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)
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I would suppose that if you were to use the same statistical methods described in the article, periodically refreshing your corpus with new input from the federal register, and ran an analysis on what you wrote, you could get a score that you could use as feedback on your attempt at neutrality. Write what you want to write, pass it through the analysis, then edit until the analysis shows it as neutral. What do you think?
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I think it's impossible to be "unbiased". Even when I was editing articles about HD Radio or DRM radio, I discovered both articles were heavily-biased (against HDR and for DRM). I tried to remove the bias, but now I suspect it's biased the opposite way. This is why I think reporters who claim to be "unbiased" are foolish. The bias sneaks in, even if it's just through omission of relevant stories (such as supposedly unbiased CNN showing a republican primary poll with 2nd place mysteriously missing; the 2
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
What can be done to avoid political bias and how do we do it consistently?
Don't write about political topics that are relevant to you?
For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
However if I research and report on the political situation in France, where I have no dog in the fight, I'll probably end up pretty much unbiased.
Its a big interconnected world... there's really no reason for locals to have to write biased filler about local issues.
Doesn't have to be geographic. I have no personal interest in the gay marriage thing, not being gay or close to those in their subculture and not being hyper-christian, so I can be extremely unbiased about the topic. This SHOULD work, but it fails anyway, because my completely unbiased view unsurprisingly seems to match the (few) non-cowardly (D) and oppose almost all the neo-(R) so I'll be accused of being "politically biased" based on results, although I obviously don't have any reason to care that would influence the process of writing about it. Think of how everyone naturally decides that slavery was a dumb idea now, but it was a hot political football around 1860 or so in the USA.
There's some other hints, like if you find evidence of sloganeering in your writing you're probably doing it wrong.
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Don't write about political topics that are relevant to you?
One slight problem with this idea...
However if I research and report on the political situation in France, where I have no dog in the fight, I'll probably end up pretty much unbiased.
Why would you?
People only contribute to articles on topics that interest them (witness all the video game and anime/manga articles). How many topics are there that actually interest you, but for which you hold no bias?
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bias is an interesting phenomenon. I can be a fundamentalist Christian and think all gays are going to Hell to burn in eternal torment and still be okay with gay marriage as a civil situation since its not like the government can actually force me to accept that they are truly married in a Christian sense.
Alternately, I could also be atheist or agnostic, believe that being gay is perfectly acceptable and normal but still wonder just what the point of gay marriage is actually supposed to be, from a state perspective.
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> For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
It is worse. Just using those phrases implies a bias. NPOV is a very difficult thing, few could actually attain it and even fewer would actually be interested in the result. No, what most people want is their beliefs confirmed in such a way that they are assured that what they believe is the only Truth, thus defined as 'neutral'. The Truth has no Age
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About the only way I can think of is to avoid politics altogether. Too bad we can't determine a man's heroics or douchebaggery without first determining if he's a liberal or a conservative. By the time we figure that out, most of the time, we've already decided his (or her) worth. Sad.
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Too bad we can't determine a man's heroics or douchebaggery without first determining if he's a liberal or a conservative.
I don't know if that's strictly true. I have a whole lot of respect for individual's personal histories without thinking they'd make good politicians, or that they would best represent my personal opinions.
For situations like the wiki, I think it's just a question of intellectual integrity. I'd agree that nobody is perfect and bias will sneak in, but we can try to suppress that (when we're being honest) and overcome the remaining difference with lots of eyeballs.
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: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.
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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
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Republican != Conservative
Re:How to write without political bias? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's an interesting point of view, but it's not a very good proof. Greece has been following the "conservative" prescription to solve their economic problems. The result? Record levels of unemployment. If you think the American economy is doing poorly, consider that Greece now has hit a new record level of unemployment (22%) and over 50% unemployment for people aged 15-24. Given how well the "conservative" solution is working out, do you think it's any wonder they're looking for a "liberal" solution instead?
More importantly, you missed the entire point of the joke. The joke is that when reality disagrees with conservatives, they claim reality is biased. It's a sad commentary on the far right's rejection of facts and embracing of fictions to justify their views in the face of evidence to the contrary*. Liberals, while not immune, are currently much less prone to that type of behaviour as recently confirmed [slashdot.org].
