There has been so much talk in this thread on whether Wikipedia is under liberal control (biased).
Let's think for ourselves a moment. Thought I'd give you a few facts to clear up any confusion.
Brace yourselves, it's a lengthy read. People are going to become concerned that I'm the conservative alter ego of Notimp. Lol.
Finding examples of Wikipedia’s bias is not difficult. One need only compare the entries of figures who do the same thing but from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
Consider Ann Coulter versus Michael Moore. Coulter’s entry (on August 9, 2011) was 9028 words long.* Of this longer-than-usual entry, 3220 words were devoted to “Controversies and criticism” in which a series of incidents involving Coulter and quotes from her are cited with accompanying condemnations, primarily from her opponents on the Left. That’s 35.6 percent of Coulter’s entry devoted to making her look bad. By contrast, Moore’s entry is 2876 words (the more standard length for entries on political commentators), with 130 devoted to “Controversy.” That’s 4.5% of the word count, a fraction of Coulter’s. Does this mean that an “unbiased” commentator would find Coulter eight times as “controversial” as Moore?
There was a similar disparity between the Wikipedia pages of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann for anyone who would like to research it and there are many other examples.
Perhaps more interesting than the bias itself on Wikipedia are the two factors which enabled it, the first present in the project’s founding DNA, and the second in a policy implemented in 2009.
Wikipedia was originally launched in 2001 as an off-shoot from Nupedia, a similar effort to construct a free online encyclopedia, although in this case written by experts instead of random, anonymous contributors. Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia was an idea whose time had come on an information-driven net whose consumers couldn’t wait for the slow workings of expertise or the cost of proprietary content: a free encyclopedia written by anonymous users supposedly striving for an “unbiased” perspective.
There was not a single ideological vision driving Wikipedia’s founders and core contributors as they launched the project. Jimmy Wales, who would become the face of the project and its “benevolent dictator,” according to Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution, is a libertarian and Ayn Randian Objectivist. Also important in shaping Wikipedia was the so-called “hacker ethos,” the culture that has developed amongst computer programmers over the last 40 years and been shaped by the Left, the counterculture, popular culture, and anarchist thought.
What binds together these ideologies is a utopian ideal that human beings are more prone to altruism rather than self-interest. In Wikipedia Revolution Wales is quoted as saying, “Generally we find most people out there on the internet are good… It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipeda, that most people only want to help us and build this free nonprofit, charitable resource.” Ward Cunningham was the programmer who created the wiki concept and software. According to Lih, he believed in the Wiki because “People are generally good.”
A core idea Wikipedia embraced.. was to assume good faith when interacting with others. The guideline promoted optimistic production rather than pessimistic nay-saying, and reads, “Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it; avoid accusing others of harmful motives without particularly strong evidence.
But as it worked out, Wikipedia in practice has strayed from these utopian ideas because of the ease with which political and social bias trumps altruism.
After almost a decade of rapid growth and free-wheeling experimentation the situation at the site by the Summer of 2009 was chaos. Political operatives would sabotage one another in electoral contests by vandalizing pages. More malicious misinformation filtered in freely, with living historical figures accused of involvement in conspiratorial plots.
Ira Matetsky, known by his Wikipedia handle as newyorkbrad, is a lawyer and veteran Wikipedian, both an administrator on the site and part of the Arbitration Committee, the council of editors who sort out disputes between editors. In a series of articles at the libertarian group blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Matetsky discussed some of these incidents and described the power of Wikipedia to affect people’s lives:
In the intervening years, though, it’s become more and more clear that malicious or simply thoughtless content added to Wikipedia BLP’s (“Biographies of Living Persons”) can be very damaging. A series of serious and widely reported incidents have brought the problem to public attention. Among these: the [[Siegenthaler incident]], in which an article was vandalized to accuse a completely innocent person of suspected complicity in an assassination, and no one caught the problem for four months; the incident in 2007 in which a Turkish academic was detained for several hours by immigration officials in Canada, reportedly based on an inaccurate allegation in his Wikipedia article that he was a terrorist; the lawsuit brought by a prominent golfer against the person who added defamatory content to his article; the blatant attack page created against a well-known California attorney, allegedly as part of a negative public relations campaign launched on behalf of one of the companies he was suing.
There was no “solution” to these derelictions if Wikipedia were to retain its basic identity as a “democratic” encyclopedia. There was only a trade-off which in “solving” this problem of defamation created a treatment worse than the disease: the birth of a “more equal” class of 20,000 volunteer editors who had greater level of authority to alter and control entries. Their responsibility is to act as guards for all articles about living people, reviewing suggested edits before they go live. The decision was made by the Wikimedia Foundation, the California nonprofit that operates the site, not only to prevent libelous vandalism but also to reduce the threat of lawsuits. Wales and Wikimedia chairman Michael Snow both voiced their support for the new policy, with “benevolent dictator” Wales noting soberly that the great informational power they had created was a “serious responsibility.”
This sentiment is a cousin to Google’s corporate motto “Don’t be evil,” also a manifestation of the utopian hacker ethos. Of course, as with Google’s occasional failures to live up to its values, Wikipedia’s altruism in theory enables malice in practice.
Wikipedia, continually guided by the ideal of universal human goodness, entrusted greater power to its most devoted, loyal user base. By definition, more authority was granted to individuals with the significant free time to devote to a volunteer, utopian endeavor to shape the world’s information into a unified “consensus.” By and large such individuals are more likely to be leftists than the general population. Wikipedia’s own demographic statistics demonstrate this further: Only 13 percent are women. The average age for a contributor is 26.8 and most do not have a girlfriend, wife, or children. So, alone and apparently without a meaningful, fulfilling career, the devoted Wikipedian instead finds excitement in devoting his time to filling Ann Coulter’s entry with 35.6 percent criticism.
The most significant, blatant examples of bias will be found in these living person entries. To see the difference one need only compare Beck’s entry with its 23% rate of criticism to the more antiseptic entry for Beck’s TV show which has far less.
Incidentally, Fontova’s own Wikipedia entry is 826 words, 432 of which are criticism, an unusually high 52 percent. Unsurprisingly, the primary author and watchdog of Fontova’s entry is Redthoreau.
Our political culture today revolves around debate of contested ideological symbols. For better or worse, arguments about the merits of Coulter and Moore, Beck and Olbermann are actually proxy battles in the culture war between the Right and Left. Unfortunately, Wikipedia, because of its decision to create an elite group of “information specialists,” has picked its side in this war and is now fighting on the front lines.
*For these analyses I’m not counting table of contents, bibliographies, or references in the word count – just the introduction and bodies of the entries written by Wikipedians.