Talk:Ideological bias on Wikipedia/Archive 3

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Academic views

In 2011, Maurice Hall, an associate professor at Villanova University in the U.S., stated his opinion "that the information can be skewed in directions of ideology or other forms of bias, and so that is why it cannot be taken as a final authority." Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said in 2018 that, "(f)or 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."

References

Really? Why are we quoting Hall at all? He's an associate professor expressing a personal opinion. I wouldn't object to Matei being quoted higher up the article (I think he's right) but Hall looks to be WP:UNDUE verging on WP:SYN as far as ideological bias goes. Guy (Help!) 10:23, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Everything anyone ever says is "expressing personal opinion" to some degree. These academic views on bias on Wikipedia are used throughout this article. I also think that the Karl Kehm quote in that same source offers another interesting perspective about how, despite concerns about bias, our citations are seen as a valuable resource. -- Netoholic @ 10:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

I'll bet there are tens of thousands of academics all around the world who have never felt the need to write about Wikipedia's (alleged) bias, because they have never seen it as an issue. How will you incorporate their views into this article? HiLo48 (talk) 10:59, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

There's perfectly good sources to balance the article like that, if we had to remove all articles where most of the people who wrote about the topic had a slanted view we'd have to gut an enormous part of it. This topic is not sacrosanct compared to other topics. It is perfectly okay to point to sources sayig Wikipedia is pretty muh balanced like [1]. Dmcq (talk) 11:16, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

That line of thinking can be just as wrongly applied to an absurd degree about any topic of knowledge because most academics don't write about things outside of their area of interest. That's like asking how we incorporate the views of all the academics that are silent on climate change into that article, or how to incorporate academics silent about colony collapse disorder in that article? -- Netoholic @ 11:43, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Rubbish. I stand by my many times repeated point that this article is based entirely on the thoughts of American right wing whiners. Your general style response cannot negate that point. HiLo48 (talk) 11:47, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

A secondary source took notice of the associate professor's opinion and reported it. It was an article about education and he warned about possible ideological bias, he didn't mention other types of bias though he said they could occur. U.S. News & World Report is a reliable source, and particularly so on education topics.. Dmcq (talk) 11:16, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

And a lot of secondary sources ignored it. HiLo48 (talk) 11:47, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

This line of reasoning is entirely vacuous. There is likely no conceivable subject on which tens of thousands of academics have not written, and in order to make a meaningful argument on the POV of absent sources, you need a source talking about the absence of sources. Reading entrails about what people who didn't write would have written, or why they didn't, is less than meaningless. GMG^talk 12:07, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

We could go round in circles on that forever, the issue for me is that this is a single opinion by a single not-very-senior academic with no particular authority, and he's not talking about ideological bias specifically, he's talking about whether Wikipedia is a suitable source for academic work. It may well be an entirely valid point in discussion criticism of Wikipedia (he is mainly talking about the non-expert contributor issue, after all), but the inclusion in this article looks very much like a case of googling Wikipedia +ideology + bias and sticking all the results in the article. US News and World Reports' article was about how Wikipedia is being accepted as a source, it is not about Hall's opinion, it merely namechecks him once. Wired doesn't even do that. It's not a study, not a peer-reviewed analysis, it's a one sentence quote in an article making essentially the opposite point. Hence WP:UNDUE and bordering on WP:SYN. Guy (Help!) 12:21, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Hall is not UNDUE. The section is relevant. To remove stable content requires consensus. Not the other way around. – Lionel^(talk) 12:55, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for stating your opinion, now would you care to address the actual arguments grounded in policy? As I said, I think Matei's opinion merits inclusion, but the reality of Hall is "in an article discussing the increasing acceptance of Wikipedia as a source, one random junior academic said 'information can be skewed in directions of ideology or other forms of bias, and so that is why it cannot be taken as a final authority'". So it's not about ideological bias on Wikpiedia, it's about Wikipedia's open access model resulting in the potential for bias, classes of which may include ideology. That's a seriously weak source to support this as "academic views" of "ideological bias on Wikipedia". In fact, it's bordering on WP:SYN. Academic views implies studies in the peer reviewed literature, not random soundbytes in newspaper articles. Maybe if the section was "random views", but it's not. Guy (Help!) 13:03, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Opinions found in one or two magazines do not really establish due weight, and are misleading in that they pretend to represent an academic view of this subject. Find at least three good sources that cite these opinions in the context of Ideological bias on Wikipedia and then we can talk. Otherwise this should remain out until there is consensus to include it.- MrX 🖋 13:33, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Its not WP:SYNTH to gather information from various sources and to editorially organize them in the article, as long as we aren't misleadingly conflating two or more sources to draw a conclusion. In this case, there is two sources and two lines broadly gathered under the heading of "Academic views" as an organizational method, but there is no overlap between them. Personally, I would not mind (eventually) restating this section in Wikipedia's voice, without the quotes and without attributing specific professors, in a way that includes the two main points: academics advice caution with regards to using Wikipedia as a direct source due to the potential for ideological skews and biases, and they recommend to their students to refer to the footnotes/citations of our articles as a good resource and a launch point for doing their own research. I'd suggest we keep it as is for now though with the quotes as I think its less stressful while we're building up the article. I'd be very surprised if there aren't other academics that suggest the same or similar approach. This is just a section (and article) in its earliest growing phase, still gathering sources. Tag it {{Expand section}}, if you want, and let it grow. Removing it just because its lightweight though is working backwards. -- Netoholic @ 13:36, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

LOL! Mining primary sources to tease together an argument is the canonical definition of SYNTH! You appear to have googled "Wikipedia +ideology + bias" and hammered it together into an "article". This is a single paragraph quote in a single news story, it is not published in any academic journal, and you're defending it as an "academic view". It's not. It's an opinion by a random person who happens to be a junior academic. Guy (Help!) 22:58, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

SYNTH is not summary, SYNTH is not mere juxtaposition. -- Netoholic @ 06:06, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

SYNTH is, however, the quote-mining in which you are engaged. Guy (Help!) 10:58, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

The first source (Hall) seems to say that individual articles can have an ideological bias, not that there is an overall bias. Certainly this article is a good example of an ideologically biased article. TFD (talk) 13:54, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes. Like the American TV show, 77 Sunset Strip. SPECIFICO talk 13:59, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

This removal by a participant who previously voted to delete this article is in incredible bad faith. Citing WP:ONUS this long after the section has been established in this article is WP:GAMING the system and can be seen as a thinly-veiled rouse to attack the development of this growing article. This short section of content has been stable in this article for weeks now, is sourced well and verifiable, is being further discussed, and is tagged so as to alert readers and to attract more editor attention to the discussion. MrX , the article was kept with the explicit suggestion that it needs more time to develop. Restore the section. Drop the stick. Stop adding unnecessary drama with such drive-by disruptions. -- Netoholic @ 14:40, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The short section of content shouldn't have been added in the first place, and I have explained my reasoning which happens to be grounded in policy. Stability is not consensus. This article fails in that it is a hodgepodge of outdated studies, some with questionable methodology, and a few out of context opinions from relatively unknown scholars.- MrX 🖋 14:55, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

We should be using the same standards as for example in the article on Conservapedia, perhaps a little stricter since Wikipedia is larger but not very much stricter. Requiring that sources be mentioned in at least three different reliable sourves is not policy, the requirements on sources is just to be of some sort of comparable quality with an article so if there are very good peer reviewed sources we don't counter them with some crank source. Dmcq (talk) 18:15, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The problem with the sources is that they could be described as all coming from one particular cultural niche. Maybe we could create a category for them - People who don't like Wikipedia because it presents a balanced global view. HiLo48 (talk) 23:09, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Could you just try using some technique to distance yourself from the fact that the article is related to Wikipedia rather than say Conservapedia. As I said before try changing your statements in your mind to something like The problem with the sources is that they could be described as all coming from one particular cultural niche. Maybe we could create a category for them - People who don't like Conservapedia because it presents a balanced global view. Or put in some word like Trustmedia instead if there is no other encyclopaedia mentioned in the context. Dmcq (talk) 10:04, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Stop telling me how to think. Your suggestion about Conservapedia is ridiculous. I have never heard of Trustmedia. I am not American. I take a global view. That would be one that American conservatives would pejoratively call liberal. But that's the way the world outside conservative America thinks. You can choose to think that way. Unlike you, I won't tell you how to think. Convince me that anyone outside conservative Americans thinks there is an unacceptable bias in Wikipedia. HiLo48 (talk) 11:12, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Block of Wikipedia in Turkey GMG^talk 11:18, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Wow. How obscure can you get? That's a government trying to control communication. Nothing to do with what we're discussing here. HiLo48 (talk) 11:26, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Moving the goalposts GMG^talk 11:28, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

There is no actual encyclopaedia called Trustmedia. As I said it is just a word instead of Wikipedia. I was talking about how to distance oneself and achieve some neutrality as it seems to me that you are taking the 'Wikipedia' personally rather than treating this like any other article on Wikipedia. Dmcq (talk) 12:13, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

This whole article is non-neutral. With its current title, it is impossible for it to be otherwise. The weak decision by the closing Admin for the RfD did not disagree with that. And stop telling me how to think! HiLo48 (talk) 08:03, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

The issue isn't with Hall -- there is absolutely nothing disqualifying or even unsettling about being an "associate professor," which is a tenured professorship. The issue is that we shouldn't be citing an academic's off-hand comment to popular press as "academic opinion". For that, we need academic sources. A comment to US News & World Report might be based on serious research or it might just be an anecdote based on teaching experience. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 03:16, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

This comment echoes others above which seem to be fixated more on the wording of the section header than on the actual content. Suggest something else then. -- Netoholic @ 04:02, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

My suggestion? Delete the article. HiLo48 (talk) 04:06, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I did not intend to simply criticize the heading, although I can see how it could be read that way. To be clear, I do not think we need to include a source like this based on short comments related to bias on Wikipedia in a popular press article about Wikipedia more broadly (e.g. Wikipedia in the classroom). If there were a study behind those words or if it were more substantial (in the sense of content, but also in terms of publication), rather than a teacher's own pedagogically oriented evaluation, then that would be different, but I don't think there's weight here. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:31, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