* Sometimes it manifests as an inability to accept some of the relevant facts. For instance, Grover Norquist is unable to accept that Ronald Reagan raised taxes, increased the size of the government and tripled the U.S. federal debt during his term in office. This colours his entire perception of government and it's role in the economy, since he credits the Reagan economic boom solely to the tax cuts that Reagan implemented without considering any of the other relevant factors.
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Yes, Greece is looking for a liberal solution.
I agree the conservative solution is very painful for them.
But, I think if they follow the liberal solution, their country will burn. It will be 10x worse than anything they've gone through so far.
Their options are painful thriftiness, or universally worthless money.
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Define doomed. If Greece goes bankrupt and the foreign debts never get paid, are they doomed? The debt will eventually be repudiated and life will go on, somehow. I don't think Germany or France are quite ready to invade Greece to recoup their investments.
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> Define doomed.
Hyperinflation, total collapse of social order, cats and dogs sleeping together.
Their basic problem is they are spending far more on their welfare state than they can take in through taxes. Full stop. They are far beyond the point where any conceivable tax scheme is likely to actually generate more revenue to their treasury, that 'ol Laffer Curve is a reality that can no longer be denied for them. Their ability to borrow the difference between what they can raise through taxation and w
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I know it sounds like crazy talk to most people, but there's a third option called "spending less money".
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You can't. Really, the best thing you can do is simply acknowledge your bias beforehand. This way you come across as being more honest. Some people might see your initial admission and skip reading what you write, but you wouldn't have wanted them to read you anyway because, if they are that polarized or radical, they would in all likelihood have attacked your ideas anyway. It might also have the effect of getting people who would otherwise have skipped right over your article to decide to read it. Bec
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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
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:How to write without political bias? (Score:5, Funny)
There are no other points of view.
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.
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Whoosh. The comment was, to use a political phrase, "illustrating absurdity by being absurd". Sometimes people mod those insightful because they think (mistakenly, it would seem) that this is obvious to everyone.
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This is shaping up just like last year's presidential election - We're only getting candidates who are R's and D's, e
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It's more than that. They do statistics to try to identify language patterns and then associate those language patterns with bias.
That might be a very reasonable approach, in fact it might be the best we have but I don't think the language patterns are that great at identifying bias so much as they identify the bias of constituents. Freakanomics radio had an show about this a while back. The closest you get is a couple derivatives away from the actual intent, you chart politicians and their level
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It's not just a matter of "obscure related topics", as you put it, although you're quite right, obscurity will definitely matter in many cases. It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic. For example, it's become a widepsread tactic for the right wing to call the Democratic party the "Democrat Party" instead. Google for that phrase, and you will see an enquiry offering the user a chance to search for Democratic party instead and
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> It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic.
It isn't nearly as petty as you imply. Control of the language is control over the framing of the debate and usually gives whoever has that control an overwhelming advantage. Once you understand that things make a lot more sense.
Some example. Note that I am not interested in opening up these issues themselves so consider them OFF TOPIC here. Keep replies on the idea of bias and
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Mod this up.
I tend to think for myself, which actually leads me to a slight democratic slant overall but in general if you took everything I say together I'm pissing off both sides.
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and is likely to make a lot of people uncomfortable.
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?
Re:Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:5, Informative)
Would it kill you to read the paper?
We obtain a list of 111,216 articles. We then eliminate these articles that cover countries other than the United States.
[...]
For each of these articles, we construct a slant index by applying the methods and estimates developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010), hereafter G&S. G&S select 1,000 phrases based on the number of times these phrases appear in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record, applying statistical methods to identify phrases that separate Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. In brief, we ask whether a given Wikipedia article uses phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress.
And the corresponding footnote:
The words “republican” and “democrat” do not appear exclusively in entries about United States politics. If a country name shows up in the title or category names, we then check whether the phrase “United States” or “America” shows up in the title or category names. If yes, we keep this article. Otherwise, we search the text for “United States” or “America.” If these phrases do not show up more than 3 times in the text, this article is dropped. This process keeps articles such as “Iraq War” but drop articles related to political parties in foreign countries.
Researchers do think of this stuff, you know.
