Communications of the ACM
Study: Wikipedia Perpetuates Political Bias
Credit: Associated Press
Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Southern California say the collective intelligence used to create Wikipedia articles generally produces biased information.
The researchers analyzed a decade's worth of Wikipedia articles on U.S. politics and found that only a few of them were politically neutral. Large numbers of contributors did help make articles less biased, but the researchers found that most articles receive little attention and change only slightly from their original slant.
Although Wikipedia is less biased and partisan than when it first launched, most of the content has not benefited from the true wisdom of the crowd, according to the researchers. However, the researchers based their conclusions on a very technical index for measuring political slant, which was developed to measure media bias. The index is based on how many times 1,000 phrases were used by Republicans and Democrats in the 2005 Congressional Record. Although the index determined that Democrats were more likely to use "civil rights," while Republicans were more likely to use "trade deficit," those tendencies might not still hold true in 2012.
From Washington Post
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