That is one of the most popular sources on education matters. Discounting them on education matters would be like discounting New Scientist in the Conservapedia article. It may not be peer reviewed science like Nature but it definitely has weight. Dmcq (talk) 10:08, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but that's not what we're doing. The issue is a single cheery-picked quote from within an article being misrepresented as "academic views" of ideological bias on Wikipedia, when the subject of ideological biasw as not being specifically addressed, so there is a high chance of ambiguity. This source would be perfectly acceptable for something anodyne like "Wikipedia is increasingly accepted as a source". Guy (Help!) 10:33, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree that ideological bias is not really being specifically addressed even though it is the only specific type of bias mentioned. At most it could be used as a background to concerns. Dmcq (talk) 08:07, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• "the information can be skewed"--what information? Also, what Rhodondentrites says. Drmies (talk) 17:22, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

The coverage in US News gives it weight. It should be included.– Lionel^(talk) 11:01, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

It's coverage in only the conservative part of a country with less than 5% of the world's population. That's not notable. If you can balance it with how the rest of the world feels, I would be a lot happier. HiLo48 (talk) 11:07, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Please just go and do something more useful with your time instead of wasting other peoples time here. Dmcq (talk) 17:51, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I am not the topic. As soon as people start talking about me rather than the words I write, it makes me feel even more confident about those words. HiLo48 (talk) 22:19, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Burkeman, Oliver (September 11, 2015). "Why don't we take our own advice?". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 June 2018. GMG^talk 22:41, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

It's not "coverage". This is not an academic publication covered by a third party source, it's a single word in a single soundbyte in a story that's actually about something else entirely. The quoted test is a primary source for this opinion, and there's no context to establish the extent to which his statement intersects with the actual subject of ideological bias on Wikipedia. Guy (Help!) 15:23, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The citation is to a secondary source not a primary source. Dmcq (talk) 17:51, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I have read it several times. As far as I can see it is a direct response to a question, an interview, basically, and therefore primary. Where's the primary publication of this opinion, if this is the secondary? Guy (Help!) 18:35, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The reporter is not directly involved in education. It is not an insider view. The reporter did report the views of the person but as part of his analysis of how acceptable Wikipedia is in the classroom. I have already said I accept that ideological bias is not being specifically addressed in the article but dismissing the business as primary when the reporter chose to include it is just wrong. The article was not just a report on what was said without analysis. Dmcq (talk) 20:57, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Primary: the first time t's published. Secondary: an independent discussion of primary sources. This is the first time his view was published, as far as we can tell. Guy (Help!) 20:19, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm going to assume this is an intentional gross oversimplification, just poorly done, and that you actually do know how primary and secondary sources work. GMG^talk 20:45, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm going to assume that you were not being intentionally condescending and that the implicit "in my view" was added at all stages. So, this is not a newspaper reporting on a published view, it is an interview, and thus a primary source. Guy (Help!) 06:10, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

They're not unstructured interviews. They're both news pieces from major publications, one of which quotes an academic as a a subject matter expert because he wrote a book about Wikipedia, and the other quoting the dean of his university's college of communications, as a distinguished communication scholar. That's not the same thing as We sat down to shoot the shit with our good buddy Maurice and here's the full transcript of our interview. This is not front-line studies (n=what we could cobble together) in MEDRS where we need meta analyses or textbooks for validation. It's not The New York Times from 1875 that we need to treat as a period piece. Determining whether something is a primary source is not an exercise in counting how many times it's been republished, and in the era of online churnalism, that number of often mostly meaningless anyway.

If you want to argue that these represent a minority view, then bring sources and be my guest. But don't argue that entirely on topic pieces in major publications quoting what they as journalists recognized to be experts is a primary source. That's silly. GMG^talk 10:54, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Nice reversal of the burden of proof there. Guy (Help!) 11:17, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

That's not a reversal of anything. At no point has the sources ever stopped being the standard. If you have none, then you have very little with which to build an argument other than your personal opinion. GMG^talk 11:41, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

RfC

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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There are a few classes of critique under debate on this page at present. There is merit in discussing them formally rather than in the multiple branching threads above.

1. Should we include criticism from creationist groups such as the Discovery Institute?
2. Should we include criticism from Conservapedia and other fundamentalist groups?
3. Should we include criticism from Brian Martin (social scientist) and other article subjects unhappy with the treatment of their work?

Guy (Help!) 21:46, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Opinions

• My answer to all three would be no unless it is by reference to a reliable independent secondary source that includes objective analysis of the bias motivating the critique, per WP:UNDUE and a whole host of other TLAs. I do not think we should quote mine the internet looking for random grudges against Wikipedia. Guy (Help!) 21:46, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
• No. Whether it should be included at criticism of Wikipedia is debatable, but that's where it would go, as it's criticism and not anything we should be citing for statements of fact regarding ideological bias on Wikipedia. This should not be a coat rack of opinions but, if it's to exist at all, a summary of in-depth analyses/studies into the subject, published by sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy (preferably academic studies, and most definitely not advocacy organizations and personal opinions). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:05, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
• It is not "ideological bias" to describe things in scientific terms; it is, indeed, the basic task of an encyclopedia whose mission is to describe things as mainstream sources do. The overwhelming majority of sources, and indeed even federal courts, have described "intelligent design" as a religious argument which exists outside of scientific inquiry, because of its dependence on the existence of something supernatural beyond the reach of science. Arguments that Wikipedia is biased because it declines to call something "science" which is, according to virtually everyone not ideologically committed to the idea, not science, must inevitably fail. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 14:46, 26 May 2018 (UTC)
• No, no, and no. -- Somedifferentstuff (talk) 15:50, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
• No to FRINGE. The sky is blue. That's not ideological bias. O3000 (talk) 16:16, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
• No. Not under any circumstances. scope_creep (talk) 09:03, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
• Comment There's no indiscriminate yes or no answer to any of the above. If for example a pissed off author writes a book which ladles criticism on WP for its handling of a particular subject, then inclusion of swathes of that book would be undue. If the NYT goes on to report on the book, puts it into its best seller list, academics in other fields start quoting it and the author goes on to join a bunch of televised discussion forums then it would be daft and undue to exclude it in the article on the subject on which said author is writing. If as a result of the author's position he or she became a notable critic of Wikipedia then mention of that author's name on crit of WP article might be warranted. Edaham (talk) 06:01, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

For balance, we would obviously then go and find a notable author who has written a book saying Wikipedia's balance is just right. Good luck with that HiLo48 (talk) 06:43, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

if when searching for such a source “luck” prevailed in the face of a shortage of complimentary opinions, then inclusion of such opinions would be false balance wouldn’t it. You don’t need luck to find verifiable main stream sources. By definition they are right there for the taking. Edaham (talk) 12:16, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

You have missed my point. From the day this article was created I have repeatedly pointed out that people who don't perceive bias in Wikipedia generally don't write books about it. This article can never be balanced. HiLo48 (talk) 22:28, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

I never miss points. I simply choose not to shoot at them if they are unarmed and defenseless. Edaham (talk) 23:07, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

• No No No We don't give "equal time" to fringe POV. Except in their own articles where we describe them as fringe POVs. SPECIFICO talk 22:40, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
• This RfC is silly, malformed, and premature. GMG^talk 23:27, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Agree with this Edaham (talk) 23:31, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

• Don't be ridiculous --- Of course include. The stance above that WP doesn't agree or has normative policies against the objectors is an excellent example of an ideological bias leading to exclusion or POV-pushing. How can this article reasonably deny the very existence of some of the most-often reported areas for bias or the sources of such complaints ??? Would the WP position even be complete to ignore the existence of an WP:FRINGE ??? Markbassett (talk) 05:46, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Not sure I understand your reasoning. Are you asserting that claims by fringe believers that Wikipedia is biased in favour of mainstream views are a legitimate claim of ideological bias? Guy (Help!) 22:48, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

• Of course not. Such groups are not reliable sources, and therefore deserve no weight in the article. If independent reliable sources report on their opinion, we can include that, along with, of course, descriptions of the groups themselves. Vanamonde (talk) 05:14, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
• No no no. If a reliable source says there is relevant unhappiness with Wikipedia articles, it can be quoted. The examples above are not among those. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:34, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

This RfC is not neutrally worded with broad phrases like "creationist", "fundamentalist", "other article subjects unhappy with the treatment of their work". It also defaults to the negative, when in fact it was recent removals that prompted this, and the article should be restored to its pre-conflict stable version so that RFC participants can see the specific items that are being discussed. -- Netoholic @ 22:04, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

• Breaking RFC template until neutral wording is implemented. Please see WP:RFCST. -- Netoholic @ 22:17, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

What, exactly, is not neutral about it? We have an article on the Discovery Institute. They are creationists. We have an article on Conservapedia that notes its extreme ideological bias and calls them fundamentalists, based on sources. Martin's article is about how he is unhappy with the coverage of his work. What, exactly are you complaining about here? Guy (Help!) 22:19, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

• To RfC closing admin: This RfC has been somewhat mooted. It was an ill-advised, ill-formed RfC created on the same day the article was nominated for deletion, and both processes were started within 3 days of page creation. The Discovery Institute item hasn't been discussed in any specific way since this RFC started. The RfC opener himself has already mooted the Conservapedia item, which he re-added and has become fairly stable based on later discussion. I'll also add that the RfC opener has a possible WP:BLPCOI in regards to the Brian Martin item (he is mentioned by name within it), which has had separate discussion and hasn't been added back. I suggest a close which leaves the specifics to future consensus discussions or new RfCs on specific items as needed. -- Netoholic @ 07:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

You say. And yet thoughtful people above who, unlike you, don't have a vested interest in proving that Wikipedia's rejection of your edits is due to "ideological bias", appear to disagree. Guy (Help!) 22:49, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RfC about inclusion of Croatian Wikipedia event

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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In 2013, the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia gained media attention after the daily newspaper Jutarnji list reported on critic's concerns that administrators and editors on the website were projecting a right-wing bias into topics such as the Ustashe regime, anti-fascism, Serbs, the LGBT community, and gay marriage. Many of the critics were former editors of the website who said they had been exiled for expressing concern. The small size of the Croatian Wikipedia — as of September 2013, it had 466 active editors of which 27 were administrators — was cited as a major factor. Two days after the story broke, Croatian Minister Željko Jovanović advised students not to use the website. In 2018, historian Hrvoje Klasic of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) that he often refers students to the English Wikipedia instead of their native Croatian, especially for topics on Croatian history. Goran Hutinec, also a historian at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, said of the Croatian Wikipedia that is has "many shortcomings, factual mistakes and ideologically loaded language".

