examining Wikipedia articles related to U S politics and the editors that work on them to identify aspects of ideological bias within its collective intelligence In Is Wikipedia Biased 2012 the authors 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 6 This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican 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 vs Republican members of U S Congress and this lean rating is assigned to a Wikipedia contribution that includes the same key phrase The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic whereas those created more recently held more balance They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall 7 8 9 4 5 In a more extensive American follow up to the 2012 study Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia 2018 Greenstein and Zhu directly compare about 4 000 articles related to U S politics between Wikipedia written by an online community and the matching articles from Encyclopaedia 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 10 11 12 13 Collaboration on contested or slanted content Research shows that Wikipedia is prone to Neutral Point of View violations caused by bias from its editors including systemic bias 14 15 The study Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators Evidence from Wikipedians 2016 by Greenstein Zhu and Yuan Gu was a working paper that was not peer reviewed 4 It focused on the behaviors of contributing editors themselves Working again within a subset of articles related to U S politics and using terminology introduced in Is Wikipedia Biased the authors offer several significant findings 4 13 16 17 They found that editors are slightly more likely to contribute to articles which exhibit 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 view which the authors called unsegregated as opposed to debates involving only editors with homogeneous views segregated The unsegregated conversation is supposed to favor the convergence towards a neutral point of view 4 They also found that the degree of an editor bias decreases over time and experience and decreases faster for editors involved in editing 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 A subsequent peer reviewed study found that a model of this productive friction which is defined as the collective resolution of socio cognitive conflicts can explain and predict the dynamics of knowledge production on Wikipedia further supporting the hypothesis that collaborative work from multiple editors with opposing views help reach neutrality 5 Furthermore another study found on the French Wikipedia that a majority of editors had a propensity to share equally in a dictator game and that this propensity was correlated with their involvement on Wikipedia as measured by the time spent and attachment 18 Claims of biasAccording to Bloomberg News in 2016 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 19 According to Haaretz in 2018 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 20 According to CNN in 2022 Wikipedia s ideological bias may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem 21 According to The Boston Globe in 2022 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 22 According to Slate in 2022 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 23 Liberal and left wing bias Larry Sanger Wikipedia co founder Larry Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia ever since he was laid off as the only editorial employee of Wikipedia in its early stages and left the project in 2002 24 25 26 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 27 28 29 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 27 28 29 30 Because of these perceived biases Sanger views Wikipedia as untrustworthy 30 He has also accused Wikipedia of abandoning its neutrality policy neutral point of view 31 Conservapedia American Christian conservative activist Andrew Schlafly founded the online encyclopedia Conservapedia in 2006 based on his view of liberal bias on Wikipedia 32 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 33 Infogalactic American far right activist 34 Vox Day founded the online encyclopedia Infogalactic in 2017 35 to counter what he views as the left wing thought police who administer Wikipedia 36 37 Croatian Wikipedia and right wing bias Main article Croatian Wikipedia Controversy about right wing bias In 2013 Jutarnji list reported that the administrators and editors of the Croatian language version of Wikipedia were projecting a right wing bias into topics such as the Ustasha regime anti fascism Serbs the LGBT community and gay marriage Many of the critics were former editors of the website who said they had been exiled for expressing concern The small size of the Croatian Wikipedia as of September 2013 it had 466 active editors of whom 27 were administrators was cited as a major factor Two days after the story