12 Comments
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Amy Pinkerton's avatar

Educators take note. This highlights the importance of disregarding Wikipedia as a reliable, academic source.

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Mike Williams's avatar

Its not "just" left wing bias.

Its also "science" bias.

If big pharma advocate any line on absolutely anything..Wikipedia will promote and guard it.

It also tries to hold the "consensus" line on consciousness .

PSI WARS: TED, WIKIPEDIA AND THE BATTLE FOR THE INTERNET

by Craig Weiler (

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The Solar Princess's avatar

Have you considered that maybe you guys just suck?

By that I mean: if right-wingers do more bad things, then a neutral reporting of what people do would result in descriptions of right-wingers being shown more badly than left-wingers. It doesn't mean there is bias: to prove a source's bias relative to reality, you need to compare source to reality; it can't be done just by examining the source. Or would you claim that Wikipedia is "biased" against pedophiles and serial killers, and that is a problem that needs to be corrected?

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Ashley Rindsberg's avatar

This might be true, though I don’t think it is. However it is by definition not a “neutral point of view”. If Wikipedia would like to amend its NPOV principle to suit this bias then I guess that would make sense.

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The Solar Princess's avatar

It can be a neutral point of view. Wikipedia's neutral point of view (as explained on the site itself) is not "represent the right and the left as equally good", it's to proportionately represent all published significant views without editorial bias. If those published significant views contain more bad about one side than good, then the neutral point of view would contain more bad about one side as good. If one side (for example) murders people much more often than the other, and the major news sources reported those murders, then the people on one side will get those murders represented on their Wikipedia page and bring down the sentiment on their side. The only way to represent both sides with the same sentiment would be to intentionally censor and suppress anything bad that those people do, which is NOT neutral either by conventional definition, or by Wikipedia's own definition.

So, your method of determining bias on Wikipedia doesn't actually detect bias. Find a better method that is actually sensitive to bias.

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Ashley Rindsberg's avatar

“More good than bad” — in whose view though? According to whom?

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The Solar Princess's avatar

Actually, let's build a hypothetical.

There are some things that pretty much everybody agrees are bad -- such as murder or child rape. Any person who did any of that would necessarily be negative-colored on a sentiment measure. So, suppose one side does significantly more of those things. What should Wikipedia do then -- suppress and censor reporting of murder and child rape, or reject neutrality?

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Ashley Rindsberg's avatar

Is that what we’re seeing on Wikipedia? Let’s say there is one demographic group that commits more violent crime than other. Perhaps this is even the case in reality. Does Wikipedia then paint that group as “bad”? Like, does it currently? Should it?

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The Solar Princess's avatar

Answer the hypothetical, please

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The Solar Princess's avatar

According to the criteria you used to judge positive and negative sentiment.

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