References

Should the above event related to the Croatian Wikipedia be included in this article? --Netoholic @ 06:11, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Survey

• Yes - The article is not limited to English Wikipedia, although of course its the most studied and commented upon. We don't limit any other general articles about Wikipedia to English-only content. This Croatian Wikipedia event adds breadth to the coverage in this article, is highly relevant, is interesting in that it shows a case of right-wing bias, and is a brief summary-style section of a topic already covered more widely in the Croatian Wikipedia article. -- Netoholic @ 06:11, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

• No - A tiny, cherry picked example from a version of Wikipedia that's not ever going to be read by most readers of this version. It's simply the article's creator trying to negate arguments that this is all about American right wing whiners not liking the balanced views of this global encyclopaedia. He has failed again. HiLo48 (talk) 07:52, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
• No. When people see "ideological bias of Wikipedia" they will interpret it as either the English Wikipedia or all WMF projects. To include this tiny wiki with its dozen or so admins is WP:UNDUE to the point of being actively misleading. As was already discussed and agreed, in fact. Guy (Help!) 08:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
• No Irrelevant undue. SPECIFICO talk 08:47, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
• Yes - Not an easy one this but I think it is better to interpret 'Wikipedia' in the title to refer to any Wikipedia, it's better to have one arrticle than have a multitude of articles about the different ones. The item seems notable in itself judging from the citations but it is too small for an article. I think it should be put in a separate section about non-English Wikipedia's and a small header put in that section about each language Wikipedia being self-governing but under the Wikimedia foundation. Dmcq (talk) 09:25, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

It belongs in "criticisms of Wikipedia", though, not "ideological bias on Wikipedia", because the issue it highlights is not ideological bias but the vulnerability of small projects to groupthink. We have a study discussed here previously which is directly relevant. Bias is lowest when the editor pool is large. The complaint about hrWP is that a tiny cabal of admins (they only have 20 in total) is imposing ideology on the project. So it's not about ideological bias, it's about small projects and groupthink. Guy (Help!) 09:32, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

That is possible but 'pro-fascist ideologues' sounds like here to me rather than a more general article. Dmcq (talk) 10:53, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The complaint about hrWP is that a tiny cabal of admins (they only have 20 in total) is imposing ideology on the project. So it's not about ideological bias

Umm... GMG^talk 11:41, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• No - I agree with Guy that it is UNDUE. I came here because I was invited by RfC bot.--Antidiskriminator (talk) 21:35, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
• Small Inlude - I think the 'ideological bias' should be more focused on ideology than on nationality, and more to general studies than specific examples, similar to how Gender bias on Wikipedia does not mention gamergate even though it has some prominence. But this one seems to have a high prominence reflected by Google count of 270,000 -- for comparison "Social Justice Warriors" got 50,300 hits. And Racial bias on Wikipedia does do minor naming of Latino and Black. So I'll say it should go in as a small mention or example, with the focus being on the ideological bias in question and the mechanics attributed by RS. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 06:27, 19 June 2018 (UTC)
• Include: to limit the article to the en Wikipedia is arbitrary. If the content is sourced then it is a consideration for inclusion. Don't know why anyone would try to suppress this. – Lionel^(talk) 10:58, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

If you really don't know, you haven't been paying attention. HiLo48 (talk) 11:08, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

• Include - Looking at the arguments against:

• The Croatian Wikipedia is tiny and unimportant. - Actually not really. According to List of Wikipedias the median size of projects is 7,643 articles. hr.wiki is well above that with almost 200,000 articles, and the 41st largest project by article count out of 301 language editions. It's above the mean of 160k articles too, as heavily skewed as that statistic is by the comparatively monstrous largest of the projects. The argument from number of admins is silly and inane. en.wq has 25 admins and en.ws has 31. Yet, they somehow managed to never make headlines about promoting fascism.
• It's a cherry picked example. Well the articles cited are entirely about the subject they're cited for. So it's not clear how using them to address their own main topic is cherry picking. Moreover, the issues related to hr.wiki were later picked up as context in tangentially related stories by The Washington Post and The Register. And I'm not exactly seeing anyone pullout out sources about how great hr.wiki is to show how these do not represent the prevailing view. And no, the vast amount of people who have never written about Wikipedia is not a coherent counterargument to this, or a coherent argument.
• Readers will be primarily thinking of en.wiki or all of WMF The latter makes no factual sense. Projects like commons, quote and source are not Wikipedia. So they're outside the scope of the article by definition. Other than that, Wikipedia is a global project. If readers are primarily concerned with en.wiki, then that's their own systemic bias they need to deal with, we have no obligation to uphold it, and in fact, a contrary obligation to represent a global perspective in our articles. The title is not "Ideological bias in the English Wikipedia".
• It lends undue weight Well, on the topic of ideological bias on Wikipedia, it seems to be covered in quite a few sources, and undue weight is determined by the sources, and not by our personal opinions about the relative importance of other language projects.
• "It's simply the article's creator trying to negate arguments that this is all about American right wing whiners not liking the balanced views of this global encyclopaedia. He has failed again." WP:NPA, WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL and I think that about covers this non-argument.
• "the issue it highlights is not ideological bias" At least the Daily Dot felt the need to title their piece "How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia’s history." So yeah, the meaning of words. If we're going to say that several sources entirely about ideological bias are somehow not about ideological bias, then we've probably reached a level of rhetorical bending-over-backward where your argument should probably just simply be ignored.

So there you go. And overall, a lot of the back and forth here is starting to look an awful lot like "some of us have decided this article is crap, so we're going to make sure it's crap" with little to no actual collaboration going on. GMG^talk 14:37, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Actually we're trying to make sure it's not crap. In particular, that it's not a random collection of hits when you Google "Wikipedia +ideological +bias". Guy (Help!) 15:31, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Relevance? GMG^talk 15:32, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Conditional Include I think discussion of how what happened on Croatian Wikipedia did happen is relevant -- understanding this is important for preventing similar, larger scale episodes, and thus it is of interest. On the other hand I would not want to imply that this is a current "ideological" bias on en-wiki in any way (not sure how it looked previously but that is something I'd rather avoid). What it is is an illustration of how such a thing can arise. -- Calthinus (talk) 18:48, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

So, include it, but not in this article? I'm good with that. Guy (Help!) 18:57, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

That's not what I said. ---- Calthinus (talk) 19:21, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Include I was summoned by bot, and have been watching the discussion for a while. GMG's arguments are vastly more convincing than anything else I've seen. Presented appropriately, the information is not undue, and its scope is very clear from the suggested presentation. Having a diversity of notable examples from different wikis, some of them minor, is the very opposite of UNDUE. In fact, placing too much emphasis on the bigger wikis might well be undue in itself. It would be like sort of like only talking about major faiths on an article on relgion, and declining to mention, say, smaller polytheistic faiths. I'm not saying that this is anywhere near that problematic, but it should be something we think about. Tamwin (talk) 00:43, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

• yes (Summoned by bot) I disagree it undue based off it's size alone, and agree with GMG for most of the points. ^{cinco de} L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 14:32, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

• No. For many of the reasons stated above and because the lead makes it clear that the article is about the English Wiki with a focus on US editors. Gog the Mild (talk) 23:11, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
• Include, it appears to have been the subject of reliable sources. It should not be given undue weight, but it should be included in some form.--RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 04:40, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
• No – It might be appropriate for an article titled "Ideological bias on Wikimedia Foundation projects", but that's not this article, with its US centric focus. I'd support inclusion per Dmcq, if "put in a separate section about non-English Wikipedia's and a small header put in that section about each language Wikipedia being self-governing but under the Wikimedia foundation", if the article's scope were broadened, expanded and renamed, but not in its current state. Mojoworker (talk) 22:40, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
• Yes Summoned by the bot. I vote for inclusion of the paragraph under a new sub-section of section 2. Claims of bias. I find the arguments by GreenMeansGo convincing. Dryfee (talk) 17:21, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
• No (invited by a bot) WP:UNDUE. [Way too much chatter in this survey section. Please save it for Threaded Discussion.] Jojalozzo (talk) 14:56, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
• Include Max per Clutterbuck. Wikipedia =/= to just English WP, surely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Serial Number 54129 (talk • contribs) 05:29, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
• Include, since this seems to be a notable event per GreenMeansGo, and "Wikipedia" is not just about the English version. That the article currently only contains information about the English Wikipedia may mean that there is not enough information about the others, rather than that it should not contain information about the others. Jc86035 (talk) 06:52, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
• Include this article is about WP as a whole, and this is a notable aspect of WP, despite the small size of Croatian WP. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 09:14, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
• Include per GreenMeansGo, whose rebuttal is thorough. Jusdafax (talk) 09:20, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
• Include per several above. The Feedback Request Service bot invited me here. EllenCT (talk) 01:15, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

• FFS, haven't we covered this before? This is trivia. It's a tiny number of editors on a non-English version of Wikipedia. It's a perfect example of blatant cherry picking to try to prove the non-existent point that this isn't just about right wing whiners in the USA. But of course that's what the whole article really is. HiLo48 (talk) 06:16, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

• Didn't you raise concerns on this talk page that the article needed to be more "global"? I would think this qualifies, otherwise the article truly is narrowly confined to the English Wikipedia, or even more narrowly, an American viewpoint. But most of all, this event is simply within the scope of this article. Any other concerns like globalization or left/right dichotomy are secondary. -- Netoholic @ 06:25, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

• What's with adding the asterisks? Please don't change the posts of other editors.

