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Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias (wikipedia.org)
42 points by akolbe on Feb 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments



Wikipedia's bias is more prevalent on specific pages, or collections of topics. Many pages have zero or near zero bias. You're not going to have much bias on scientific topics like, say resonant structures.

It's a lot more prone to bias on biographical topics, where senior editors can essentially suppress any negative coverage, or promote embellished facts about a person. Take a gander at the talk page of controversial articles, or more specifically the history of the talk page since talk pages themselves get pruned and censored.


I agree. However, I would add that there's an equal risk of biographies being slanted negatively. Cf. this week's article by Russ Baker:

https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/why-we-should-be-wary-of-wiki...

Or this one about "revenge editing", published in Salon:

https://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/revenge_ego_and_the_corrupt...

As for bias, the thing with Wikipedia is that it can be incredibly patchy. Overall, in the English Wikipedia, the bias is undoubtedly slightly left of centre, but you may also have areas that swing the other way. Just yesterday, for example, a study appeared in The Journal of Holocaust Research alleging that Wikipedia's English-language coverage of Holocaust history is systematically distorted by right-wing Polish editors:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

Similarly there have been allegations that nationalists and historical revisionists hold sway in the Japanese Wikipedia:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...

The Croatian Wikipedia was acknowledged by the Wikimedia Foundation itself to have been in the hand of right-wing extremists for about a decade:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform...

Wikipedia is vast. The amount and direction of bias can vary from language to language, from article to article, even from paragraph to paragraph.


Your post is incredibly enlightening. This study, that looked at 30 million citations, found left-wing bias, even after controlling for news media factual reliability.

Yet media only (or mostly) report anecdotal examples of right-wing bias.

I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. —Thomas Jefferson


Yes, you could argue that the systematic left-wing bias should be a bigger story than the occasional right-wing excess.

This said, there are frequent media stories about the left-wing bias as well. A Google search for Wikipedia "left-wing bias" provides rich pickings.

It is noticeable that many of the outlets that run them are deemed "unreliable" by (English) Wikipedia. :/

(Love that quote.)


For a very long time since 2004, is a real struggle to get “Deaf” to be recognized as a culture on Wikipedia.

But these Wikipedia authors seems hell-bent on medical approach and total ignorance, not to mention that Wikipedia wants their preferred but offensive “hearing-impaired” over our preferred “hard-of-hearing”.

So, a bunch of us Deaf Wikipedians still got overridden by these “Liberal” moderators wearing pink/purple hair, multi-piercing and what nots.

Even deleted my drafts under my User: folder without my permission on various Deaf things. (only Deaf History made the cut).

I’ve. since stayed clear of Wikipedia and their progressive armies.



> https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Mmm, in this polemic, Larry Sanger complains that “[Wikipedians] live in a fantasy world of their own making.” Yet, in the same polemic, he believes conspiracy about the MMR vaccine, and asks for religious scripture to be treated as fact.

He says he asks for neutrality, but perhaps he is being reductive in his definition of neutrality.


I am not certain it is just "moderate", but it definitely exists.


If you think you hold the truth, you don’t. If you think your position is unbiased, you’re wrong. We are all flawed and ignorant humans and recognizing it is the first step to enlightenment.


WikiMedia is known to have paid "edit-thons" to edit their site.

These are grants given to organizations, primarily of a certain political bent, with the express purpose of creating and editing content. And when such grants are given out on this manner, it's hardly a surprise when the desired outcome is achieved.


Always a lot of drama at the Project Veritas article if you want to see their techniques in action.


This is obvious if you've read an article on any even sightly controversial topic.

Know Your Meme is less partisan.


[flagged]


I’m not sure you’re serious or not. Just in case you are, this would be a horrible position to take on the concept of truth. It would make you unaware of the fallacy of your political side. No one side has truth on their side.


Countries have political skews so it's entirely possible for truth to be heavily skewed conservative in the USSR and liberal in the USA. This is why the let's cover 2 points of view press is garbage. 2 points are 2 conservative war hawk dominated parties in the US.


An article on global warming would be described as "leftist" in the US despite accurately reflecting reality. How else would you word the fact that american conservatives reject reality in a lot of cases? Remember, a significant amount of these conservatives openly believe the earth is 6000 years old and that geology is a satanic ploy to make people doubt god.


"Breaking down polarization ratings by ORES article topic areas, "we cannot see differences among macro topics". This "general trend" was also found for the top 10 (sub-)topic areas and the top 10 Wikiprojects, although with "minor shifts [...]. For example, the topic sports has a higher conservative-leaning fraction of citations, all the while maintaining a liberal-leaning skew. The WikiProjects Politics and India are more liberal-leaning than the average, instead. Taken together, these results confirm that the overall trend towards liberal political polarization is not specific to some areas of Wikipedia, but seems to be widespread across topics and WikiProjects.""

In what way does your theory explain that sport articles should reflect a leftist world view?


Many if not most of those who are liberal enough to "believe" in global warming also believe in countless other forms of dumb shit that's even more stupid than the Earth being 6,000 years old. Otherwise they would reject religion outright, or in the other case accept it as ansolute. Whatever someone believes is only loosely related to their other beliefs, science or not. Observe what people do in practice, not just listen to what they say, and you'll find lots of fake Conservatives and Orthodox Progressives.


Its this sort of arrogance that gets us into trouble in the first place.

Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.


> We also show that this effect is not mitigated by controlling for news media factual reliability.




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