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.'"
How to write without political bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
Or shall we remind them that the English Wikipedia is not only about U.S., and the word 'republican' and 'democrat' have other meanings too?
Equally biased != NPOV (Score:5, Insightful)
One guy may say that the sun is green, the other guy may say it's purple. Having both of them in the same article does not make it neutral.
Re:Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed; I should imagine that those who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War have little in common with Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, and neither have much in common with the former Iraqi Republican guard.
WAIT! (Score:3, Insightful)
We have one ruling political party in this country that masquerades as two. They measured bias in those articles... far more than they realize. Bias towards the statuesque and our 1 party system.
Interesting, but shallow (Score:4, Insightful)
The frequency of using individual words is far from an actual political bias.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
In my opinion, the best way to combat it is to let it happen, because that way you create the most content possible. Then you use a review process to improve the content. Actually this is pretty much what Wikipedia does, it seems to work out okay for them.
Actually, according to this study, that doesn't work out for them at all. They mention that articles with a bias tend to keep that bias - it remains across many revisions. They only found some balance because other articles with bias in the other direction were also found.
But that raises another question, which they don't address: How much bias is the average reader subjected to if they don't hunt around for obscure, related topics. That is, if the main article for a topic is one read by, say, 1,000,000 people, and there are articles that balance out the viewpoint but are only read by 1,500 people, then the public in general is getting a very slanted view of the topic.
Re:Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Three accountants go duck hunting. (Score:5, Insightful)
The first accountant shoots and misses a meter high.
The second accountant shoots and misses a meter low.
The third accountant says "Got it"!
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It looks like another paid for study that proves what they were asked to prove.
They only had to determine which data points would produce the required end point.
Re:Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Every statistical process has outliers, and one way to deal with those outliers is to have a sample size large enough (oh, say, 111,000 articles) to practically eliminate the effects of those outliers.
Re:Equally biased != NPOV (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. A neutral article will be biased towards the position that is actually true. An article that treats all opinions equally is biased in favor of the positions that are untrue.
And this article is example 1: Apodixis (Score:5, Insightful)
Bias is rhetoric. Apodixis: A rhetorical device that stealthily inserts a false pretense of general knowledge. For example "As everyone knows..."
Or, as this article does: "expected political slant - civil rights tends Democrat"
Republicans broke the Democrats filibuster of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60's. The Republican Party was formed for the sole purpose of overturning Democratic Legislation that allowed slavery to expand into the Western Territories. The first Republican President freed the slaves. Every Governor of every state that let loose the fire hoses on and dogs on minority students was a Democrat.
Study rhetoric, and don't fall for it. We are most vulnerable to the rhetoric we cheer for. That's where we should put most of our scrutiny.
Being tricked by adversary is bad enough, being tricked by someone you support is truly insulting.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also another problem. They are measuring only the bias toward the two main parties. What about bias toward/against other points of view?
Re:Equally biased != NPOV (Score:4, Insightful)
Debates can be reframed, introducing bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Bias can sneak in because of changes in terminology, presumably in both directions, although I've noticed it more on the right these days. As Robert Anton Wilson famously observed, you can go from liberal to conservative without changing a single idea if you wait long enough -- the reverse is also true, depending on the domain in which you have your ideas.
For instance, an article about taxation written in the 1990s might be considered neutral in its time, and talk about the "inheritance tax" a lot. Fast forward ten years, during which the term "death tax" has come into prominence, and the old term "inheritance tax" is only used by fogies and liberals. The textual analysis of the unchanged article will now score it as "liberal", because the terms of the debate have shifted.
This can happen with policies, too -- I remember when a carbon tax was considered a compromise position between liberals, who wanted to directly regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and conservatives, who felt that some kind of market mechanism would provide useful flexibility. Carbon taxes were a technocratic, ideologically neutral solution when they were proposed, but now they're seen as liberal social engineering.
It doesn't always go rightward, of course, some debates have been successfully re-framed by the left, as well, I think -- "global warming" used to be a neutral descriptive term, but the warming isn't uniform, so "climate change" is the preferred term, and I think it's mostly conservatives who use the term "global warming".
That ought to blow up my karma for a solid year...
Re:Equally biased != NPOV (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, I'll not mod the troll for what it is. But that condescending "reality liberal bias" shit is getting really old.
Just to point to a counter example. Greece would prefer to stick with its liberal policies and continue spending government money it doesn't have. In this case, and I am not claiming that this is true in all cases, reality has a decidedly conservative bias. Greece needs to make heavily conservative moves with respect to their government spending or they are doomed. And no, the liberal "raise taxes" move isn't going to work, either.
So, Greece is living in a reality that has a conservative bias. Through proof by contradiction, the lie that "reality has a liberal" bias (in all cases) is patently false.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no other points of view.
How come that didn't get modded insightful?
The two party bi-polarism has buried every other point of view in the US and it has pretty much killed the democratic process for years now. Nobody gets a fair vote in anything unless it can be represented as one extreme or the other. The system is rigged in such a way that this is unlikely to change and the media keeps dumbing down everything to the same two extremes.
A democratic system can't function with only the illusion of choice, you need more than just 2 viewpoints.
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I'll not mod the troll for what it is. But that condescending "reality liberal bias" shit is getting really old.
Just to point to a counter example. Greece would prefer to stick with its liberal policies and continue spending government money it doesn't have. In this case, and I am not claiming that this is true in all cases, reality has a decidedly conservative bias. Greece needs to make heavily conservative moves with respect to their government spending or they are doomed. And no, the liberal "raise taxes" move isn't going to work, either.
So, Greece is living in a reality that has a conservative bias. Through proof by contradiction, the lie that "reality has a liberal" bias (in all cases) is patently false.
I don't think you're making the point you think you are. Spending money you don't have is a thoroughly conservative value. In the USA, sure people claiming to be conservatives talk about responsibly government spending, but when they get in to office, it's been 30 years of "deficits don't matter." Even now the presumed Republican nominee for president is running on a platform of cutting taxes and raising defense spending. How is that not spending money you don't have?
I suppose you know this is true, as you say so yourself in your comment. I don't have the solution to the Greece situation, but isn't 'the liberal "raise taxes" move' an effort to get money to spend? While liberals in the USA have traditionally been "tax-and-spend," doesn't that contradict your point? It's the conservatives who have been "borrow-and-spend" AKA spending money they don't have.
There may be situations where the conservative course of action is the best solution, but that does not mean reality has a conservative bias. (I don't think reality has a liberal (or any) bias either. I do think the current reality in the USA shows liberal values (in moderation) work. I say that makes liberals more biased to embrace reality while conservatives biased to deny it.)