Study Finds Political Bias Against Conservatives on Wikipedia
“apparent across groups, including United States presidents, senators, representatives, governors, Supreme Court justices, and journalists”
I did not need a study to know this. Simply look at the Wikipedia entry for Donald Trump and it tells you everything you need to know.
David Rozado writes at City Journal:
Wikipedia’s Neutrality: Myth or Reality?
Wikipedia has long been celebrated for its stated mission of providing open, unbiased information to anyone with Internet access. Central to that purpose is the site’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which requires articles to be “fairly” and “proportionately” written, without “editorial bias.” My new computational analysis of Wikipedia’s content, however, found that this worthy ideal is not always realized in practice.
My study examined the average sentiment—positive, negative, or neutral—associated with 1,628 politically charged terms in English Wikipedia articles. This method, which reviewed Wikipedia mentions of hundreds of politicians, journalists, and more, sought to identify whether Wikipedia biases its content based on a public figure’s political orientation.
My analysis found that Wikipedia was more likely to portray right-leaning figures negatively than their left-leaning counterparts. This “sentiment bias” was apparent across groups, including United States presidents, senators, representatives, governors, Supreme Court justices, and journalists. Notably, the disparity was not universal; I did not find significant sentiment bias, for example, in the site’s descriptions of U.K. Members of Parliament.
Still, these findings are concerning, particularly given the possibility of Wikipedia’s biases permeating endeavors beyond the site itself. Since the online encyclopedia’s content is used to train large language models (LLMs), which drive many cutting-edge AI systems such as ChatGPT, Wikipedia’s biases could influence AI-generated content. In fact, my analysis revealed preliminary evidence that this might already be happening: I found that the sentiment-associations in Wikipedia content and those of OpenAI’s “words embeddings layer”—a component in AI models that represents words as numerical vectors to capture their meanings and relationships—showed a slight similarity in political bias.
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Comments
“I did not need a study to know this. Simply look at the Wikipedia entry for Donald Trump and it tells you everything you need to know.”
Hear hear…my initial response to the headline was “well, duh.”
How much do these “studies” pay? Count me in – I could knock something like this out in 45 minutes.
File this news under “day ending in y.”
Volunteer editors with a leftward slant have controlled multiple sectors of Wikipedia for years (for instance, coverage of “climate change”).
In more recent years, they’ve received overt encouragement from the top at Wikimedia.
Hope this “study” didn’t cost mo den two-fiddy.
The very guy who FOUNDED Wikipedia is on record saying it has become a Marxist hell-hole. How big a study do you need?
Conquest’s Second Law: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
Leftist strategy:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
Duh!!
sorry bro,,not even close to being ture:
Wikipedia has long been celebrated for its stated mission of providing open, unbiased information to anyone with Internet access
the “unbiased” part
the communists “State” equality as their mission but actions have PROVEN otherwise
correction:
not even close to being true
Wikipedia’s bias is clearly stated if you read up their editorial policies. Only Leftist approved news sources are permitted, anything deemed biased and unreliable i.e. non-Left, is generally prohibited. I forget Wikipedia’s position on Far Left sources.
To paraphrase something I heard many many years ago, had the Nazis won WW2, Wikipedia would operate much the same as it does today. Its policies of ‘neutrality’ and ‘reliable sources’ would however mean ever so slightly different information presented.
That (anti-conservative bias) has been the case for at least the last ten years.
I no longer contribute to them, and very seldom even read their pages. At best, they are a good place to start for general non-political information, but one has to check what they say if there is any political aspect to the issue you’re researching.
Even relatively non-controversial topics can be affected by vandalism or even outright fabrication.
(One article about a completely made-up historical event stuck around for years and even won a site award before finally being taken down.)