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Wikipedia as a whole is subject to various and varying biases. See for example: BBC: "Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedia"

by akolbe 5y ago

Wikipedia as a whole is subject to various and varying biases. See for example: BBC: "Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedia" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59325128 Slate: "Non-English Editions of Wikipedia Have a Misinformation Problem" (about historical revisionism in Japanese Wikipedia, the far right Croatian Wikipedia, etc.) https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misinformation-non-english-editions.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi... WMF report on Croatian Wikipedia ("captured by ideologically driven users", "intentionally distorted the content presented in articles, abused power, and systematically obstructed otherwise accepted global Wikipedia community practices"): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Croatian_WP_Disinformation_Assessment_-_Final_Report_EN.pdf https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Croatian_WP_Disinformat... Even within the English Wikipedia, you can find pages with surprising slants. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-10-07/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... By and large, though, I think most people would agree that politically Wikipedia skews somewhat left of centre.

namdnay 5y ago
> By and large, though, I think most people would agree that politically Wikipedia skews somewhat left of centre. I find this type of sentence very frustrating. Left of which centre? Where is the centre? What is left and what is right? None of these questions have clear answers as soon as you look at a global userbase. I think en-wiki reflects the attitude of the editorbase, i.e. mostly young, mostly male, mostly white, mostly anglo-saxon, mostly educated, mostly geeky
- akolbe 5y ago
  I think you put that well, actually (although the editor base is not as young as it used to be ... quite a lot of oldies by now). I would agree with your phrasing. What I meant with left of centre was that, taking the US as an example, Obama and the Clintons (lots of Wikimedia consultants have Clinton links, actually) are more likely to get favourable write-ups on Wikipedia than Republicans.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > Left of which centre? The median of English-speaking people, presumably.
  - another-dave 5y ago
    For example though it's often said in the UK that if the US Democratic party were over here they'd be seen as right of centre — the Overton window is very localised.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by akolbe 5y ago

namdnay 5y ago

> By and large, though, I think most people would agree that politically Wikipedia skews somewhat left of centre. I find this type of sentence very frustrating. Left of which centre? Where is the centre? What is left and what is right? None of these questions have clear answers as soon as you look at a global userbase. I think en-wiki reflects the attitude of the editorbase, i.e. mostly young, mostly male, mostly white, mostly anglo-saxon, mostly educated, mostly geeky

akolbe 5y ago
I think you put that well, actually (although the editor base is not as young as it used to be ... quite a lot of oldies by now). I would agree with your phrasing. What I meant with left of centre was that, taking the US as an example, Obama and the Clintons (lots of Wikimedia consultants have Clinton links, actually) are more likely to get favourable write-ups on Wikipedia than Republicans.
cabalamat 5y ago
> Left of which centre? The median of English-speaking people, presumably.
- another-dave 5y ago
  For example though it's often said in the UK that if the US Democratic party were over here they'd be seen as right of centre — the Overton window is very localised.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]