broke Croatian Minister of Science Education and Sports Zeljko Jovanovic advised students not to use the website 38 39 40 41 In 2018 historians with the University of Zagreb told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network BIRN that the Croatian Wikipedia has many shortcomings factual mistakes and ideologically loaded language and that students are often referred to the English Wikipedia instead of their native Croatian especially for topics on Croatian history 42 Japanese Wikipedia and historical revisionism In a March 2021 article Yumiko Sato from Slate criticized the Japanese language version of Wikipedia for spreading historical revisionist misinformation about the Nanjing Massacre comfort women and Unit 731 43 Spanish Wikipedia In 2022 several Spanish cultural and political figures 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 44 The manifesto signed by Juan Carlos Girauta Alvaro Vargas Llosa Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo Joaquin Leguina Albert Rivera Daniel Lacalle and Toni Canto among other right wing personalities 45 The Spanish Wikipedia has been criticized for offering a whitewashed coverage of Cristina Kirchner 46 47 48 Responses from WikipediaIn 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 49 In 2007 Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia are not supported by the facts 50 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 51 See alsoGeographical bias on Wikipedia Reliability of Wikipedia Criticism of WikipediaReferences a b 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 Burnsed Brian June 20 2011 Wikipedia Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms U S News amp World Report Archived from the original on June 12 2018 Retrieved June 2 2018 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 a b c d Greenstein Shane Gu Yuan Zhu Feng March 2017 October 2016 Ideological segregation among online collaborators Evidence from Wikipedians National Bureau of Economic Research No w22744 doi 10 3386 w22744 a b Holtz Peter Kimmerle Joachim Cress Ulrike October 23 2018 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 Gentzkow M Shapiro J M January 2010 What Drives Media Slant Evidence From U S Daily Newspapers PDF Econometrica The Econometric Society 78 1 35 71 doi 10 3982 ECTA7195 Archived PDF from the original on March 14 2019 Retrieved June 4 2019 Greenstein Shane Zhu Feng May 2012 Is Wikipedia Biased American Economic Review American Economic Association 102 3 343 348 doi 10 1257 aer 102 3 343 Khimm Suzy June 18 2012 Study Wikipedia perpetuates political bias The Washington Post Archived from the original on May 23 2018 Retrieved May 22 2018 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 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 Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased BizEd AACSB May 1 2015 Archived from the original on May 22 2018 Retrieved May 17 2018 Bhattacharya Ananya November 6 2016 Wikipedia s not as biased as you might think Quartz Retrieved June 4 2018 a b Guo Jeff October 25 2016 Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet s biggest flaws The Washington Post Archived from the original on May 23 2018 Retrieved May 17 2018 Hube Christoph 2017 Bias in Wikipedia Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion WWW 17 Companion International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee Republic and Canton of Geneva CHE 717 721 717 721 doi 10 1145 3041021 3053375 ISBN 9781450349147 S2CID 10472970 Yan Hao Das Sanmay Lavoie Allen Li Sirui Sinclair Betsy 2018 The Congressional Classification Challenge Domain Specificity and Partisan Intensity EC 19 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation EC 19 71 89 doi 10 1145 3328526 3329582 ISBN 9781450367929 S2CID 146802854 Bernick Michael March 28 2018 The Power Of The Wikimedia Movement Beyond Wikimedia Forbes Archived from the original on March 30 2018 Retrieved June 4 2018 Gebelhoff Robert October 19 2016 Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet The Washington Post Archived from the original on November 30 2018 Retrieved June 4 2018 Nguyen Godefroy Dang Dejean Sylvain Jullien Nicolas February 2018 Do open online projects create social norms PDF Journal of Institutional Economics 14 1 45 70 doi 10 1017 S1744137417000182 S2CID 91179798 Archived PDF from the original on August 27 2019 Retrieved August 27 2019 Is Wikipedia Woke Bloomberg News 2016 12 22 Retrieved 2019 11 23 Benjakob Omer May 27 2018 The Witch Hunt Against a pro Israel Wikipedia Editor Haaretz Retrieved March 16 2022 Kelly Samantha Murphy May 20 2022 Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started CNN Retrieved May 24 2022 Cammack Shaun 2022 07 08 I quit Twitter and discovered Wikipedia s righteous opinionated utterly absorbing battles over The Truth The Boston Globe Retrieved 2022 07 19 Breslow Samuel 2022 