Comment by hagbard_c
7 months ago
> who needs to download the whole Wikipedia
Anyone who wants to have access while off-line, for whatever reason. This can be as simple as saving costs via more complicated as accessing content from regions with spotty and/or expensive connectivity (you're on a ship out of reach of shore-based mobile networks, you do not have access to Starlink or something similar, you're deep in the jungle, deep underground, etc) to some prepper scenario where connectivity ends at the cave entry because the 'net has ceased to exist.
I would like to have a less politically biased online encyclopedia for the latter scenario, it would be a shame to start a new society based on the same bad ideas which brought down the previous one. If ever a politically neutral LLM becomes available that'd be one of the first tasks I'd put it to: point out bias - any bias - in articles, encyclopedias and other 'sources' (yes, I know, WP is not an original source but for this purpose it is) of knowledge.
You don't need to be deep in the jungle. You might just not want to pay for mobile data. If your phone has an SD card slot, you can put in 1 TB of storage and have wikipedia, a lifetime of music, tons of books, an atlas of your country for GPS navigation, and plenty of room for taking photos/videos. Storage is cheap enough that mobile data should be basically pointless.
Is there a "politically neutral" human? And if there was, what could that person reasonably say about politics?
I suspect "politically neutral" is a meaningless phrase. It's just a way for people to tar their political opponents by inference.
The problem is: even if you report only facts, there is an editorial function in choosing which facts to report, because it is physically impossible to report all facts. So someone can always point to some sort of bias on choosing which facts to report.
And when editors have big ad spenders, you bet they won't criticize the hand that feeds them, most of the time
1 reply →
There are no politically neutral humans but there can be politically neutral publications. All you have to do to be politically neutral is treat all legal political ideologies the same without favouring one over the others. Wikipedia does not achieve this goal, not by far.
Genuine question, can you provide multiple explicit examples of such bias? I heard a lot of people railing against bias in Wikipedia, but no one provides any blatant examples of it.
A genuine answer, how about looking up some studies on this subject? Not those done by Wikipedia of course, they claim to be politically neutral after all.
Here's a few, from https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
Six studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia:
A 2024 analysis [1] by researcher David Rozado that used AllSides Media Bias Ratings [2] found Wikipedia associates right-of-center public figures with more negative sentiment than left-wing figures, and tends to associate left-leaning news organizations with more positive sentiment than right-leaning ones.
A Harvard study [3] found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica.
Another paper [4] from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site.
A 2018 analysis [5] found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing.
Another analysis [6] using AllSides Media Bias Ratings found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets.
American academics found [7] conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement.
There are far more sources out there.
If I show examples of biased pages - the one on Antifa is a good example - this will just devolve into a quibble about this or that sentence.
[1] https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...
[2] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
[3] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-Experts-or-Collecti...
[4] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788...
[5] https://archive.md/v4TFn
[6] https://archive.is/dDr7X
[7] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/
> A genuine answer, how about looking up some studies on this subject?
I figured that since you had a strong opinion on the subject you probably had strong evidence and could steer us to more directed reading to understand your viewpoint. Certainly we all should investigate things for ourselves, but sometimes it helps to have a place to start. You've certainly given us plenty to read through and consider. I'll read it with an open mind - some prereading thoughts that come to mind, is the citation bias proportional to factual accuracy (some outlets are more factually accurate than others, so one would expect to see them cited more often)? What's the distribution of the population of potentially citable sources (I.e. Is the bias a reflection of the population, or selection bias)? Is editor sanctions selective in enforcement or are conservative editors more likely to engage in behavior that warrants sanctions?
In other words, are we confusing correlations with causation? I don't know, I'll have to dig into the sources you provided and do my own research. I posit the questions now because it's the only thoughts I can contribute to the discussion at present.
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You have bad politics. This is bad politics.
No, you have bad politics.
This is not kindergarten so let's no go down this path. Asking for a politically neutral (see my explanation elsewhere in this thread if you don't understand what that means) source of information is not 'bad politics' but intended to avoid bad politics. I suspect that you 'identify' as either 'liberal' or 'progressive' so I assume you'd be less than thrilled if Wikipedia had a conservative bias. The same goes for conservatives and (traditional) capital-L Liberals who are less than thrilled to see Wikipedia having a 'left-wing' or 'progressive' bias. It just makes WP end up being lumped together with the legacy media, known to be untrustworthy where it counts and that is a shame for a site which in many ways still is a valuable resource as long as you avoid any and all subjects which have been pulled into the polarised political discourse.
I may be mistaken, but i think the person you are replying to was pretending to be the kind of AI you were speaking of.
> based on the same bad ideas which brought down the previous one
I don’t think that’s fair. Not that Wikipedia is without bias, but that their ivory tower biases are worlds apart from the lying brutal animalistic Hollywood signals herding the masses in “our democracy”.