Ideological bias on Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by KyKatriza (talk | contribs) at 15:59, 10 May 2023 (→Larry Sanger: Fixed grammar, sentence structure). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 15:59, 10 May 2023 by KyKatriza (talk | contribs) (→Larry Sanger: Fixed grammar, sentence structure)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) Analysis of claims of ideological bias on Misplaced Pages

Real or perceived ideological bias on the free online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages, especially on its English-language edition, has been a frequent subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideology its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.

Misplaced Pages has an internal policy which states that articles must be written from a neutral point of view, which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant points of view that have been verifiably published by reliable sources on a topic. Collectively, findings show that Misplaced Pages articles edited by large numbers of editors with opposing ideological views are at least as neutral as other similar sources, but articles with smaller edit volumes by fewer—or more ideologically homogeneous—contributors are more likely to reflect an editorial bias.

Analyses

Bias in content in relation to U.S. politics

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School have authored several studies examining Misplaced Pages articles related to U.S. politics and the editors that work on them to identify aspects of ideological bias within its collective intelligence.

In Is Misplaced Pages Biased? (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics as of January 2011, measuring their degree of bias on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro in 2010, to measure bias in newspaper media. This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican based on key phrases within the text such as "war in Iraq", "civil rights", "trade deficit", "economic growth", "illegal immigration" and "border security". Each phrase is assigned a slant index based on how often it is used by Democratic vs. Republican members of U.S. Congress and this lean rating is assigned to a Misplaced Pages contribution that includes the same key phrase. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Misplaced Pages leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.

In a more extensive American follow-up to the 2012 study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Misplaced Pages (2018), Greenstein and Zhu directly compare about 4,000 articles related to U.S. politics between Misplaced Pages (written by an online community) and the matching articles from Encyclopædia Britannica (written by experts) using similar methods as their 2010 study to measure "slant" (Democratic vs. Republican) and to quantify the degree of "bias". The authors found that "Misplaced Pages articles are more slanted towards Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased", particularly those focusing on civil rights, corporations, and government. Entries about immigration trended toward Republican. They further found that "he difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions" and, when articles were substantially revised, the difference in bias compared to Britannica was statistically negligible. The implication, per the authors, is that "many contributions are needed to reduce considerable bias and slant to something close to neutral".

Collaboration on contested or slanted content

Research shows that Misplaced Pages is prone to Neutral Point of View violations caused by bias from its editors, including systemic bias.

The study Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians (2016) by Greenstein, Zhu, and Yuan Gu was a working paper that was not peer-reviewed. It focused on the behaviors of contributing editors themselves. Working again within a subset of articles related to U.S. politics and using terminology introduced in Is Misplaced Pages Biased?, the authors offer several significant findings. They found that editors are slightly more likely to contribute to articles which exhibit an opposite slant to their own—a tendency that the authors called opposites attract. They further found that debates on Misplaced Pages tend to exhibit a "prevalence of unsegregated conversations over time", meaning that the debates on Misplaced Pages tend to involve editors of differing view—which the authors called unsegregated—as opposed to debates involving only editors with homogeneous views (segregated). The unsegregated conversation is supposed to favor the convergence towards a neutral point of view. They also found that the degree of an editor bias decreases over time and experience, and decreases faster for editors involved in editing very slanted material: "he largest declines are found among contributors who edit or add content to articles that have more biases". They also estimated that, on average, it takes about one year longer for Republican material to reach a neutral viewpoint than for Democratic material.

A subsequent peer-reviewed study found that a model of this productive friction, which is defined as the collective resolution of socio-cognitive conflicts, can explain and predict the dynamics of knowledge production on Misplaced Pages, further supporting the hypothesis that collaborative work from multiple editors with opposing views help reach neutrality. Furthermore, another study found on the French Misplaced Pages that a majority of editors had a propensity to share equally in a dictator game, and that this propensity was correlated with their involvement on Misplaced Pages (as measured by the time spent and attachment).

Claims of bias

According to Bloomberg News in 2016, "The encyclopedia's reliance on outside sources, primarily newspapers, means it will be only as diverse as the rest of the media—which is to say, not very." According to Haaretz in 2018, "Misplaced Pages has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, and has critics from across the spectrum", while also noting that Misplaced Pages is "usually accused of being too liberal.”

