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Statisticians Investigate Political Bias On Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include 'republican' or 'democrat' as keywords, and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. 'The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic' but gradually, Wikipedia's articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly, some articles have the expected political slant (civil rights tends Democrat; trade tends Republican), but at the same time many seemingly controversial topics, such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. 'Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.'"
Surely they need to investigate libertarian bias (especially seeing as Wales himself is, how should I put this, a raving Objectivist nutjob). The fact that libertarian beliefs overlap with democrat and republican beliefs can explain the two separate slants with one single hypothesis.
(civil rights tends Democrat; trade tends Republican)
Could that be simply because Democrats invent/introduce/overuse new phrases and talking points for civil rights and Republicans invent/introduce/overuse new phrases and talking points for trade? For example, you'd probably hear Democrats say "Equal Opportunity Employment" or "Affirmative Action" a lot and you'd probably hear Republicans say "Laissez-faire" or "Free Market" a lot. What would be the antithesis of these phrases for the other side? I would posit that it's entirely possible that these articles are not on average biased and instead are merely explaining and using the phrases that each party has employed to tackle their number one priorities.
On top of that, I didn't see anything that seemed to indicate that they used windowing to determine when a phrase was opposed to the phrase they were using. For example if you found that the acronym ACORN indicates a Democratic slant but there's a whole section on its Wikipedia page full of negative criticism despite them using 'ACORN' frequently in that section. Would this section be identified as a Democratic slant?
Where is this G&S word bank? Where is the list of results so I can look up the ACORN article's scores?
My work here is dung.
I would have assumed a fairly even distribution with Wikipedia so the results weren't that surprising. I'd be more interested in using it to find bias in the media. There are obvious cases of bias such as Fox but I've noticed a gradual move towards the right in groups like CNN who seemed in the past Democratic in it's leaning. I've found more open reporting from comedians these days. Some subjects only the comedians take on that the media avoids or barely mentions. One interesting trend I noticed early on is all media sources including supposed left wing groups call the President Mr Obama while Bush was generally called President Bush and I can't remember him being referred to as Mr Bush. Traditionally the media always calls a sitting President by the title President and expresidents are generally referred to as Former President. Pay attention when you listen to the news and see if I'm right. Both Bushs and Clinton are referred to as former Presidents far more often than Obama is called President Obama.
What can be done to avoid political bias and how do we do it consistently?
Don't write about political topics that are relevant to you?
For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
However if I research and report on the political situation in France, where I have no dog in the fight, I'll probably end up pretty much unbiased.
Its a big interconnected world... there's really no reason for locals to have to write biased filler about local issues.
Doesn't have to be geographic. I have no personal interest in the gay marriage thing, not being gay or close to those in their subculture and not being hyper-christian, so I can be extremely unbiased about the topic. This SHOULD work, but it fails anyway, because my completely unbiased view unsurprisingly seems to match the (few) non-cowardly (D) and oppose almost all the neo-(R) so I'll be accused of being "politically biased" based on results, although I obviously don't have any reason to care that would influence the process of writing about it. Think of how everyone naturally decides that slavery was a dumb idea now, but it was a hot political football around 1860 or so in the USA.
There's some other hints, like if you find evidence of sloganeering in your writing you're probably doing it wrong.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's an interesting point of view, but it's not a very good proof. Greece has been following the "conservative" prescription to solve their economic problems. The result? Record levels of unemployment. If you think the American economy is doing poorly, consider that Greece now has hit a new record level of unemployment (22%) and over 50% unemployment for people aged 15-24. Given how well the "conservative" solution is working out, do you think it's any wonder they're looking for a "liberal" solution instead?
More importantly, you missed the entire point of the joke. The joke is that when reality disagrees with conservatives, they claim reality is biased. It's a sad commentary on the far right's rejection of facts and embracing of fictions to justify their views in the face of evidence to the contrary*. Liberals, while not immune, are currently much less prone to that type of behaviour as recently confirmed.
* Sometimes it manifests as an inability to accept some of the relevant facts. For instance, Grover Norquist is unable to accept that Ronald Reagan raised taxes, increased the size of the government and tripled the U.S. federal debt during his term in office. This colours his entire perception of government and it's role in the economy, since he credits the Reagan economic boom solely to the tax cuts that Reagan implemented without considering any of the other relevant factors.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Bias is an interesting phenomenon. I can be a fundamentalist Christian and think all gays are going to Hell to burn in eternal torment and still be okay with gay marriage as a civil situation since its not like the government can actually force me to accept that they are truly married in a Christian sense.
Alternately, I could also be atheist or agnostic, believe that being gay is perfectly acceptable and normal but still wonder just what the point of gay marriage is actually supposed to be, from a state perspective.