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Wikipedia's Not as Biased as You Might Think, Say Harvard Researchers (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on Quartz:In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it's starting to see results. Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia's online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012. In its initial years, Wikipedia's crowdsourced articles were tinted very blue, slanting more toward Democratic views and displayed greater bias than Britannica. However, with more revisions and more moderators volunteering on the platform, the bias wore away. In fact, the upper quartile of the Wikipedia's sample had enough revisions that there was no longer any difference in slant and bias from its offline counterpart. More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time.

4 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Show me the Wikipedia entry for "Bradley Mannin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Bradley Manning. You're welcome.

  2. BOLD, revert, discuss cycle by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did you ask the editor who reverted that change to explain the reversion? If you ask, wait a week, and try the edit again, the burden falls on the reverting user to explain why the edit should not stick.

  3. Re:Might not be neutral but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Experienced editors like former Wikipedia admin Ryulong are among the most guilty of introducing bias and incorrect information into articles. The worst part is that even in the face of these actions, it was ridiculously difficult to have an individual like this removed. The old hands can be just as damaging to an article.

  4. Re:How do you accurately measure bias? by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know it's not popular to try and approach things as scientifically as possible, but in this case they describe their methodology in the original paper.

    In simple terms, they identify text samples which express either a Republican or a Democratic view, and then tally them up.

    This seems like a more disciplined approach than asking one's friends what they think.

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