According to CNN in 2022, Misplaced Pages's ideological bias "may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem." According to The Boston Globe in 2022, "A Misplaced Pages editor's interest in an article sprouts from their values and opinions, and their contributions are filtered through their general interpretation of reality. Edict or no, a neutral point of view is impossible. Not even a Misplaced Pages editor can transcend that." According to Slate in 2022, "Right-wing commentators have grumbled about 's purported left-wing bias for years, but they have been unable to offer a viable alternative encyclopedia option: A conservative version of Misplaced Pages, Conservapedia, has long floundered with minimal readership." while also noting that conservatives "have not generally attacked Misplaced Pages as extensively" as other media sources.

Liberal and left-wing bias

Larry Sanger

The co-founder of Misplaced Pages, Larry Sanger, has been a critic of Misplaced Pages since his departure from the project as an editorial employee in 2002. He went on to found and work for competitors to Misplaced Pages, including Citizendium and Everipedia. Among other criticisms, Sanger has been vocal in his view that Misplaced Pages's articles present a left-wing and liberal or "establishment point of view". Sanger has cited a number of examples for what he views as left-wing and liberal bias, such as that "Drug legalisation, dubbed drug liberalisation by Misplaced Pages, has only a little information about any potential hazards of drug legalisation policies" and that the Misplaced Pages article on Joe Biden does not sufficiently reflect "the concerns that Republicans have had about him" or the Ukraine allegations. Because of these perceived biases, Sanger views Misplaced Pages as untrustworthy. He has also accused Misplaced Pages of abandoning its neutrality policy (neutral point of view).

Conservapedia

American Christian conservative activist Andrew Schlafly founded an online encyclopedia named Conservapedia in 2006 based on his view of "liberal bias" on Misplaced Pages. Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias on Misplaced Pages, including assertions it is "anti-American", "anti-Christian" and "anti-capitalism".

Infogalactic

American far-right activist Vox Day founded the online encyclopedia Infogalactic in 2017 to counter what he views as "the left-wing thought police who administer ".

Croatian Misplaced Pages and right-wing bias

Main article: Croatian Misplaced Pages § Controversy about right-wing bias

In 2013, Jutarnji list reported that the administrators and editors of the Croatian-language version of Misplaced Pages were projecting a right-wing bias into topics such as the Ustasha regime, anti-fascism, Serbs, the LGBT community, and gay marriage. Many of the critics were former editors of the website who said they had been exiled for expressing concern. The small size of the Croatian Misplaced Pages (as of September 2013, it had 466 active editors of whom 27 were administrators) was cited as a major factor. Two days after the story broke, Croatian Minister of Science, Education and Sports Željko Jovanović advised students not to use the website. In 2018, historians with the University of Zagreb told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) that the Croatian Misplaced Pages has "many shortcomings, factual mistakes and ideologically loaded language" and that students are often referred to the English Misplaced Pages instead of their native Croatian, especially for topics on Croatian history.

Responses from Misplaced Pages

In 2006, Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales said, "The Misplaced Pages community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Misplaced Pages community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." In 2007, Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Misplaced Pages "are not supported by the facts".

In 2021, Misplaced Pages denied accusations made by Larry Sanger of having a particular political bias, with a spokesperson for the encyclopedia saying that third-party studies have shown that its editors come from a variety of ideological viewpoints and that "As more people engage in the editing process on Misplaced Pages, the more neutral articles tend to become".

Controversies

Japanese Misplaced Pages

In a March 2021 article, Yumiko Sato from Slate criticized the Japanese-language version of Misplaced Pages for spreading historical revisionist misinformation about the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women and Unit 731.

Spanish Misplaced Pages

In 2022, several Spanish cultural and political figures published a manifesto alleging a "lack of neutrality and ... obvious political bias in Misplaced Pages" and claimed that the Spanish Misplaced Pages is "edited by people who, hiding behind anonymous editor accounts, take the opportunity to carry out political activism, either by including data erroneous or false, or selecting news from the media with a clear political and ideological bias, which refer to controversial, distorted, insidious or inaccurate information". The manifesto was signed by Juan Carlos Girauta, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Joaquín Leguina, Albert Rivera, Daniel Lacalle and Toni Cantó among other right-wing personalities.

The Spanish Misplaced Pages has been criticized for offering a whitewashed coverage of Cristina Kirchner.

English Misplaced Pages

In February 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published a research article in the Journal of Holocaust Research accusing a number of English Misplaced Pages editors of engaging in a campaign to " a skewed version of history on Misplaced Pages," claiming that their actions " the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and stereotypes about Jews." The English Misplaced Pages's Arbitration Committee subsequently opened a case to investigate and evaluate the actions of editors in the affected articles.

