Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Recent research
 Article display preview: | This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!
| ||||
YOUR ARTICLE'S DESCRIPTIVE TITLE HERE
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Wikipedia's political bias: Halfway to liberal
[edit]- Reviewed by Clayoquot
Is Wikipedia "Wokepedia" as some have claimed? A 2024 paper[1] by Puyu Yang and Giovanni Colavizza sheds some light on the question. It adds to a corpus of research on ideological bias on Wikipedia; some previous studies have found leftist bias and one study found a center-right bias. The authors of the present study (whose previous work includes several papers on Wikipedia citations) had already reported on it in a 2022 preprint (see our earlier review), but it since been published in the peer-reviewed journal Online Information Review, with some changes including an updated abstract.
The paper looks at the English Wikipedia's citations to news sources and associates each source with a score corresponding to its political bias. The bias scores come from a dataset called Media Bias Monitor (MBM), described in this 2018 paper.
The MBM dataset is based on the propensity of Facebook users to share links to particular sources. For instance, it presumes that if a source is shared more by self-identified liberals than by self-identified conservatives, the source has a liberal bias.
Yang and Colavizza find that on a scale ranging from -2 (very liberal) to +2 (very conservative), the average Wikipedia news citation has a score of -0.5, which is halfway between "moderate" and "liberal".
Could editors be preferring liberal news sources because they are more factually accurate? The paper anticipates this question. Through further analysis using ratings of factual reliability from Media Bias/Fact Check, Yang and Colavizza conclude that the favouring of liberal sources "persists when accounting for the factual reliability of the news media."
The authors say their findings "can be attributed to several factors, including the political leanings of Wikipedia contributors, the prominence and accessibility of liberal-oriented news sources, and potential methodological biases in gauging political polarization." With regard to the last two factors, The Guardian, which makes up more than half of Wikipedia's "very liberal" citations, owes some of its popularity to its open access. Its classification as "very liberal" is debatable, as other sources have described it as closer to the centre.
See also our earlier reviews of related research, in particular:
- "Report by conservative think-tank presents ample quantitative evidence for 'mild to moderate' 'left-leaning bias' on Wikipedia" (2024)
- "'How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet' – by reinterpreting NPOV and driving out pro-fringe editors (2023), in particular the "Fringe and politics" section
- "Language analysis finds Wikipedia's political bias moving from left to right" (2012)
...
[edit]- Reviewed by ...
...
[edit]- Reviewed by ...
...
[edit]- Reviewed by ....
Briefly
[edit]- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
- ...
Other recent publications
[edit]Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
- Compiled by ...
"..."
[edit]From the abstract:
...
"..."
[edit]From the abstract:
...
"..."
[edit]From the abstract:
...
References
[edit]- ^ Yang, Puyu; Colavizza, Giovanni (2024-01-18). "Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia". Online Information Review. 48 (5): 908–925. doi:10.1108/OIR-02-2023-0084. ISSN 1468-4527.
- Supplementary references and notes:
Discuss this story
(This allows for greater visibility of discussions, makes archiving easier, and prevents discussions becoming disconnected from articles during the publication process)