I have argued against the one-sided perspective of the topic. Finding one pathetic tiny example in a foreign language where the allegations are of different kind of bias does not help. The fact that your example is so tiny and remote from this Wikipedia actually proves my point. HiLo48 (talk) 06:59, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

• Threading your posts with asterisks helps keep discussion points clear and separate. All articles are a work in progress. The size of the Wiki shouldn't matter. In fact, it might be interesting exactly because its small and vulnerable (since bias complaints were made often back when EN Wikipedia was also small). -- Netoholic @ 07:22, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Of course the size of the wiki matters. That's a nonsensical argument. And we are not talking about English Wikipedia in its early days. Unless you are going to change the topic name.... HiLo48 (talk) 07:32, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

• The Greenstein studies used snapshots from 2006, that's all my comment relates to. I'm stepping away from this thread for now. Let's wait for some other participants. --Netoholic @ 07:41, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

As I noted at the previous discussion of exactly this: Look at hr:Posebno:Statistika. There are 20 admins on hrWP, and we have single articles that receive more edits per day than that entire project. It is not representative of Wikipedia, and the ideological bias of a small group of admins in a minor language project is a very far cry from being relevant to discussion of the purported ideological bias of Wikipedia. The ideological bias of Wikipedia is well known and well understood and negligible for all practical purposes, as the sources clearly state. It is somewhat liberal, but close to the global political centre. The Overton window has moved so far to the right in the US that some conservatives see Wikipedia as basically Marxist, but that is their problem not ours. Objective studies - which this article includes - show that Wikipedia is, in the main, neutral, and that we are at our best when editors with differing views collaborate. Hence some of our articles on Israel-Palestine are often held up as being very good. What we do not have is a bias towards Croat nationalism that obscures the nature of neo-Nazism. I think it is pretty clear that our article on neo-Naxism doesn't describe it as the opposite of what it is, which is one of the complaints about hrWP. In criticism of Wikipedia you could make an entirely valid point about the vulnerability of small projects to nationalist agendas, especially in the Balkan states where the language is likely to be inextricably linked to nationalist views, but as a point about the supposed ideological bias of Wikipedia it is actively misleading. Guy (Help!) 08:46, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The title of this article is "Ideological bias on Wikipedia" not "Ideological bias of Wikipedia". I think distinction is clouding your interpretation of what this article is meant to cover. -- Netoholic @ 08:50, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

You already lost this argument once. Now you're losing it again. Guy (Help!) 08:58, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

I don't see how I can be wrong about the title of this article and the distinction between on and of. If you're talking about the RfC, I guess we'll see how it ends. No harm, no foul either way, though I think this minor expansion of the article is perfectly appropriate since it is an example of ideological bias which happened on a Wikipedia. See you in 30 days. -- Netoholic @ 09:11, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Which would be valid if the title were "ideological bias on individual Wikimedia Foundation projects". But it isn't. As noted previously by multiple people, "Wikipedia" is going to be interpreted by the reader as enWP or all WMF projects. This is relevant to neither. Guy (Help!) 09:34, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Update 2018-11

@GreenMeansGo, Netoholic, and JzG: I updated the article and rewrote/renamed the academic sections, as I found the per-article order to not be very informative, so I ordered rather by the subject that was the focus of the cited studies. I also added a new reference (a peer-reviewed paper). I rewrote a bit to precise the information, mostly about the collaborative editing process of contributors with opposing views. Could you please check if these modifications are OK? :-) Furthermore, I would suggest that this article continue in this general direction. It seems that it was initially done mostly in a political setting, but I find that the question of bias and collaborative editing to be more general and pertinent for the WP project as a whole. Thank you very much! --Signimu (talk) 15:46, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Croatian Wikipedia

Topic of Croatian Wikipedia just from 2013 is today, oct. 2019, a bit old, 6 years later. Are there newer and compared data? - where is Update button! --178.197.230.175 (talk) 15:28, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

This page is biased.

It cites a study whose only two options in terms of bias are "Democrat" (centre-right) or Republican (right wing). How the hell is this representative of anything, when those two parties agree on 90% of policy issues? Trash. 174.89.132.146 (talk) 21:10, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Have you got some reliable source talking about other types of bias in Wikipedia? Dmcq (talk) 21:17, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Although this is an old comment, to be fair, this page is biased. It lists others who have criticized Wikipedia (such as Conservapedia), and smears them by adding criticisms levied against them. SuperWikiLover223 (talk) 06:29, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

If you compare wikipedia geography articles with other data, we can not find big differences by ideology. If you compare political data, it is often not 100% neutral. But honestly, who do you know, is a allways neutral and objectiv person? In any topic? - There are much more possibilities to compare data since internet. But if something is centraliced it will automaticly have a character of ideology, or name it character of too much power. Administrators have much more power than all others. Transparency is not very huge. Where does the money come from? This element is deciding in the world today a lot.--94.228.154.217 (talk) 16:22, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

New content to add

Here are a few very interesting sources to potentially exploit: best ones: [2][3][4][5][6], a vulgarization article by Greenstein and Zhu that may help in more accurately write about the results of their study[7], and here some lower quality refs but may still be interesting: [8][9][10]. --Signimu (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

obvious political bias

Wikipedia has an obvious political bias, and it's a problem. Upon comparing the two articles "Fox News Controversies" and "CNN controversies", you will notice that one is significantly shorter than the other. The Fox Controversy Article, as I will call it, contain such tabs like "Photo Manipulation" and "9/12 newspaper ad controversy". The Fox Controversy Article contains roughly 16 different tabs on the subject while the CNN Controversy Article contains roughly 5. Now just from a non-political standpoint, there is no way one news channel has created or made that many less "mistakes" (whether purposeful or not) than the other, unless the media that's providing the information has chosen to include some controversies and not the others. Another realisation about the articles is the ability to edit. Whether there has been some form of political manipulation in one article and not the other is a possibility, but taking the lengths of both articles, there is some speculation. In the CNN Controversy Article, there is no ability to edit. It claims that it's protecting the page from getting "vandalised" however, in the Fox Controversy Article, it is free to edit. Another difference between the two articles is the number of references used. In the CNN Controversy Article, 102 references are cited. In the Fox Controversy Article, 254 are cited. Considering the great detail Wikipedia and it's editors have put into the Fox Controversy Article, the same has not been put in the CNN Controversy Article, whether it may be political bias or pure laziness. It needs to be fixed. The ammount of bias that's simulated into our "sources" is almost uncanny. We do not need another; however, that statement most likely means little. This source already has a background for posessing a left-wing bias. Hopefully, as more people will read this, it will be fixed. The1stAmendment (talk) 19:09, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

You could expand the length of the CNN article by convincing CNN to lie and distort as much as Fox does, then adding the resulting controversies.

Seriously, this is disingenious. Some sources are more reliable than others. Demanding equal length of Controversies sections is the height of silliness. --Hob Gadling (talk) 20:14, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Kinda like saying Bernie Madoff and Warren Buffett should have equal controversy sections because they both ran funds. O3000 (talk) 20:32, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

If you seriously believe that CNN doesn't prolifically lie and distort - at least to the same degree FOX News does - than you need either a physical, or a new TV. Both are full on propaganda outlets, neither deals in journalism. Chris Wallace, Brett Baier, and Jake Tapper might be the only exceptions. 24.63.16.140 (talk) 05:31, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

We are all biased. One important personal attribute is being aware of one's own biases, and being able to observe and comment without letting those biases get in the way. I'm from the city that gave Rupert Murdoch to the world. We know what he does. I hope you realise it too. HiLo48 (talk) 05:40, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

And how do you know that? Which information do you base your opinion on that CNN lies more than Fox? Where do you get that information? How biased is that source?

No, don't answer. Stop this. This page is for improving the article Ideological bias on Wikipedia. You have no contribution to make to that, so you should leave and go to a forum instead. This is not a forum. See WP:TALK. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:53, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Can we include the claim that wikipedia's citation system has a systematic bias

The claim is not new and simply claims that mainstream media for English sources are left leaning and that certain academic topics are disproportionately left leaning. When combining the two it would theoretically produce blind-spots in Wikipedia's coverage as the site itself admits (Wikipedia admits that it has blind-spots because of its reliable source policies) and the claim simply states that those blind spots correlate with right wing ideology. Bgrus22 (talk) 20:53, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

• There is are some obvious due weight questions: Who is making these claims? What are the academic topics in question? Wikipedia relies on sources with good reputations for fact checking, and peer-reviewed academic journals are considered the gold standard of reliable sources. • Gene93k (talk) 21:06, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

I see no point in including a claim unless it has some credibility. Who, precisely, has said "mainstream media for English sources are left leaning"? It's certainly not the view from where I sit. HiLo48 (talk) 22:29, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

By left-leaning I assume you mean supportive of modern capitalism and U.S. hegemony, while favoring science over superstition. TFD (talk) 23:43, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Or refusing to state Christian dogma in WikiVoice, or suggesting that racism is problematic, or prostrating to any current leader, or giving credence to idiotic conspiracy theories, or considering The Daily Mail as a reliable source. O3000 (talk) 00:25, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

• To include this claim, you would need a reliable source reporting it. And you will need at least one source that claims that right-wing ideology is absent from mainstream media and academia. Dimadick (talk) 16:54, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

@Dimadick:, @The Four Deuces:, @HiLo48:, and @Objective3000: I would be fine giving some citations but I hope that you do not construe my question as anything other than a valid question. The circular logic of the problem does pose a problem as you can imagine since it claims that only sources that are not accepted on wikipedia would be able to validate it but I think I can do the work to demonstrate something that makes the claim considerable to some extent, if not though I hope there are no hard feelings since some of you guys seemed to get very upset at me. So here's a citation 1 claiming that there is general media bias and 2 claiming that significantly more reporters identify as liberal than conservative. Here 3 we can see that there is a discrepancy in coverage which was attributed to volume of news sources related to ideological positions.

As for Colleges I would point to 1a demonstrating students are perceiving bias and 2a demonstrating that there is discrepancy in terms of beliefs, and ill include a thrids source 3a just to be safe on this point as well. I hope that this will suffice but if not I am happy to learn the issue related to what Im bringing up. Bgrus22 (talk) 06:13, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Most journalists are left-wing is a red herring. While most creative people are left-wing, it has no bearing on what their employers publish.

The most you can say is that Wikipedia summarizes what reliable sources say. Whatever bias they have will be reflected in Wikipedia articles. For example, the theory that the world was created in 6 days is rejected by scientists hence Wikipedia describes it as pseudo-science. But if scientists suddenly accept it, then so will Wikipedia. Wikipedia editors don't choose the view that the universe is 15 million years old because their left-wing ideology tells them to, but because that's what university textbooks say.

TFD (talk) 06:34, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

@Bgrus22: - I don't see what you claim at all in those sources. In fact I wasted a lot of time trying to find how the first one says anything all to do with what you claim. As I said earlier, I don't see what you claim to see. In my country, 70% of the media is owned by Rupert Murdoch. A big chunk of the rest is controlled by a company chaired by a former deputy leader of our major conservative party. I do see nutters claiming our media is left wing, but any rational, informed thinker knows that isn't and cannot be the case. The claim is therefore nonsensical. We don't include nonsense in Wikipedia. HiLo48 (talk) 07:31, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: thank you for your response, I could understand that argument and I am aware Wikipedia states in its guidelines that its reliability system will create blind spots, one of which could easily be this if it is in fact something that should be included here. Im fine with dropping the issue in that case. Bgrus22 (talk) 08:04, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Should Larry Sanger’s recent comments be included?

