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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.
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.