Ideological bias on Wikipedia

Questions about ideological bias on Wikipedia are reflected in academic analysis and public criticism of Wikipedia, and especially its English-language site, in relation to whether or not its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideology of its volunteer Wikipedia editors and any effect it may have on the reliability of the online encyclopedia.[1][2] Wikipedia has 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.[lower-alpha 1][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 fewer edits by a smaller number of ideologically homogeneous contributors were more likely to reflect editorial bias.

Analyses

Greenstein and Zhu

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, professor and associate professor respectively at 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 the its collective intelligence.

Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012)

In Is Wikipedia Biased?, 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.[4] This slant index measures an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican based on key phrases within the text and gives a rating for the relative amount of that lean. The authors used this method to measure whether Wikipedia was meeting its stated policy of neutral point of view. They also examined the changes to articles over time as they are revised. 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.[5][6][7]:4-5

Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators (2016)

The 2016 study Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians by Greenstein, Zhu, and Yuan Gu 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 two significant findings. They found that slanted editors are slightly more likely to contribute to articles which exhibit the opposite slant - a tendency that the authors called Opposites Attract - which indicates a "prevalence of unsegregated conversations at Wikipedia over time". They also found that the degree of editor bias is not persistent, but lessens over time - "[t]he largest declines are found among contributors who edit or add content to articles that have more biases" - but estimated that this convergence takes about one year on average longer for Republicans than for Democrats.[8][9][10][11][12]

Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? (2017)

In a more extensive American follow-up study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, 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".[13][14][1][15][10]

Claims of bias

Conservapedia

American Christian conservative activist Andrew Schlafly founded the online encyclopedia Conservapedia in 2006 based on his view of "liberal bias" on Wikipedia, which he also described as "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American".[16] He said that he "found that the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views" and that "facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored", that some articles use British English, and that Christianity is not given credit for the Renaissance.[17] Conservapedia has itself received negative reactions from political figures, journalists, and scientists for its bias and factual inaccuracies.[18][19][20][21][16][22]

Croatian Wikipedia

In 2013, the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia drew media attention after the daily newspaper Jutarnji list reported on critic's concerns that administrators and editors on the website were projecting a right-wing bias into topics such as the Ustashe 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 which 27 were administrators — was cited as a major factor. Two days after the story broke, Croatian Minister Željko Jovanović advised students not to use the website.[23][24][25][26] 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.[27]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ For the internal Wikipedia policy on neutrality, see Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. For the internal Wikipedia policy on verifiability see Wikipedia:Verifiability.

References

  1. 1 2 Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right". Backchannel. Wired. Retrieved 1 June 2018.
  2. ↑ Burnsed, Brian (June 20, 2011). "Wikipedia Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved 2 June 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. ↑ Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers". Econometrica. The Econometric Society. 78 (1): 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195.
  5. ↑ 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.
  6. ↑ Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Wikipedia perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
  7. ↑ Shi, F.; Teplitskiy, M.; Duede, E.; Evans, J.A. (November 29, 2017). "The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". (paper). arXiv:1712.06414. Bibcode:2017arXiv171206414S.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ Nguyen, Godefroy Dang; Dejean, Sylvain; Jullien, Nicolas (February 2018). "Do open online projects create social norms?". Journal of Institutional Economics. 14 (1): 45–70. doi:10.1017/S1744137417000182.
  10. 1 2 Guo, Jeff (October 25, 2016). "Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  11. ↑ Bernick, Michael (March 28, 2018). "The Power Of The Wikimedia Movement Beyond Wikimedia". Forbes. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  12. ↑ Gebelhoff, Robert (October 19, 2016). "Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet". The Washington Post. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  13. ↑ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (2014). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia" (PDF). MIS Quarterly.
  14. ↑ "Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased?". BizEd. AACSB. May 1, 2015. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  15. ↑ Bhattacharya, Ananya (November 6, 2016). "Wikipedia's not as biased as you might think". Quartz. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  16. 1 2 Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Rightwing website challenges 'liberal bias' of Wikipedia". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 June 2018.
  17. ↑ Johnson, Bobbie (March 2, 2007). "Conservapedia - the U.S. religious right's answer to Wikipedia". Retrieved 2018-06-02.
  18. ↑ Zeller, Shawn (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia: See Under "Right"". The New York Times.
  19. ↑ Calore, Michael (February 28, 2007). "What Would Jesus Wiki?". Wired.
  20. ↑ Chung, Andrew (March 11, 2007). "Conservative wants to set Wikipedia right". Toronto Star.
  21. ↑ Clarke, conor (March 1, 2007). "A fact of one's own". The Guardian.
  22. ↑ Anderson, Nate (March 4, 2007). "Conservapedia hopes to "fix" Wikipedia's "liberal bias"". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2018-06-02.
  23. ↑ Sampson, Tim (October 1, 2013). "How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history". The Daily Dot. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  24. ↑ Penić, Goran (10 September 2013). "Desničari preuzeli uređivanje hrvatske Wikipedije" [Right-wing editors took over the Croatian Wikipedia]. Jutarnji list (in Croatian). Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  25. ↑ "Fascist movement takes over Croatian Wikipedia?". InSerbia Today. September 11, 2013. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  26. ↑ reporter3 (September 17, 2013). "Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays". Gay Star News. Retrieved 26 May 2018.
  27. ↑ Milekic, Sven (March 26, 2018). "How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear". Balkan Insight. Zagreb: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Retrieved 26 May 2018.

Further reading

  • Margolin, Drew B.; Goodman, Sasha; Keegan, Brian; Lin, Yu-Ru; Lazer, David (5 August 2015). "Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability" (PDF). Information, Communication & Society. 19 (8): 1029–1045. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1069871. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
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