A short section containing Larry Sanger's comments has been added, then deleted and added back several times. Since the suggestion in the edit summaries is to gain consensus here, I post it below my signature, with my own comment that this material is relevant to the article subject and should be included. Cheers! Jusdafax (talk) 14:28, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia co-founder (header coding removed for Talk Page)

− In May 2020, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger published in article in his personal blog describing Wikipedia as "badly biased" and stated that he believed it no longer had an effective neutrality policy, claiming that portions of the Donald Trump article are "unrelentingly negative", while the Barack Obama article "completely fails to mention many well-known scandals", and various other topics he claims are presented with liberal bias.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jusdafax (talk • contribs) 14:28, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

References

I don't think that a blog post reported by Fox News gives it sufficient weight for inclusion. And I think we would need a better source to provide context to his views. He's basically challenging the current policy of weight which favors mainstream views rather than assigning equal validity to fringe views such as climate change denial, fundamentalist readings of the bible and alternative medicine. TFD (talk) 19:33, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

I don't agree with everything he said in the post, but I think it is totally appropriate to include the opinion of one of the founders of this site. His opinion is, at least, more relevant than that of those lunatics of conservapedia that are already included in the article. --Lucasdmca (talk) 22:02, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Not until it gets more coverage. And he may be one of the founders, but he left a long time ago - 18 years, and was only around for a short time. Wikipedia was launched January 25 2001 and he left on March 1st 2002. Doug Weller talk 10:36, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

The bar for sourcing about "ideological bias" should really be higher than a blog post + Fox News. Just noting again here that this page has been kind of a mess from the start. How Conservapedia has its own section here is beyond me. This should be about ideological bias on Wikipedia, according to the highest quality sources, whether scholarly or at least high-quality journalism. In this case, the sources about Conservapedia are just that -- about Conservapedia. The journalists aren't digging in to analyze Wikipedia, they're reporting on what Schlafly said (and in many cases mocking or criticizing him for it, directly or indirectly). This shouldn't be a coatrack for any time someone said Wikipedia is biased because we don't say the earth is just a few thousand years old, or that neutrality would be way more neutral if we learned to embrace false balance more. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:07, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

I find it almost unbelievable that people can't realize Wikipedia's blatant ideological bias and its loophole arguments to defend it. But anyway, I don't intend to delve into any example, as there are tons out there. As a matter of fact, this very conversation is an example. I apologize for not having any reliable sources (or "high-quality journalism") to back up my claim, such as CNN.

To make myself more clear, if some random left-wing progressive media outlet (which survived a simple WP:RS voting) wrote an article stating Wikipedia is biased, without any type of evidence whatsoever, it could promptly be included in this article and, in the unlikely event that someone starts a topic about it, the suggestion for its removal would be fiercely battled against and easily put to rest. It's hard to maintain (or, given the current state-of-the-art, achieve) neutrality when the overwhelmingly majority of the editors lean to the left, whose one of the most prominent thought is that they're doing the world a favor by shutting down dissenting opinions, which they deem hateful (comma intended, as it's a nonrestrictive clause).

By the way, if somehow wikipedians find out that I'm actually Tronald Dump in disguise, feel free to add my statements to Veracity of statements by Donald Trump (how this has its own article in Wikipedia is beyond me). InGoWeTrust (talk) 12:25, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Rhododendrites, I agree. I guess that if that is bar standard, Sanger's recent comments may well be included; but that is a very low standard. Another issue, which I believe is further highlighted by InGoWeTrust, is that it is not even clear what left or left-wing progressive does even mean. To me, it seems that it is used for fairly centrist viewpoints or at best left-wing capitalist, liberal or social-liberal bias, certainly not the way left-wing is used [b]oth in the world outside the U.S. and academic writing in the U.S. [...] [to mean] socialist, communist or anarchist. They would not call politicians whose base of financial support is Walmart, Amazon and other corporations left-wing as pointed out by The Four Deuces here. I also believe Collectively, findings show that Wikipedia articles edited by large numbers of editors with opposing ideological views are at least as neutral as other similar sources, but articles with fewer edits by a smaller number of ideologically homogeneous contributors were more likely to reflect editorial bias.[4][5] contradicts the above claim that it [is] almost unbelievable that people can't realize Wikipedia's blatant ideological bias and its loophole arguments to defend it, for there is no mention of left or right bias and the latter wording may well apply to both side of the spectrum.--Davide King (talk) 10:55, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

• Umm... It looks like Fox is pretty alone on this one. It gets honorable mention in Slate, but that amounts to all of a single sentence. Of course Breitbart (blacklisted) did an entire piece on it. To be fair, the Foundation didn't do itself any favors by releasing a statement saying unequivocally "On these issues, there is no neutral stance." But if I had a nickle for every time the Foundation made a tone deaf statement disconnected from community and policy... And Breitbart can be reliably counted on to latch onto any independent clause that allows them to justify their own intellectual and journalistic laziness as being merely an oppressed ideological victim. Nothing new there.

At the end of the day, Sanger comes gunning for Wikipedia every few years when he tries to release his new iteration of "the new Wikipedia" that inevitably fails. It looks like most have just taken to ignoring him.

I don't have any illusions that a crowd sourced project like Wikipedia is going to somehow magically be perfect, and without problems that brutally honest data-driven dissent can help us understand and work to correct. But Sanger angrily typing on his blog late into the night about anecdotes he finds personally objectionable doesn't seem to rise to that standard. GMG^talk 11:51, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

The argument for include is that Sanger was a founder of Wikipedia, therefore what he says about it is significant. But Wikipedia policy is to include opinions based on their weight of coverage in reliable sources, not based on the stature of the person who uttered them. Not only is that policy, but we need reliable secondary sources to establish the credibility of the comments. Suppose for example a leading astrobiologist suddenly claimed to have been abducted by aliens and started to walk around wearing a tin foil hat. Would we give his or her new perspective any weight in articles about astrobiology? Probably not, because these new views would not be taken seriously regardless of whatever contribution the person had already made.

InGoWeTrust, I don't think anyone questions that Wikipedia has a bias. It's clearly stated in policy: "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources." Since reliable sources are themselves biased, that bias will be reflected in articles.

Also, you shouldn't conflate the views expressed by the editorial board of the New York Times with those of the Socialist Worker. It may be that you think ultimately they are working for the same people, but at least acknowledge that they present radically different ways of looking at the world.

TFD (talk) 13:31, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

...I... Don't know that I agree that all bias on Wikipedia is because we are a completely neutral conduit for the sources and the bias rests in the sources. That is the goal. I'd say we come close on topics that are...100 years old or older. But we make all kinds of editorial decisions using the sources, and I wouldn't recommend Wikipedia as a source for contemporary politics, but that's coming from a guy who mostly writes on things that are 100+ years old, and can't be bothered with the morass that is contemporary politics on Wikipedia...besides getting well into NOTFORUM territory and all that. GMG^talk 14:50, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

I think there is a problem with modern U.S. politics articles. There's a small group of pro-establish Democrats who consistently whitewash articles about their preferred candidates and turn articles about people they don't like into hit pieces. Then there's a large group of extreme right Americans who are less organized but are able to distort some articles such as about the U.S. Second Amendment.The same editors who will argue that a single mention of an event in reliable sources does not meet weight in one article will argue that it does in another. TFD (talk) 15:59, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Are you sure that pro-establishment Democrats and far-right activists are the only groups that try to influence Wikipedia? A wide variety of groups from the far-left to the far-right, from liberals to conservatives, from business lobbies to uniformed contributors try to influence Wikipedia. Alcaios (talk) 16:27, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

There certainly are more, but those along with editors in ethnic/national disputes are the main ones when it comes to ideological bias. There aren't many if any editors for example who try to change articles on Biden or Trump to reflect a Maoist perspective, and they certainly would not have any success. TFD (talk) 17:13, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

Can this thread please return to discussion of article improvement? Thank you. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:16, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Fvoltes. Doug Weller talk 09:58, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Unrelated, but I'd bet dollars to donuts they were inspired off wiki. Doug Weller talk 19:24, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

"...I... Don't know that I agree that all bias on Wikipedia is because we are a completely neutral conduit for the sources and the bias rests in the sources" - The wiki on Reliable Source LITERALLY states: "reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective". It is notable that his section of the opening paragraph which states "articles must be written from a neutral point of view" is a copy-paste from the 'Reliable Source' article, but omits the immediately-following qualifier about "reliable sources" not being required to be neutral, in favour of an obscure quote from a book expounding the meaning of a neutral source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.3.124.242 (talk) 17:19, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

• After looking through the post by Larry Sander [11], I am happy he is not around here. I think he wants to follow a wrong and unworkable policy on "neutrality". Yes, something like "Obamagate" should not be included to the page Barak Obama. Same would apply to any BLP pages. He tells about page on "Snowden’s revelations", the article is almost a total whitewash. You might find this to be objectively correct; but you cannot claim that this is a neutral treatment, considering that the other major U.S. party would treat the subject very differently.. What? Why should it matter how any political party in U.S. or elsewhere treats a subject? And he is wrong that a page should not define certain claims as "false" if they are false as a matter of fact. Should the opinion by Larry sanders referenced to Fox be included here? Does it help a reader to learn anything? I doubt. My very best wishes (talk) 19:59, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Right. Why is Sanger (not Sander or Sanders) even supposed to be relevant? This is as if the fifth Beatle, who left when they weren't famous, looking down his nose at their later hits. Complaining about the Trump article being more negative than the Obama article is like complaining that the articles about Texas and New Hampshire give vastly different values for the sizes and populations for both states. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:04, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

• Somehow it slipped back in despite what seems like a general consensus here to exclude? I agree we should omit it; one person's opinion (even a founder) is WP:UNDUE for an article of this nature without other sources actually backing up what he says rather than commenting on it. And coverage, overall, seems to have been pretty light. --Aquillion (talk) 15:28, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Anti-Hindu and Anti-India bias

My edits [12] were reverted by Tayi Arajakate citing WP:NOTNEWS. The following event received a lot of coverage in news as well as social media. I strongly believe that this event is very relevant to the article. Please discuss. Cwarrior (talk) 15:31, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't say it is a "Hindu" bias, but there is surely an erudition crusade of sorts which is being led by users who fail to look past their own implcit biases. My main issue with the whole talk page being referenced here is, this holier than thou status being attributed to certain foreign publications and preferring them over even the good quality local ones. For example, while Nytimes coverage of West might be good, it certainly is not the case with their coverage of India. Even in the US, the whole cancel culture debate has brought in the open the ideological hypocrisy that exists within the organization. Not all biases have to come up with modifying the facts, some can be just put forward by omission of them.

I think we need to have a re-look at publications we trust and value for articles here, it might be hard considering the average quality of publications in India is low but we need to have a balance here. So that we are not looking at news about India from a Western eye but from a neutral one.

