Comment by hagbard_c
7 months ago
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...
[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.