Ideological bias on Wikipedia

Ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.[1][2]

Wikipedia has an internal policy which states that articles must be written from a neutral point of view, which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant points of view that have been verifiably published by reliable sources on a topic.[3]

Collectively, findings show that Wikipedia articles edited by large numbers of editors with opposing ideological views are at least as neutral as other similar sources, but articles with smaller edit volumes by fewer—or more ideologically homogeneous—contributors are more likely to reflect an editorial bias.[4][5] Multiple studies, including two from the same Harvard researchers, found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia in both article content and editor sanctioning.[6][7]

  1. ^ Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right". Backchannel. Wired. Archived from the original on January 17, 2018. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  2. ^ Burnsed, Brian (June 20, 2011). "Wikipedia Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms". U.S. News & World Report. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved June 2, 2018.
  3. ^ Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press. pp. 11, 55–58. ISBN 978-0-262-01447-2. LCCN 2009052779.
  4. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Gu, Yuan; Zhu, Feng (March 2017) [October 2016]. "Ideological segregation among online collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians". National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w22744.
  5. ^ Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim; Cress, Ulrike (October 23, 2018). "Using big data techniques for measuring productive friction in mass collaboration online environments". International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. 13 (4): 439–456. doi:10.1007/s11412-018-9285-y.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference GZ2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference :5 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).