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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.

9 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Might not be neutral but... by TWX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...the fact that the editorial system still follows the king-of-the-hill model, where those that choose to sit on pet-pages win simply by undoing any other changes simply because they don't like them, will leave the entire thing biased in some fashion or another.

    I will not contribute to Wikipedia anymore. I've had edits that I could provide support for undone by some self-important busybody whose only credentials were the ones they defined when they signed up for an account on Wikipedia. Forget that.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Might not be neutral but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This is, in fact, a terrible fact about Wikipedia. It's also the only way to actually achieve neutrality: a very strong bias against new people, since they're usually just there to slant an article towards their preferred point of view.

  2. Absolute horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't biased is someone who has never tried to contribute to Wikipedia.

  3. Re:Fox News headline version by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    "Cheeto Jesus"

    And you wonder why no one takes libs seriously.

  4. How do you accurately measure bias? by Wycliffe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, like their main news channel being self-described as "fair and balanced"... oh, wait!

    I have plenty of conservative friends that think fox news is less biased and plenty of liberal friends who disagree. I even have conservative friends that think that fox news is a little too left leaning.

    I'm not sure how you even go about measuring bias. Do you find the most conservative and the most liberal person you can find and ask them? I would love to see more shows with opposing views but it would be hard to do the extremes without turning in to the Jerry Springer Show. I've found that it's easy to talk politics to people who are in the rational middle but if you get a diehard democrat or a diehard republican then they get very angry if you disagree with them. Both sides have taken the moral high ground and think anyone who disagrees with them is evil and irrational.

    1. Re:How do you accurately measure bias? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That approach only indicates an equal amount of bias. It doesn't indicate if the Democrat views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests their views aren't loony, and the Republican views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests they're actually correct.

      What if you wrote an article about vaccine causing autism, where you cited 12 rigorously-evaluated scientific opinions, and 12 fervently-espoused lunatic ravings? The article would tally as "unbiased", but it would actually be biased: a preponderance of evidence would discredit the lunatics, yet the article would be shored-up to give them equal footing. In other words: you'd handicap the visibly-correct view and give additional, unmerited support to the visibly-unsupportable view, slanting the article toward a side that can't stand on its own merits.

  5. Re:Wikipedia no more biased than British ivory tow by fred6666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's face it, the rest of the English-speaking world is more liberal than the USA.
    The problem here is US politics which has a conservative bias, not Wikipedia.

  6. Bias of people versus bias of organization by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't biased is someone who has never tried to contribute to Wikipedia.

    Wikipedia as an organization and as a website generally isn't biased on most topics. Kind of hard to have a bias about some random regurgitation of a technical fact like a chemical or math equation. Some of the people who contribute to Wikipedia very much are biased because most people carry assorted biases with them. But these biases generally don't seem to lean coherently towards one political persuasion or another across Wikipedia but rather are generally confined to specific hot button topics. The hope is that the various biases of the contributors will mostly balance out and the objective facts will remain. This doesn't always happen but it seems to happen often enough that one can say it usually works and not look stupid saying so.

    What is amusing/depressing is that some people reflexively claim that any facts that don't match their pre-existing world view must be biased.

  7. Voltaire's Opinion by avandesande · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Perfect is the enemy of good". It's not perfect but it's good enough to be useful.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism