Is Wikipedia Biased?
Abstract
This study empirically examines whether Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. It develops a method for measuring the slant of 28 thousand articles about US politics. In its earliest years, Wikipedia's political entries lean Democrat on average. The slant diminishes during Wikipedia's decade of experience. This change does not arise primarily from revision of existing articles. 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.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Web-scale corpora are known to contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and biases.
“However, web-scale corpora are known to contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and biases (Kumar et al., 2016;Greenstein and Zhu, 2012).”
From On the Risk of Misinformation Pollution with Large Language Models (2023) · cites this paper as Greenstein and Zhu, 2012
Wikipedia, Couchsurfing, and Linux have recently received fair amounts of cynical responses from digital commoners.
“Additionally, self-professed promoters of the peer-to-peer economy of the digital commons, Wikipedia and Couchsurfing, as well as champions of the open-source movement like Linux have recently received fair amounts of cynical responses from digital commoners (Fosfuri et al., 2008; Greenstein and Zhu, 2012; Molz, 2012).”
From The illusion of the digital commons: 'False consciousness' in online alternative economies (2017) · cites this paper as Greenstein and Zhu, 2012
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Goldfarb, A., & Tucker, C. (2019) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.20171452 · Cited by 2,744 · see citing works
Gentzkow, M., Shapiro, J. M., & Taddy, M. (2019) · Econometrica · doi:10.3982/ecta16566 · Cited by 381 · see citing works
On the Risk of Misinformation Pollution with Large Language Models
Pan, Y., Pan, L., Chen, W., Nakov, P., Kan, M.-Y., & Wang, W. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.97 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
The illusion of the digital commons: 'False consciousness' in online alternative economies
Ossewaarde, M., & Reijers, W. (2017) · Organization · doi:10.1177/1350508417713217 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Rindermann, H., Becker, D., & Coyle, T. R. (2020) · Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406 · Cited by 50 · see citing works
- Authors
- Greenstein, S., & Zhu, F.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- University of Southern California (US)
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2012-05-01
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 343-348
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2021146226
- Cited by
- 118
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 29.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Economic Review (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Wikis in Education and Collaboration
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- Wikipedia, neutrality, political bias, American politics, online encyclopedias
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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