References

^ Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Misplaced Pages of the Alt-Right". Backchannel. Wired. Archived from the original on January 17, 2018. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
Burnsed, Brian (June 20, 2011). "Misplaced Pages Gradually Accepted in College Classrooms". U.S. News & World Report. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved June 2, 2018.
Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Misplaced Pages. MIT Press. pp. 11, 55–58. ISBN 978-0-262-01447-2. LCCN 2009052779.
^ Greenstein, Shane; Gu, Yuan; Zhu, Feng (March 2017) . "Ideological segregation among online collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians". National Bureau of Economic Research. No. w22744. doi:10.3386/w22744. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
^ Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim; Cress, Ulrike (October 23, 2018). "Using big data techniques for measuring productive friction in mass collaboration online environments". International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. 13 (4): 439–456. doi:10.1007/s11412-018-9285-y.
Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" (PDF). Econometrica. 78 (1). The Econometric Society: 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 14, 2019. Retrieved June 4, 2019.
Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (May 2012). "Is Misplaced Pages Biased?". American Economic Review. 102 (3). American Economic Association: 343–348. doi:10.1257/aer.102.3.343.
Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Misplaced Pages perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 23, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
Shi, Feng; Teplitskiy, Misha; Duede, Eamon; Evans, James A. (2019). "The wisdom of polarized crowds". Nature Human Behaviour. 3 (4): 329–336. arXiv:1712.06414. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0541-6. PMID 30971793. S2CID 8947252.
Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (September 2018). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Misplaced Pages". MIS Quarterly. 42 (3): 945–959. doi:10.25300/MISQ/2018/14084. S2CID 44151904.
"Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased?". BizEd. AACSB. May 1, 2015. Archived from the original on May 22, 2018. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
Bhattacharya, Ananya (November 6, 2016). "Misplaced Pages's not as biased as you might think". Quartz. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
^ Guo, Jeff (October 25, 2016). "Misplaced Pages is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 23, 2018. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
Hube, Christoph (2017). "Bias in Misplaced Pages". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW '17 Companion). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 717–721.: 717–721. doi:10.1145/3041021.3053375. ISBN 9781450349147. S2CID 10472970.
Yan, Hao; Das, Sanmay; Lavoie, Allen; Li, Sirui; Sinclair, Betsy (2018). "The Congressional Classification Challenge: Domain Specificity and Partisan Intensity". EC '19 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. EC '19: 71–89. doi:10.1145/3328526.3329582. ISBN 9781450367929. S2CID 146802854.
Bernick, Michael (March 28, 2018). "The Power Of The Wikimedia Movement Beyond Wikimedia". Forbes. Archived from the original on March 30, 2018. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
Gebelhoff, Robert (October 19, 2016). "Science shows Misplaced Pages is the best part of the Internet". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved June 4, 2018.
Nguyen, Godefroy Dang; Dejean, Sylvain; Jullien, Nicolas (February 2018). "Do open online projects create social norms?" (PDF). Journal of Institutional Economics. 14 (1): 45–70. doi:10.1017/S1744137417000182. S2CID 91179798. Archived (PDF) from the original on August 27, 2019. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
"Is Misplaced Pages Woke?". Bloomberg News. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
Benjakob, Omer (May 27, 2018). "The Witch Hunt Against a 'pro-Israel' Misplaced Pages Editor". Haaretz. Retrieved March 16, 2022.
Kelly, Samantha Murphy (May 20, 2022). "Meet the Misplaced Pages editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started". CNN. Retrieved May 24, 2022.
Cammack, Shaun (2022-07-08). "I quit Twitter and discovered Misplaced Pages's righteous, opinionated, utterly absorbing battles over The Truth". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2022-07-19.
Breslow, Samuel (2022-08-11). "How a False Claim About Misplaced Pages Sparked a Right-Wing Media Frenzy". Slate. Retrieved 2022-08-12.
Duval, Jared (November 14, 2010). Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 80. ISBN 978-1-60819-484-1. Retrieved August 7, 2022.
Schwartz, Zach (November 11, 2015). "Misplaced Pages's Co-Founder Is Misplaced Pages's Most Outspoken Critic". Vice. Archived from the original on November 14, 2015.
"Misplaced Pages founder sets up rival". The Australian. AFP. October 19, 2006. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014.
^ Freddie Sayers (July 14, 2021). "Misplaced Pages co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created". UnHerd (Podcast). UnHerd. Retrieved May 25, 2022.
