Statisticians Investigate Political Bias On Wikipedia 221
Hugh Pickens writes "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include 'republican' or 'democrat' as keywords, and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. 'The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic' but gradually, Wikipedia's articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly, some articles have the expected political slant (civil rights tends Democrat; trade tends Republican), but at the same time many seemingly controversial topics, such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. 'Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.'"
Re:Please limit it to articles about the US gov't (Score:4, Funny)
Europe has a clear political bias too (we're left wing socialist surrender monkeys), and we're quite happy about that. So, please America, leave our wikipedia alone..
Didn't you know that every use of British spellings counted as a "left wing" article.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Funny)
You can't. Even if you write purely factual prose, it's slanted toward's the left. Reality has a well known liberal bias.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Funny)
There are no other points of view.