Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:16, 25 May 2018

Concerns about an ideological bias on Misplaced Pages are reflected in analysis and criticism of the reliability of the online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages, and especially its English-language site, in relation to whether or not its content is biased due to the political or epistemological ideology of its volunteer Misplaced Pages editors.

Public opinion

Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales said in April 2006: "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."

Lawrence Solomon of the National Review in 2008 considered the Misplaced Pages articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views.

In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events, Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Misplaced Pages's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Misplaced Pages's article on its rival Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias.

Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said in 2018 that, "For certain political topics, there's a central-left bias. There's also a slight, when it comes to more political topics, counter-cultural bias. It's not across the board, and it's not for all things."

Analyses

Greenstein and Zhu

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, both professors at the Harvard Business School, have authored several studies and articles examining Misplaced Pages from an ideological standpoint as component of its collective intelligence.

Is Misplaced Pages Biased? (2012)

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 Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) to measure bias in newspaper media. This slant index measures an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican based on key phrases within the text and gives a rating for the relative amount of that lean. The authors used this method to measure whether Misplaced Pages was meeting its stated policy of "neutral point of view" (or NPOV). They also examined the changes to articles over time as they are revised. 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.

The findings have been confirmed by later research, such as The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (2017).

Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? (2017)

In a more extensive follow-up study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Misplaced Pages (2017), 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 "(t)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".

Jointly They Edit (2013)

A 2013 study, Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Misplaced Pages, was conducted by Jessica J. Neff, professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and colleagues David Laniado , Karolin E. Kappler, Yana Volkovich, Pablo Aragón, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, all from the Barcelona Media-Innovation Centre. The study was conducted to "take a closer look at the patterns of interaction and discourse that members of different political parties have around information online, because they may have important consequences for the accuracy and neutrality of political information provided online". It investigated how Wikipedians (editors of Misplaced Pages) identified themselves as affiliated with any political party, whether their participation was divided along party lines, if they had a preference to interact with members of the same party, and how much affiliation impacted conflicts within discussions. The authors identified party and ideological affiliation using "userboxes" which some Wikipedians place on their user pages. The authors concluded:

"Although Democrats and Republicans seem to maintain their political identity within the Misplaced Pages community, our findings show that users displayed more 'Misplaced Pages' boxes than political boxes on their user pages, indicating that the identity of being a Wikipedian may be more salient in the context of this community. Further, the lack of preference to interact with same-party members in the context of article discussions does not indicate the same polarization that has been observed in other contexts. In this sense, the Wikipedian identity seems to predominate over party identity. Hence, the results of our analysis show that despite the increasing political division of the U.S., there are still areas in which political dialogue is possible and happens."

— Neff, JJ et al, "Conclusions", Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Misplaced Pages,

The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (2017)

A 2017 study The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (Feng Shi, Misha Teplitskiy, Eamon Duede, James Evans) investigated the effects of ideological diversity on Misplaced Pages entry quality scores for political, social issues, and science articles. To accomplish this, the authors estimated editor political alignment on the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their prior contributions and gauged article quality using a MediaWiki tool called "ORES". The authors found that "polarized teams" (a balanced group of editors with diverse political viewpoints) "create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams", "engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates", and "generate a larger volume of debate and their balance of political perspectives reduces flare-ups in debate temperature". They found that homogenous or highly-skewed teams engaged in less, but highly acrimonious, debate which produced articles scoring lower in quality.

Effects

Conservapedia

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Conservative activist Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Misplaced Pages contained a liberal bias, had "biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views", and had become "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American". Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Misplaced Pages. In turn, the Conservapedia project has come under significant criticism and derision for its numerous factual inaccuracies and factual relativism. Paleontologist Donald Prothero wrote in his 2013 book Reality Check that Conservapedia "is modeled on Misplaced Pages but has a strong conservative bias".

See also

• Gender bias on Misplaced Pages
• Racial bias on Misplaced Pages

References

1. Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate::Wales Discusses Political Bias on Misplaced Pages". MediaShift. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
2. Solomon, Lawrence (July 8, 2008). "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". National Review. CBS News. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
3. Scarborough, Rowan (September 27, 2010). "Whacks the Right". Human Events. Retrieved October 3, 2010.
4. Matsakis, Louise (March 16, 2018). "Don't Ask Misplaced Pages to Cure the Internet". Wired. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
5. Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers". Econometrica. 78 (1). The Econometric Society: 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195.
6. 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.
7. Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Misplaced Pages perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
8. ^ Shi, F.; Teplitskiy, M.; Duede, E.; Evans, J.A. (November 29, 2017). "The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". (paper). ArXiv. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
9. Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (forthcoming). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Misplaced Pages" (PDF). MIS Quarterly. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
10. "Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased?". BizEd. AACSB. May 1, 2015. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
11. Guo, Jeff (October 25, 2016). "Misplaced Pages is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
12. Jessica J. Neff; David Laniado; Karolin E. Kappler; Yana Volkovich; Pablo Aragon; Andreas Kaltenbrunner (April 3, 2013). "Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Misplaced Pages". PLoS ONE. 8 (4): e60584. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060584.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
13. Stevens, Sean (December 21, 2017). "Research Summary: The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". Heterodox Academy. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
14. Damore, James (February 2, 2018). "The Case for Diversity". Quillette. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
15. Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Conservapedia — the US religious right's answer to Misplaced Pages". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
16. Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Misplaced Pages right". IT Wire. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
17. ^ the notion "that there's always a second, equally valid interpretation of the facts". Clarke, Conor. (2007). "A fact of one's own". The Guardian, March 1, 2007.
18. ^ "Weird, wild wiki on which anything goes". Metro. March 19, 2007. Retrieved March 25, 2007.
19. Prothero, Donald R. (August 1, 2013). "The Rejection of Reality". Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future. Indiana University Press. p. 306. ISBN 978-0-253-01029-2. Retrieved 25 May 2018 – via Google Books.

• Criticism of Misplaced Pages
• Bias