^ Sabur, Rozina (July 16, 2021). "The Left has taken over Misplaced Pages and stripped it of neutrality, says co-creator". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022. Retrieved December 2, 2021. Mr Sanger added that "very little" reference to scandals and allegations against the Bidens, for instance relating to their business dealings in Ukraine, could be found on Misplaced Pages.
^ Spence, Madeleine (August 1, 2021). "Larry Sanger: 'I wouldn't trust Misplaced Pages — and I helped to invent it'". The Sunday Times. London. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
^ Aggarwal, Mayank (July 16, 2021). "Nobody should trust Misplaced Pages, says man who invented Misplaced Pages". The Independent. Retrieved September 17, 2021. He argued that there should be at least a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal but there is very little of that.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
Harrison, Stephen (June 9, 2020). "How Misplaced Pages Became a Battleground for Racial Justice". Slate. Retrieved August 17, 2021.
Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Rightwing website challenges 'liberal bias' of Misplaced Pages". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 16, 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2018.
Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Misplaced Pages right". IT Wire. Archived from the original on March 31, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
Robertson, Adi (October 9, 2017). "Two months ago, the internet tried to banish Nazis. No one knows if it worked". The Verge. Archived from the original on April 4, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2019.
Coren, Giles (July 22, 2017). "Game of Thrones is Tolkien with chlamydia". The Times. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
Fitts, Alexis Sobel (June 21, 2017). "Welcome to the Misplaced Pages of the Alt-Right". Wired. Archived from the original on January 17, 2018. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
Huetlin, Josephine (October 8, 2017). "How a Nazi Slur for 'Fake News' Became an Alt-Right Rallying Cry". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on June 21, 2018. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
Sampson, Tim (October 1, 2013). "How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on June 16, 2018. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
Penić, Goran (September 10, 2013). "Desničari preuzeli uređivanje hrvatske Wikipedije" [Right-wing editors took over the Croatian Misplaced Pages]. Jutarnji list (in Croatian). Archived from the original on March 25, 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
"Fascist movement takes over Croatian Misplaced Pages?". InSerbia Today. September 11, 2013. Archived from the original on April 11, 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
"Trolls hijack Misplaced Pages to turn articles against gays". Gay Star News. September 17, 2013. Archived from the original on May 26, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
Milekic, Sven (March 26, 2018). "How Croatian Misplaced Pages Made a Concentration Camp Disappear". Balkan Insight. Zagreb: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Archived from the original on March 31, 2018. Retrieved May 26, 2018.
Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate: Wales Discusses Political Bias on Misplaced Pages". PBS Mediashift. Archived from the original on October 5, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
"Conservative wants to set Misplaced Pages right". The Toronto Star. March 11, 2007. ISSN 0319-0781. Retrieved December 16, 2021.
Spence, Madeleine (August 1, 2021). "Larry Sanger: 'I wouldn't trust Misplaced Pages — and I helped to invent it'". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
Sato, Yumiko (March 19, 2021). "Non-English Editions of Misplaced Pages Have a Misinformation Problem". Slate. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
^ "Denuncian el sesgo político encubierto de Misplaced Pages en español". ABC (in Spanish). 2022-09-16. Retrieved 2022-09-20.
"Misplaced Pages. La tendencia prokirchnerista que esconde la enciclopedia virtual". La Nación (in Spanish). 2020-05-20. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
Fontevecchia, Agustino (2020-08-08). "Cristina vs. Google and the invisible battle for Misplaced Pages". Buenos Aires Times. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
"¿Kirchnerpedia? La militancia copó las definiciones políticas de Misplaced Pages". La Nación (in Spanish). 2021-07-22. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (2023-02-09). "Misplaced Pages's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research: 1–58. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648. In the last decade, a group of committed Misplaced Pages editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Misplaced Pages, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews.
^ ELIA-SHALEV, ASAF (1 March 2023). "Misplaced Pages's 'Supreme Court' tackles alleged conspiracy to distort articles on Holocaust". Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
Aderet, Ofer (14 February 2023). "'Jews Helped the Germans Out of Revenge or Greed': New Research Documents How Misplaced Pages Distorts the Holocaust". Haaretz. Retrieved 11 March 2023.

Misplaced Pages