After donating continuously for a decade, this is the reason I have paused on donations for the past two years. Even stopped editing from my main account way back. Joshikamal (talk) 18:07, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

"Wikipedia issued an appeal on 29 June, asking Indian readers for donations to help “defend” its independence. Three days later, campaign against the website began trending on social media. Several users on Twitter, including columnist Shefali Vaidya, BJP leader Nupur Sharma and author Rajiv Malhotra, asked people not to donate to Wikipedia, alleging that it spread biased information and employs “anti-Hindu” editors. Former Rajasthan Cricket Association secretary Sanjay Dixit and Hindutva activist Dr David Frawley, a Padma Bhushan recipient, also joined the campaign and urged people not to donate to the website. Some users on Twitter also questioned if Wikipedia, in fact, required the donations."

References

• I'm inclined to think we should probably prefer academic publications about bias, and not every time someone gets offended that an article doesn't say what they think it ought to and throws a tantrum on Twitter big enough to make the news. GMG^talk 18:49, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

We can document claims from media sources, especially since these claims have resulted in documented movements. - Mukt (talk) 11:01, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

The media source in this case ThePrint isn't claiming Wikipedia is biased, it is only reporting about the twitter tirade among some Hindutvavadis. There's hundreds of claims of bias against Wikipedia by people offended by its content, most of which don't merit inclusion just because they got themselves on one or two news pieces. Tayi Arajakate _Talk 11:56, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

It is behaving like a perfect secondary source: reporting relevant primary sources verbatim and keeping its own opinion out. - Mukt (talk) 12:05, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Mukt, Both the Print article on campaign urging Indians not to donate, and the Times of India article about edit-war on 2020 Delhi Riots are good references. They describe the social media campaign against this bias as well.

Are you talking about the bias that Wikipedia itself carries or particular sources in question? Regarding academic studies itself, they also carry bias so we should tread carefully there. For example, fossil fuel companies in the past have funded research to minimize the ugly picture of climate change. Joshikamal (talk) 19:13, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

We can still document claims of bias. - Mukt (talk) 11:09, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

There certainly is an ongoing campaign to cast Wikipedia as ideologically biased among the Hindutva. At least some of this is just backlash for the recent deprecation of OpIndia (Shefali Vaidya works for them) and Swarajya. They're taking advantage of the fact that the Foundation picked the worst possible time to do a fundraising drive in India. This is all happening alongside a massive online campaign to spread a conspiracy theory about Sushant Singh Rajput's suicide. That conspiracy theory involves Wikipedia supposedly changing his height to cover up a murder and somehow updating his article to say he was dead before it happened (see NedFausa's excellent breakdown). I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the same botnets that are spreading the SSR conspiracy theories are also amplifying the "Wikipedia is anti-Hindu" message. gobonobo ^{+ c} 19:31, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Campaign among the Hindutva sounds about right. If people want the article to talk about an "anti-Hindu bias", they need reliable sources saying that. I don't see those here.

Wikipedia is anti-loon, and in the current political climate, that unfortunately includes a lot of political parties and heads of government in a lot of countries. India is just one example where the party in power embraces ideas that are in conflict with reality and therefore with Wikipedia. Others are China, Brazil, Russia and US, to name just the largest ones.

As I said before in another context, if your "donations" are linked to specific demands about content, they are not donations, they are bribes. --Hob Gadling (talk) 19:52, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

I have no sympathy for the RWers as specified above and their extortion campaigns but a lot of users like me might be pausing to donate because we might be seeing illiberalism and intolerance arising from certain sections where we might need to re-look how we evaluate things. Instead of labeling issues together into one and discarding them, it would be better if we look at issues in their own merit. Like the news source thing I am complaining about.

If we don't believe that there can be any bias in the existing academic establishment and big media establishments, then we are being naive or purposefully malicious. I will give an example that is very contextual to India, In India after independence academic historians funded by establishment at that time often through omission or misrepresentation presented history in a way which had an ideological bias. This is the precise thing RWers exploited in India. So, rather than people understanding their history and coming to terms with it and constructive things happening afterwards, we have a situation where it has been weaponized in a way by some sections.

So, I think it is better to re-look at some of the historical or inherent biases that might be in the material we treat as source, so Wikipedia can remain neutral and can always be the fallback for most people in this mostly polarized media/social media world. Joshikamal (talk) 20:32, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

ThePrint, ToI, etc are not regarded as Hindutva sources. Can we call the same source as reliable when its reporting leans towards left, and unreliable when it is documenting RW ? - Mukt (talk) 11:09, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Reliability is determined by how much baloney they spread, not by the direction from which they spread it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:21, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

What you call baloney comes from your ideological bias. - Mukt (talk) 11:42, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Wrong. I am not the one who decides which sources are reliable, so my bias does not come into it. But the decision is in most cases pretty easy and reproducible for those who actually care about truth and honesty, and there are very few cases where I disagree with the community's decision. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:59, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Your own comment is a stellar example of ideological bias. Wikipedia is NPOV, and has no business opposing or supporting any ideology. - Mukt (talk) 11:13, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Bullshit. Read WP:NPOV as well as WP:FRINGE. That rule tells us to counter liars, charlatans, and fantasists, whether they rule countries or not. And you should not insert your writing into other people's contributions, it makes the conversation unintelligible. I corrected that for you. --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:21, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Maybe people should stick to containing their rants to one paragraph at a time. And stick to reporting of facts rather than their own opinions derived from cherry-picked "reliable sources". - Mukt (talk) 11:52, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

As long as there are ethnic/national disputes, one side or the other or both will complain about bias. Unfortunately the source doesn't specify the type of bias: Wikipedia reflecting the bias in Western media, Wikipedia having a bias that does not reflect sources or editors on the articles having their own biases. Without that it's not really helpful. TFD (talk) 20:55, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Note that often it is difficult to call out bias if you suffer from those biases as well. Also, I have strikedout a comment above. The argument made resorts to slandering and doesn't contribute to the discussion. Please note that some of the personalities raising the bias issue are Padma awardees. Cwarrior (talk) 21:27, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Note that I have removed your strikeout, Cwarrior. There was no "slandering", and it's not up to you to decide what does or does not contribute to the discussion. Please don't mess with other people's posts. Bishonen | tålk 21:45, 15 August 2020 (UTC).

I believe calling a Padma awardee "loon" is slandering in my opinion. But, I will leave it upto other readers to decide. Also, what are your thoughts on this revert on the talk page: [13]? Cwarrior (talk) 00:49, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I think the arguments made here seem reasonable in terms of discussing whether Wikipedia itself is biased or not. However, these allegations are being prominently discussed in the press, and therefore merit a mention on this article. These biases are not unlike those described in Anti Indian sentiment, Media bias in South Asia, and Criticism of the BBC pages. ;edited - moved from above to steer the discussion back to the topic. Cwarrior (talk) 01:25, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I would say we can say we have been accused of such bias, we cannot state it as a fact.Slatersteven (talk) 09:02, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. That's exactly what I (and a few others) are arguing for. Please note that the edits that were reverted only mentioned about these accusations and their discussion in the media. Cwarrior (talk) 13:57, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

The following two are good resources that describe the social media campaign against the bias in Wikipedia:

1. The Print article on campaign urgining Indians not to donate.
2. A Times of India article about edit-war on 2020 Delhi Riots. It describes the social media campaign against this bias as well.

Cwarrior (talk) 20:48, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

On WP:RS/P, the Times of India is considered a low-quality source at best, while The Print has no reputation. Furthermore, neither source says what you're citing them from. The Times of India says In March, right-wing activists ran a ‘#biasedWikipedia’ campaign on Twitter and Facebook while The Print says A social media campaign, spearheaded by prominent right-wing personalities accusing Wikipedia of being ‘anti-Hindu’, began trending Saturday. You omitted that vital context. Even with that included, though, these sources aren't enough for inclusion; we don't list every single time someone with a culture-war axe to grind complains about Wikipedia. --Aquillion (talk) 15:24, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Both Times of India and The Print continue to be used as references on various India-related articles. Please provide a source if you are claiming that these campaigns did not occur and if you have source contesting them. My original edits mentioned both these incidents and clearly specified that these campaigns were led by these folks. Please clarify what is the context missed. Cwarrior (talk) 16:09, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

The Free Press Journal also has an article on the campaigns against Wikipedia following the Bangalore Riots.

Live Mint documented this incident as well. Cwarrior (talk) 16:31, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

The proposed content is undue and constitutes unwarranted promotion of a fringe theory. This is because the social media campaign in question was spearheaded by affiliates of OpIndia (RSP entry), a fake news website that accuses other entities of being "anti-Hindu" and "anti-India" on a daily basis with little to no evidence supporting its claims. As an unreliable source, OpIndia's opinions are completely unremarkable. Wikipedia is not an extension of OpIndia's social media marketing efforts, and Wikipedia is also not a listing of events that lack enduring notability. — Newslinger talk 21:45, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

List of resources talking about anti-India / anti-Hindu bias

This is not a bona fide list of resources for the article, but a polemic about blacklisted (OpIndia, Swarajya, Organizer) and other deprecated (such as Twitter, Times of India) sources, which can't be used for the article. Compare the top of this talkpage: "This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Ideological bias on Wikipedia article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject." The only reason I'm hatting the list rather than removing it outright is that the section contains comments from several other users. Bishonen | tålk 10:40, 16 August 2020 (UTC).
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This is a work in progress. Feel free to add items, but don't delete. Cwarrior (talk) 02:14, 16 August 2020 (UTC) The Print article on campaign urgining Indians not to donate. A Times of India article about edit-war on 2020 Delhi Riots. It describes the social media campaign against this bias as well. Twitter handle dedicated to the cause of documenting this bias: [14] A RW news site OpIndia (blocked on WP) has 14,300 search results on Wikipedia bias: [15] Swarajya magazine article surveying discrimination against Hindus in Indian public discourse: [16]. This same bias trickles down to Wikipedia as well. Only two right-wing news websites are mentioned on this page [17], i.e., Swarajya and OpIndia, websites of both are blocked on Wikipedia. Organizer[dot]org has another recent article on Wikipedia bias and is also blocked here. TFI has an article on "Wikipedia gets slammed for biased article on Delhi riots. TFI[post.com] is also blocked on Wikipedia. They also have an article on how TFIPost, OpIndia, and Swarajya (the 3 top RW portals are in wikipedia blacklist), but Quint and Wire are not. Cwarrior (talk) 03:40, 16 August 2020 (UTC); edited Cwarrior (talk) 03:48, 16 August 2020 (UTC) No Indian news sites are flagged as left-wing news sites here [18]. Cwarrior (talk) 03:54, 16 August 2020 (UTC) Opindia is blacklisted on Wikipedia due to persistent abuse. It is considered generally unreliable due to its poor reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. OpIndia was rejected by the International Fact-Checking Network when it applied for accreditation in 2019. In a 2020 discussion, most editors expressed support for deprecating OpIndia. Editors consider the site biased or opinionated. The site has directly attacked (and doxed) Wikipedia editors who edit India-related articles. See Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. Being blacklisted for good reason, how can Opindia possibly function as a "resource" for Wikipedia? What is the point of listing it here? It is misleading. See also our properly sourced article OpIndia. And the same applies to Swarajya, formerly the parent publication of OpIndia, and also described at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. As for Twitter, context matters, but as a self-published source, it is considered generally unreliable and should be avoided unless the author is a subject-matter expert or the tweet is used for an uncontroversial self-description. Your "resource" list is off to a poor start. Bishonen | tålk 02:51, 16 August 2020 (UTC). Thanks for your very helpful comment. I appreciate it. Please note that I am continuing to work on this list. Please free to add resources if you have better ones to contribute. Cwarrior (talk) 03:01, 16 August 2020 (UTC) While you may question the sources, the issues described in the current resource list are easily verifiable on Wikipedia in my opinion. Cwarrior (talk) 03:04, 16 August 2020 (UTC) This is not how Wikipedia works. See WP:OR. Wikipedia repeats what reliable sources say. It does not collect data and draw conclusions from them. If there are no sources or only very bad sources for specific content, the content will not be added. This is not at all India-specific. We get exactly the same complaints from avid Trump fans. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:25, 16 August 2020 (UTC) Bishonen, also note that the Organiser they're talking about here is an organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh... Tayi Arajakate Talk 05:12, 16 August 2020 (UTC) References