08 11 How a False Claim About Wikipedia Sparked a Right Wing Media Frenzy Slate Retrieved 2022 08 12 Duval Jared November 14 2010 Next Generation Democracy What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power Politics and Change Bloomsbury Publishing USA p 80 ISBN 978 1 60819 484 1 Retrieved August 7 2022 Schwartz Zach November 11 2015 Wikipedia s Co Founder Is Wikipedia s Most Outspoken Critic Vice Archived from the original on November 14 2015 Wikipedia founder sets up rival The Australian AFP October 19 2006 Archived from the original on August 8 2014 a b Freddie Sayers July 14 2021 Wikipedia co founder I no longer trust the website I created UnHerd Podcast UnHerd Retrieved May 25 2022 a b Sabur Rozina July 16 2021 The Left has taken over Wikipedia and stripped it of neutrality says co creator The Telegraph ISSN 0307 1235 Archived from the original on January 12 2022 Retrieved December 2 2021 Mr Sanger added that very little reference to scandals and allegations against the Bidens for instance relating to their business dealings in Ukraine could be found on Wikipedia a b Spence Madeleine August 1 2021 Larry Sanger I wouldn t trust Wikipedia and I helped to invent it The Sunday Times London ISSN 0140 0460 Archived from the original on August 1 2021 Retrieved August 1 2021 a b 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 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint url status link Harrison Stephen June 9 2020 How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice Slate Retrieved August 17 2021 Johnson Bobbie March 1 2007 Rightwing website challenges liberal bias of Wikipedia The Guardian Archived from the original on June 16 2018 Retrieved June 5 2018 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 Robertson Adi October 9 2017 Two months ago the internet tried to banish Nazis No one knows if it worked The Verge Archived from the original on April 4 2018 Retrieved February 2 2019 Coren Giles July 22 2017 Game of Thrones is Tolkien with chlamydia The Times Retrieved May 25 2018 Fitts Alexis Sobel June 21 2017 Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt Right Wired Archived from the original on January 17 2018 Retrieved January 16 2018 Huetlin Josephine October 8 2017 How a Nazi Slur for Fake News Became an Alt Right Rallying Cry The Daily Beast Archived from the original on June 21 2018 Retrieved May 25 2018 Sampson Tim October 1 2013 How pro fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia s history The Daily Dot Archived from the original on June 16 2018 Retrieved May 25 2018 Penic Goran September 10 2013 Desnicari preuzeli uređivanje hrvatske Wikipedije Right wing editors took over the Croatian Wikipedia Jutarnji list in Croatian Archived from the original on March 25 2016 Retrieved May 25 2018 Fascist movement takes over Croatian Wikipedia InSerbia Today September 11 2013 Archived from the original on April 11 2016 Retrieved May 25 2018 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 Milekic Sven March 26 2018 How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear Balkan Insight Zagreb Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Archived from the original on March 31 2018 Retrieved May 26 2018 Sato Yumiko March 19 2021 Non English Editions of Wikipedia Have a Misinformation Problem Slate Retrieved March 22 2021 Denuncian el sesgo politico encubierto de Wikipedia en espanol abc in Spanish 2022 09 16 Retrieved 2022 09 20 Denuncian el sesgo politico encubierto de Wikipedia en espanol ABC in Spanish 2022 09 16 Wikipedia La tendencia prokirchnerista que esconde la enciclopedia virtual La Nacion in Spanish 2020 05 20 Retrieved 2022 03 05 Fontevecchia Agustino 2020 08 08 Cristina vs Google and the invisible battle for Wikipedia Buenos Aires Times Retrieved 2022 03 05 Kirchnerpedia La militancia copo las definiciones politicas de Wikipedia La Nacion in Spanish 2021 07 22 Retrieved 2022 03 05 Glaser Mark April 21 2006 Email Debate Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia PBS Mediashift Archived from the original on October 5 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Conservative wants to set Wikipedia right The Toronto Star March 11 2007 ISSN 0319 0781 Retrieved December 16 2021 Spence Madeleine August 1 2021 Larry Sanger I wouldn t trust Wikipedia and I helped to invent it The Sunday Times ISSN 0140 0460 Archived from the original on August 1 2021 Retrieved August 1 2021 Further readingMargolin Drew B Goodman Sasha Keegan Brian Lin Yu Ru Lazer David August 5 2015 Wiki worthy collective judgment of candidate notability Information Communication amp Society 19 8 1029 1045 doi 10 1080 1369118X 2015 1069871 S2CID 55283904 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Ideological bias on Wikipedia amp oldid 1131628132, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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