Re:Hope they don't do just word frequency analysis (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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That's why they used 111000 articles, you will of course get an amount of statistical noise and articles that doesn't make much sense. That doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, it just means it's not exact. I'm sure you are aware of that though, judging from even knowing about stuff like "word frequency analysis". :)
I haven't RTFA but it's very likely that they checked a random sample manually, and used the results from that to weigh the results from the larger set.
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Did you even read their metric?
Let each input line consist of the article title, followed by all category names (tab-separated or whatever). The countrynames regex matches any country name. The following AWK script approximates their algorithm (yes, I know egrep misses multiple matches on one line -- but you get the idea). /United States|America/) print $1;
{
if ($1 ~ countrynames) {
if ($0 ~
} else {
title = $1;
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Would it kill you to read the paper?
Probably not, but here at Slashdot our thinking is: why take the risk?
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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.
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Read the AC post a few posts above yours... he quotes the article where they explain how they removed articles not relevant to the US political parties.
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.
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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.
It depends on what your definition of "neutral" is. If it's making sure that all major points of view get equal mention and if Green and Purple are the two major points of view then it may well be "neutral".
Of course, there are many other definitions of "neutral" for which your example would not make then neutral.
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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"!
------------------
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.
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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.
Re:Equally biased != NPOV (Score:4, Insightful)
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Since when do opinions factor into any logical definition of truth?
We'd best just accept that everyone has a bias in their opinion, and that makes no statement to the validity of their worldview when applied to everyone else.
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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.
You are not taking into account Wikipedia's abject hatred of truth. It cares only about what has been reported elsewhere by publications that are also biased. See WP:TRUTH.
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And given that it is a well known fact that reality has a liberal bias, clearly the results of this study indicate that Wikipedia has a strong republican bias.
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I may have missed a joke here depending on why you italicized, but since I've frequently see that actual sentiment, I can't assume so.
Re:Equally biased != NPOV (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
The sun may well be green to one observer and purple to another depending on their movement relative to it. Look up red/blue shift.
I agree with what you are saying, just disagreeing with your example of it.
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And of course, it's hard to measure the bias of pages that have been deleted [wikipedia.org].
The Sun *is* green, at least sort of (Score:2)
"Some think that the Sun's output in visible light peaks in the yellow. However, the Sun's visible output peaks in the green": http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html [stanford.edu]
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In this particular case, it's not even in the same article - rather, there is a roughly equal amount of articles which say that sun is green and those which say that sun is purple.
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One guy may say that the sun is green, the other guy may say it's purple The other ~7 billion people of the world say it's yellow. Having all of them in the same article does make it neutral.
Especially when you find out why the two people odd people disagree with everyone else. It gives a place of study, either on the common perceptions of everyone that the sun appears mostly yellow although it is radiating all colors or the specific individuals that may be color blind or psychologically unstill.
Obligatory (Score:2)
Libertarian bias? (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely they need to investigate libertarian bias (especially seeing as Wales himself is, how should I put this, a raving Objectivist nutjob). The fact that libertarian beliefs overlap with democrat and republican beliefs can explain the two separate slants with one single hypothesis.
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Dangerous to Conclude this is "Slant" (Score:5, Interesting)
(civil rights tends Democrat; trade tends Republican)
Could that be simply because Democrats invent/introduce/overuse new phrases and talking points for civil rights and Republicans invent/introduce/overuse new phrases and talking points for trade? For example, you'd probably hear Democrats say "Equal Opportunity Employment" or "Affirmative Action" a lot and you'd probably hear Republicans say "Laissez-faire" or "Free Market" a lot. What would be the antithesis of these phrases for the other side? I would posit that it's entirely possible that these articles are not on average biased and instead are merely explaining and using the phrases that each party has employed to tackle their number one priorities.
On top of that, I didn't see anything that seemed to indicate that they used windowing to determine when a phrase was opposed to the phrase they were using. For example if you found that the acronym ACORN indicates a Democratic slant but there's a whole section on its Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] full of negative criticism despite them using 'ACORN' frequently in that section. Would this section be identified as a Democratic slant?
Where is this G&S word bank? Where is the list of results so I can look up the ACORN article's scores?
I'd be more interested in the media (Score:4, Interesting)
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CNN used to be blatantly biased against President Bush. After he left office their coverage might have become less biased; I wouldn't know though since I became disgusted with CNN several years ago.