Article in The Critic

Ran across this article presenting analysis of uneven sanction application depending on editor political viewpoint. Seems carefully done, but I'm not familiar with the magazine. Any objections to including a sentence summarizing findings in the US politics section? Rracecarr (talk) 23:13, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Doesn't look to be a particularly good source for this. Seems to be a a political opinion publication (specifically reactionary [or contrarian?] content that sounds like it's going for an intellectual dark web sort of thing). That said, I'm not sure what kind of great sources exist out there. The Greenstein + Zhu study is methodologically ... questionable (IIRC, including the word "republican" meant an article had a left-wing bias, etc.), but it's a peer reviewed journal so my own criticism thereof doesn't count for much. Meh. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 03:19, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

And the authors are using pseudonyms. We can't even cite them. Doug Weller talk 20:22, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Misrepresentation of Faris, et al. 2017

The cited study from the Cline Center does not in any way state that researchers "found an overall center-right slant in Wikipedia"—and it's quite difficult to understand how anyone could have believed it did. It's a study limited to a brief period during the 2016 Presidential campaign, and the "partisanship attention score" is simply a measure of which sources were more frequently linked to by Trump and Clinton supporters, respectively, on Twitter and the web. The study in no way purported to evaluate the content of the "media" sites, which included Wikipedia. In other words: those whom the authors identified as Trump supporters linked to Wikipedia slightly more frequently than did supporters of HRC. While one can imagine that many such sites do, in fact, contain more conservative content (which is again a very different thing from being "biased" or even having a "center-right slant"), there's no evidence or reason to assume an encyclopedia has an ideological bias simply because more conservatives linked to it during an election. Indeed, I'm doubtful that one would claim the dictionary or the Bible had a "right-wing bias" just because people who supported a Republican candidate Tweeted more links to them over a few-month period. I am editing out the unsupported sentence from the article—if anyone wants to cite the study accurately, feel free to, but I cannot fathom how it would be a constructive addition to an article about "ideological bias on Wikipedia". Thanks! Elle Kpyros (talk) 01:08, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

The study says "In this [2016] election cycle, YouTube appears to have been more popular among Trump followers on Twitter, and Wikipedia was center-right, as was Real Clear Politics." See Figure 18 on page 47. Also note the "partisanship score" in the table on page 147: negative means left, zero means neutral, positive means right, and Wikipedia scores +0.25, with +1.0 being a "perfectly" right source. So the study does two things: it assigns a partisanship score to sources, then describes the extent to which those sources are shared, to describe the overall impact (a "vector" of sorts) of partisanship across social media. I think the sentence you removed is correct, though it should be qualified to show it was for 2016 only. soibangla (talk) 01:49, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Correct. And by "center-right" they clearly mean within their definition of the term—a "partisan attention score"—not as is commonly used, i.e. in terms of content. "More popular" means simply that it was linked to more often. That says nothing at all about any "bias" in terms of Wikipedia content—indeed, they don't look at content at all. If you want to cite it and explain that Wikipedia was linked to on Twitter slightly more often by people researchers believed to be Trump supporters than those they believed to be Clinton supporters, by all means do so. But it doesn't belong in an article about "bias on Wikipedia" as it has nothing to do with and doesn't evaluate anything "on Wikipedia". Elle Kpyros (talk) 03:34, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I will note to you that I have cited specific items in the study to support my analysis, whereas you have not. Here's another on page 45:

This follows the approach of Bakshy et al. 2015, who developed media alignment scores based on the sharing of media sources by Facebook users who had self-reported their political affiliation. The resulting partisanship scores offer a measure of the partisan slant of individual stories and media sources.

That initial analysis was independent of the study's later analysis on sharing of the sources on social media in 2016. They "vectorized" it in their final analysis: direction (slant) plus magnitude (sharing), but the direction (+0.25) stands alone and they cite it in prose: "Wikipedia was center-right." soibangla (talk) 02:50, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I'll reply—but first, a big apology if I deleted anything of yours from the page. I have no idea how I managed to do that, but assure you it was entirely unintentional and the result of my being fairly new to this. And I certainly didn't engage in or write anything about "battle". So color me confused and apologetic. Elle Kpyros (talk) 20:23, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks kindly for accepting my sincere apology about inadvertent deletions. And if you genuinely think I'm off the beam here, I'm entirely open to a clear explanation of what you believe the actual findings of the paper to be.

But I'm afraid that simply lifting brief phrases from the article as if they're comprehensive is not convincing, especially since the "specific items" you quote are very much taken out of context. Much of the confusion is due to the unique definitions of "partisanship", "right/left", and even "content"—all terms specific to the stud(ies), in which none of them mean what they generally do, especially in the context of this article. To be specific:

• First, you neglect to use the full quote from Faris, et al., which explains: "In this election cycle, YouTube appears to have been more popular among Trump followers on Twitter, and Wikipedia was center-right, as was Real Clear Politics.'' In other words: their definition of "partisan" and "right/left" is how often they were shared by followers of Trump or Clinton. A following sentence confirms the limited definition of "partisan" as mere frequency of citation: "The left side of the field, by comparison, includes the most highly cited media sources, includes a much larger number of media sources, and fills out the partisan spectrum on the left."
• To be even clearer—just before the above quote, the authors make explicit that they have not evaluated any of the content for bias: "We do not seek to directly measure media slant. Instead, we base our analysis on the decisions of Clinton and Trump supporters to share media stories. This audience-centric perspective of media partisanship uses the behavior of partisan Twitter users to identify which stories and media sources are treated as partisan media without relying on qualitative human judgments." This quote alone is ample evidence that the paper has not and could not have concluded that there is "right-wing bias on Wikipedia".
• Not to gild the lily, but since you asked for specific citations: "We then used the proportion of retweets associated with either candidate for each media source as a measure of candidate-centric partisan attention... based on Twitter user behavior. We then broke down this continuous measure of audience partisanship into even quintiles, which we labeled “left,” “center-left”, “center”, “center-right”, and “right.” We used those quintiles extensively throughout the analysis, including to color all network maps."
• They further clarify the red/blue distinctions in their maps: "The colors on the map reflect the partisan pattern of attention to the media sources based on the sharing behavior of Twitter users who have clear partisan allegiances… These colors therefore reflect the attention patterns of audiences, not analysis of content of the sites."
• Bakshy, et al. used a very similar approach, and their use of terms taken out of context, even including the word "content", is as misleading as that of Faris, et al. They explain that: "measure of content alignment… is not a measure of media slant; rather, it captures differences in the kind of content shared among a set of partisans which is done by by averaging the ideological affiliation of each user who shared the article."

I hope this makes abundantly clearer why this study simply cannot be reported as "finding that Wikipedia is center-right". Again, if you wanted to include that, over a period of a few months during the 2016 election, links to Wikipedia were tweeted slightly more frequently by people who retweeted Trump than retweeted Clinton, that would be accurate—but it would need to be made abundantly clear that in no way did the study look at or find any bias in any actual content on Wikipedia. So I still can't see how its inclusion would in any way improve this article, as it really says nothing about "ideological bias on Wikipedia" in either the common understanding of that phrase or the sense of the instant article as it's been conceived and edited. Elle Kpyros (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate your lengthy response, which I read carefully, but I believe it still contains misinterpretations of the methodology and I remain unpersuaded, but I will cite only point here, about your second bullet. It’s not that they didn’t attempt to measure slant, it’s that they didn’t have the means to directly measure it, so they devised a proxy to impute it, just as Bakshy had. And those imputed values are provided in the scatter plot and table I referenced, so I think the linchpin of your argument falls apart. That said, this not a major issue for me, I just passed by and noticed it, so I’m willing to accept the status quo and “resume my regular programming.” Cheers. soibangla (talk) 20:40, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

And I sincerely appreciate your input. I'd just also point out that regardless of methodology, there's also a critical element of common sense required here: does it make any sense to describe an encyclopedia as having a "right-wing bias" solely because it was linked to more frequently by Twitter users who followed Trump's Twitter feed than Clinton's? As I hypothesized before: what if it weren't Wikipedia, but the OED? A table of weights and measures? An atlas? Obviously it would be nonsensical and meaningless to impute "political bias" to such sources solely because of online linking behavior. And it seems to me that this is the inherent problem in treating Wikipedia as a "media source", as the researchers did. If the Wikipedia article in question were about bias in the Washington Post or Washington Times, I'd have no issue with including that this study found they were linked to more frequently by people supporting one or the other candidates in 2016—as long as it was made crystal clear that link-sharing was the sole criteria used to assign any "partisan" label; that no qualitative measurement was employed by the researchers; and indeed that they had not examined a single word of the content. But when it comes to Wikipedia, this strikes me as a perfect example of how a common-sense smell test is essential when assessing the applicability of literal-but-contextless quotes from sources to articles. Thanks! Elle Kpyros (talk) 18:48, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

reversion of Sanger's statements

@Soibangla: I must respectfully disagree with your reversion [19] of my edit, in which I added Larry Sanger's widely-reported statements. You explain the rationale for your reversion thusly: "despite his role as co-founder, he has had no WP role in nearly 20 years, has not been prominent in much of anything since, his essay asserts as established fact "Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump," for which there is no evidence, says HRC's emails should be counted as an Obama scandal, there's simply no reason his view matters more than anyone else's." I have numerous objections, but first and foremost:

• Regardless of what my or your personal opinion of Sanger's "prominence" may be, the determinative factor here is whether reliable sources have reported on them. While obviously I know this isn't in any way dispositive, I'd note that when I google "ideological bias on Wikipedia", 4 of the first 10 results include Sanger's views—certainly indicative of his "prominence" for our purposes. The simple fact is that Sanger's comments have been widely reported—as far as I can tell, more widely than any other information in this article. Indeed, his views are included in several sections of the article Criticism of Wikipedia; are in the article Larry Sanger (which additionally links to this page); and have been included in Examples of Bias in Wikipedia. I'm sure you'll agree that it's not only reliable sources which assign "prominence" to Sanger's views on Wikipedia—so do Wikipedia and our fellow editors.

