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Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

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Re: Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

#3

Post by Manuel_D »

Wikipedia's bias is more prevalent on specific pages, or collections of topics. Many pages have zero or near zero bias. You're not going to have much bias on scientific topics like, say resonant structures.

It's a lot more prone to bias on biographical topics, where senior editors can essentially suppress any negative coverage, or promote embellished facts about a person. Take a gander at the talk page of controversial articles, or more specifically the history of the talk page since talk pages themselves get pruned and censored.

Re: Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

#7

Post by CMdH8 »

distantsounds wrote: post #5

[flagged]

I’m not sure you’re serious or not. Just in case you are, this would be a horrible position to take on the concept of truth. It would make you unaware of the fallacy of your political side. No one side has truth on their side.

Re: Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

#8

Post by roundandround »

CMdH8 wrote: post #7
distantsounds wrote: post #5

[flagged]

I’m not sure you’re serious or not. Just in case you are, this would be a horrible position to take on the concept of truth. It would make you unaware of the fallacy of your political side. No one side has truth on their side.

Countries have political skews so it's entirely possible for truth to be heavily skewed conservative in the USSR and liberal in the USA. This is why the let's cover 2 points of view press is garbage. 2 points are 2 conservative war hawk dominated parties in the US.

Re: Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

#9

Post by akolbe »

Manuel_D wrote: post #3

Wikipedia's bias is more prevalent on specific pages, or collections of topics. Many pages have zero or near zero bias. You're not going to have much bias on scientific topics like, say resonant structures. It's a lot more prone to bias on biographical topics, where senior editors can essentially suppress any negative coverage, or promote embellished facts about a person. Take a gander at the talk page of controversi…

I agree. However, I would add that there's an equal risk of biographies being slanted negatively. Cf. this week's article by Russ Baker:

https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/why-we-should-be-wary-of-wiki...

Or this one about "revenge editing", published in Salon:

https://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/revenge_ego_and_the_corrupt...

As for bias, the thing with Wikipedia is that it can be incredibly patchy. Overall, in the English Wikipedia, the bias is undoubtedly slightly left of centre, but you may also have areas that swing the other way. Just yesterday, for example, a study appeared in The Journal of Holocaust Research alleging that Wikipedia's English-language coverage of Holocaust history is systematically distorted by right-wing Polish editors:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

Similarly there have been allegations that nationalists and historical revisionists hold sway in the Japanese Wikipedia:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...

The Croatian Wikipedia was acknowledged by the Wikimedia Foundation itself to have been in the hand of right-wing extremists for about a decade:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform...

Wikipedia is vast. The amount and direction of bias can vary from language to language, from article to article, even from paragraph to paragraph.

Re: Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias

#10

Post by mrguyorama »

CMdH8 wrote: post #7
distantsounds wrote: post #5

[flagged]

I’m not sure you’re serious or not. Just in case you are, this would be a horrible position to take on the concept of truth. It would make you unaware of the fallacy of your political side. No one side has truth on their side.

An article on global warming would be described as "leftist" in the US despite accurately reflecting reality. How else would you word the fact that american conservatives reject reality in a lot of cases? Remember, a significant amount of these conservatives openly believe the earth is 6000 years old and that geology is a satanic ploy to make people doubt god.
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