As far as referring to the men as "Mr." vs. "President" I don't see any difference in coverage. Most writers will mix it up within an article to avoid repetition.
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Strange. I always saw CNN as pro-war, anti-middle east ( all of it ), and quick to oppose anyone who contradicted US government views on anything. To some extent it appeared to treat the rest of the world as a bunch of fools crying out for US help in every situation. I certainly didn't notice it being against Bush.
I gave up even trying to watch it as it appeared to be more a propaganda exercise than a news channel.
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I never expected even distribution. Those in charge tend to be liberal, and they will guard liberal articles that are important to them. You are a mere peon editor, so trying to insert factual information or even make the watched article consistent with the rest of Wikipedia will not be allowed. You will be reverted three times with no explanation, and any attempt by you to undo the vandalism will run you u
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I've found more open reporting from comedians these days.
Take this as a sign of your biases, then, you probably like what the comedians are saying. Comedians, such as Jon Stewart, are fully happy to distort the truth, selectively report, anything for entertainment value. When he is called out on it, Jon Stewart doesn't deny it, he says, "hey, I'm a comedian."
If you think comedians are giving you 'more open reporting' it's a problem with you, because they are not even trying to do that.
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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.
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Hey, it's possible. (plus, there's this place called Houston).
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Of course, ethnically sensitive people who respect Gaia would never stoop to the level of rednecks, hicks, and all those other racist sea-kitten-haters. Those Repooplicans.
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True, there are some words that have an inherent bias, but those aren't really used in Wikipedia articles. Words like hippy, liberal or racist are only biased in certain contexts. The researchers didn't search for actually biased words, but did an algorithmic wordcount in political writings to identify the 'bias' of each word, which I think is far too inaccurate for the confident conclusions they have drawn.
Please limit it to articles about the US gov't (Score:3)
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. Thanks.
If I think that wikipedia is politically neutral, then this investigation will show it has a bias for the Democrats.
If wikipedia is neutral between Democrat and Republican views, then I will think it has a strong right wing bias.
The problem with this kind of reserach is that it might either undermine Wikipedia as a source in general (when finally the world seems to agree that the qualiy of wikipedia is just as good as any encyclopedia), or worse: it leads to changes in the contents to neutralize the supposed bias. This investigation has no benefits for wikipedia, or for free information.
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.
What's "Global" about "Dem." vs. "Repub."? (Score:2)
Seems to me that "Democrat" or "Republican" are USA-specific terms - not sure what's 'global' about that bias? ;-)
Not much use exploring articles about political biases in civil rights articles in the UK using "Democrat" and "Republican" as terms. "Labour", "Scottish National Party", "Plaid Cymru","Liberal" , and "Conservative" (amongst others) might be more useful.
Ok, so I guess it is a good test of an example, whether USA specific articles on the English language have a political bias. Not sure it says m
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LIberal ...?
I'm glad it isn't liberal, because... (Score:3)
I'm glad it didn't turn out to be a liberal bias. I would tire quickly of the phrase "Liberal Pedia" constantly from Conservatives.
Though, it still might not stop Fox.
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.
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Republicans broke the Democrats filibuster of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60's.
Everett Dirksen [wikipedia.org] was a republican congressman that grew up in the extremely racially charged town of Pekin, Illinois. I grew up nearby, and Pekin is still regarded as one of the most racially divided towns today, but they have made a lot of progress. At least they got rid of the previous high school mascot (changed from the "Pekin Chinks" to the "Pekin Dragons").
Dirksen is the one who brought forward the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [wikipedia.org].
You can't go through the Illinois school system without hearing about what Di
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Well that explains why blacks overwhelmingly vote Republican. Republicans love blacks and would never betray them for white votes, plus Republicans are so honest they would never use passive-aggressive rhetorical tactics like the lie of omission.
How are States Rights racist? (Score:3)
ntil the Republican party adopted the Southern Strategy in the 70's to win over the racists
It's absurd that the Wiki page you link to labels the "southern strategy" as racist - when the main thing that entailed was Republicans advocating for states rights! The article tries to paint that as pandering to "scared white people" but if you even thought for a second about what it actually meant, you'd realize that stronger states rights means more control for blacks than whites in the south wher
Debunking your SS misconceptions (Score:2)
If you want to understand what the "Southern Strategy" really meant, read this [breitbart.com].
