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One special kind of bias I'm aware of is something obviously done by religious fanatics who invest significant amount of energy adding "a religion section" to e

by acqq 11y ago

One special kind of bias I'm aware of is something obviously done by religious fanatics who invest significant amount of energy adding "a religion section" to every famous person's biography and formulating and selecting his/hers statements as the support for the belief even when the statement was obviously made as the opposite. As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends." The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."

abalone1 11y ago
Ha ha. I've noticed there's a particularly active British contingent as well who make sure to add a media section that cites primarily British media sources or usually in article about inventions and stuff will add a section to show that the actual origin was some obscure British inventor who had invented it before everybody else. Judging from the slant of many articles I've noticed, that country seems to be a little overrepresented among contributors on English language wikipedia (relative to other English speaking countries)
- moomin 11y ago
  You might be surprised. Population of US: 300m, South Africa 50m, Canada 35m (but not all of those are English-speaking), Australia 20, New Zealand <5, Ireland <5, UK: 65m. You can cut this multiple ways. So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot). And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.

by acqq 11y ago

abalone1 11y ago

Ha ha. I've noticed there's a particularly active British contingent as well who make sure to add a media section that cites primarily British media sources or usually in article about inventions and stuff will add a section to show that the actual origin was some obscure British inventor who had invented it before everybody else. Judging from the slant of many articles I've noticed, that country seems to be a little overrepresented among contributors on English language wikipedia (relative to other English speaking countries)

moomin 11y ago
You might be surprised. Population of US: 300m, South Africa 50m, Canada 35m (but not all of those are English-speaking), Australia 20, New Zealand <5, Ireland <5, UK: 65m. You can cut this multiple ways. So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot). And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.