Again, any argument that the Southern Strategy is racist against blacks is inherently flawed when the Republicans enjoyed a massive increase in the black vote because of it.
I have no doubt you'll ignore the article because of where it is stored, but the inability to learn where knowledge is to be found is your own problem that I cannot solve for you.
Bias is not in the use of phrases alone (Score:3)
There's also choice of topic, slant of the article and what is included or excluded.
I see, for example, they excluded the chart with the average IQs of all nations.
Slant of article is tough to define, but it's your approach to the topic. "Self-Appointed 'Neighborhood Watch' guy shoots innocent teen" or "Angry Teen with marijuana possession offense attacks neighborhood watch official."
As long as there are people, there will be political bias, and Wikipedia still leans left because the people behind it are mostly students.
Bias is rhetoric. Apodixis For Example (Score:4, Informative)
Conservative Democrats (Score:3)
Your "history" stops at the 1960s. You are aware, aren't you, that huge numbers of conservative Democrats moved to the Republican party in the '60s? Look up "Solid South."
So you are basically claiming that a significant part of today's Republican party is racist.
Brilliant.
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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 police, the fire hoses and the dogs on minority students was a Democrat.
Republicans broke the Democrat's filibuster of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60's.
True, but missing the point. LBJ managed to get the Civil Rights Act passed, largely using the political capital of JFK's death (by describing it as an enduring legacy) and nearly all Republicans and Democrats in the North (but more Democrats) voted for it, while nearly all in the South of either party voted against it. [wikipedia.org] This correlation reverses when you combine the figures (Simpson's paradox) [wikipedia.org] which is what you are talking about. The divide was so intense that it changed the base of the parties - the Democr
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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...
The paper's bias? (Score:2)
Does anyone else find it odd that this paper has been submitted to American Economic Review [usc.edu]?
Perhaps this validates the point of the paper in that if we had the title "Economists Investigate Political Bias On Wikipedia" we would have gone in with different feelings about the whole thing.
Flawed (Score:3)
I think the major flaw is that this seems to be assuming that bias on Wikipedia is done in the same way as bias elsewhere. Someone who wants to bias a Wikipedia article has to do so within the confines of rules which help prevent some kinds of bias more than others.
For instance, one of the most common ways to bias a Wikipedia article is undue weight--you include negative information and exclude positive information, or vice versa. This sort of bias doesn't use coded language (thus making it invisible to this study) and while it is still against Wikipedia rules, Wikipedia does relatively poorly at stopping it.
Don't trust Wikis for that info anyway (Score:2)
I've seen far too many contemporaneous and historical political pages being modified for political purposes, usually to water down or outright whitewash a scandal. Heck, even some scientific content I wouldn't bother reading on Wikipedia if there was a strong enough political angle; e.g. climate change or the nuclear industry.
Left slant + right slant != neutral. (Score:2)
There is a basic error in this idea that because there are roughly equal amounts of "slant" towards various partisan ideological points of view that this somehow adds up to being "neutral". Objectively neutral would be straight to the facts without ideological slant at all, if that's even possible given the nature of the subjects.
Examples of some of the phrases? (Score:2)
What are some examples of "typically Democrat" and "typically Republican" phrases?
I skimmed the links but didn't find anything there.
Yes and Conservapedia is much less biased (Score:2)
Their second most viewed page is THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA. See the full list [conservapedia.com]. It's unusual that only one of their top ten is about homosexuality. In the past as many as seven of the top ten most viewed pages have been about it.
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This confirms US-centric bias. (Score:2)
Though probably not intended as such, this confirms that English-language Wikipedia articles have US-centric (that is, rampant right-wing, as both Republicans and Democrats are right-wing by non-US standards) bias.
Go back to conservapedia, you whiners (Score:2)
Comparison (Score:2)
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Might be more interesting and relevant to compare Windows, Linux, OSX and BSD...
And of course Amiga, but that would be cheating.
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This "reality has a liberal bias" meme popular among people my age is exactly the type of conceit that puts a stop to introspection and self-critique -- which are among the pillars of liberalism.