Additionally, I'm afraid I find fatal flaws in every one of your other objections:

• The fact that Sanger quit Wikipedia some time ago doesn't mean his views on a policy which he personally formulated are not both relevant and worthy of explication. Certainly one doesn't have to be actively working on a project one co-founded for one's widely-reported criticism to be relevant? By your standard, John Kerry's present-day views on the Iranian nuclear-weapon threat and the erstwhile JCPOA (which are included, as they should be, in Wikipedia articles on the subject), wouldn't be relevant—simply because he hasn't held an official position in US government for a number of years.
• Whether or not Sanger has made assertions on other topics for which you claim he has no evidence is utterly irrelevant. Almost every person on the planet has surely at some point made an assertion without including "evidence" of it—but doing so has zero bearing on what the sources report in this instance—which is his personal opinion on and analysis of neutrality on Wikipedia.
• Indeed, his views—even those on the instant topic—don't have to be the slightest bit true to be notable, pertinent, and worthy of inclusion. I should think it goes without saying that one does not personally need to be a reliable source for one's views to be included in a Wikipedia article—there are noted liars and frauds whose demonstrably false views are included in too many articles to count. Must Trump's claims about hydroxychloroquine be excised from Wikipedia because he lacks evidence for them? I'm sure you must realize this critical distinction: while I have included Sanger's views and cited the reliable sources which reported them, I have not cited Sanger as a source for any statement made in Wiki-voice.
• The claim "there's simply no reason his view matters more than anyone else's" is, of course, nothing but your personal opinion. And, even while maintaining an assumption of good faith on your part, I must admit to finding it a bit incredible that you sincerely believe this; surely you must acknowledge that the views of a person who originally formulated and instituted a policy are more relevant, when it comes to that policy, than those of a person chosen at random from a telephone directory? In any event, your opinion as to the importance of Sanger's views has been flatly contradicted by what RS have seen fit to report.

For all the above reasons, I strongly believe that your reversion was made in error, and that the views of Sanger on Wikipedia's neutrality/bias are notable, reliably sourced, and imminently worthy of inclusion in the article. Thanks! Elle Kpyros (talk) 20:33, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

The 2009 source obviously did not mention Sanger's later essay, so its use for this is a form of editorializing. The essay itself is not usable, as it is an unreliable primary source. The Fox media column and the Critic.co.uk column are both borderline gossip at best, the later of which barely mentions Sanger's essay. Among other serious issues, this is not automatically significant just because some flimsy sources can be found, and your summary of this essay was excessively detailed and non-neutral regardless. Grayfell (talk) 22:18, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

The significance of opinions depends entirely on their degree of coverage in reliable sources. People's opinions are not inherently important because of who they are. If the Pope says something to someone in an Italian village and only the local paper reports it, it's not significant no matter what he said. We rely on news media to decide what is important. Sometimes they fail, but we have no policy for correcting that. Nor should we, because we would have difficulty coming to agreement. TFD (talk) 20:58, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I see it was added again. With three sources cited, the only one that even mentions Sanger is Fox News. WP:WEIGHT and WP:RS problem.

As an aside, this article is still a coat rack of a tiny bit of scholarly research (exclusively by Greenstein + Zhu -- which, granted, was published and well covered so should be included somewhere [despite being methodologically dubious]) plus Andrew Schlafly's opinion (which reliable sources don't actually cover as "ideological bias of Wikipedia" but rather what Schlafly says his motivation was for founding an explicitly biased alternative) and a bit about the Croatian Wikipedia. As I said when this article was created [as even more of a coat rack], any material that is WP:DUE weight to include here should really just be in criticism of Wikipedia. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:28, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Sanger told me a few days ago that last year Democrats were trying to change policy through violent riots. He's retweeting covid misinformation, eg a video by this guy.[20]. Ditto claims of voting fraud, etc. Doug Weller talk 20:04, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: How is the Greenstein and Zhu study methodologically flawed? X-Editor (talk) 01:42, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@X-Editor: Missed this, sorry. G+Z use a list of phrases extracted from the 2005 Congressional Record, looking at what phrases Republicans are more likely to say and which phrases Democrats are more likely to say. The more times an article uses phrases that appear in the democrats list, the more of a slant they say it has, and vice versa. The thing is, those phrases don't necessarily mean anything when it comes to bias. For example, from the very first sentence, our article on civil rights has a democratic bias because democrats use the phrase "civil rights" more often. ...But that's not actually a bias as much as it's a subject. That democrats happen to mention that subject more often doesn't mean that any article that includes the phrase "civil rights" is "ideologically biased". Likewise abortion, illegal immigration, and even just "republican party" and "democratic party" -- they're all evidence of "slant" in this research, and it speaks to how difficult it is to research bias in media that it's become one of the most well known citations on Wikipedia and politics... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:49, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. soibangla (talk) 04:19, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Sanger is not a subject-matter expert on politics, which reduces the weight of his political views. His politics can be mentioned in the Larry Sanger article, per WP:ONEWAY. Obligatory:

Larry Sanger Twitter @lsanger

All, if I happen to be caught up in this purge—not that I’m a big Qanon supporter, but I’m interested and I’m friends with many who are—then go to LarrySanger.org for future updates from me.

22 Jul 2020

References

— Newslinger talk 07:29, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Zhu and Greenstein specifically said in their research that the bias on Wikipedia is left-leaning and leans Democrat (even in the abstract). Why does this Wiki page not mention this in the portion they are cited? Weagesdf (talk) 22:12, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

The article already mentions this in Ideological bias on Wikipedia § Bias in content in relation to U.S. politics:

The authors found that "Wikipedia 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.

— Newslinger talk 04:09, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Does anybody except me find it weird that the parties are used as a frame of reference for judging Wikipedia? After all, they are not constant themselves. The Republican party has continued moving away from reality towards more and more loony ideas, such as conspiracy theories, so it is only natural that Wikipedia, being based on reliable sources and thus on reality, has a greater distance to Republican politics now than a few years ago. But how is this Wikipedia's fault?

Are there any sources mentioning this effect? --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:24, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

• Since someone re-added this... I'm still not seeing any reason to include Sanger per the above discussions. As far as I can tell, coverage of his comments in reliable sources is very slight. Only Fox focuses on them, and for obviously political comments that introduces clear issues given Fox's disputed reliability for politics per WP:RSP. Devoting an entire section to him based on that seems patiently WP:UNDUE - sections of comparable size in the article summarize the views of a much wider range of people using far higher-quality sources. --Aquillion (talk) 14:49, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

As far as Sanger is concerned, Wikipedia in 2021 is different in so many ways from Wikipedia in 2001 when Sanger was involved. If he had stayed active and worked on developing policies, his opinion might be worth considering but as far as I know he left very early in Wikipedia's history and I don't see how the inclusion of his point-of-view on the state of Wikipedia is comparable to social science scholars who apply academic rigor and careful examination of texts to come to their conclusions. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:25, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Then again, a competing Wiki might have replaced it. I don't see that there would have been a market for a Wiki that provided equal space for mainstream and right-wing views. TFD (talk) 04:23, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be important to add that Wikipedia's rule for not allowing original research further increases its ideological bias (https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/)? Especially considering that journalists and academia both lean left (in the West). Further, there is no mention of Wikipediocracy (except in the in the References and Analysis at the end...), which is a site basically aimed at showing the bias in Wikipedia, such as the fact that the vast majority of news sources used lean center and left. Wikipedia is a great resource, shouldn't it lay out all of its flaws so that it can better itself? Weagesdf (talk) 19:14, 6 May 2021 (UTC) Why was my message reverted by soibangla? Did I do something wrong? Weagesdf (talk) 05:35, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Soibangla's deletion was obviously a misclick - Soibangla self-reverted.

You seem to be saying that reliable sources tend to lean left, or in other words, lefties are more reliable. That is certainly true at this time, given the virulent crazyness, bone-headedness and mendacity in right-wing circles, but I don't see how that turns preferring reliable sources into "bias" on Wikipedia's part. Allowing unreliable sources would certainly move Wikipedia closer to Crazy Town. Ýou really think this would be desirable? --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:43, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Well, there is verifiable data uploaded in other places besides academics. Take this, for example: https://archive.is/dDr7X . It contains an excel sheet measuring bias in news sources taken from Wikipedia. Does it make it more trustworthy if it's on a news site, such as this: (breitbart)/tech/2020/08/17/analysis-wikipedia-articles-on-american-politicians-mostly-cite-leftist-media/ . Or if that same information was linked by the BBC? On trying to update this on the talk page, I found I wasn't even allowed to input Breitbart's link into Wikipedia. Weagesdf (talk) 17:56, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

So, notoriously unreliable sources like Breitbart, and some anonymous person on the internet, complain that Wikipedia uses reliable sources instead of them? Of course it does. What is your point? It is not Wikipedia's fault that most right-wing outlets are spouting lies all the time and cannot be used as sources for information. Wikipedia only defined the criteria, and media like Breitbart do not meet them. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:27, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

The vast majority of news sources and academic writing leans center and left as defined in the article in The Critic. TFD (talk) 02:16, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

AllSides.com

While Allsides.com is not considered a reliable source, they do provide links to other sources regarding Wikipedia’s bias on their page about Wikipedia, including some scientific studies that could be used to improve this article. X-Editor (talk) 22:01, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

The Allsides.com entry for Wikipedia has two unique scholarly links: 1. Greenstein, already covered in the article, and 2. a Semantic Scholar search dump based on Greenstein. Everything else falls under repetition, Larry Sanger, Fox News, Breitbart and Wikipediocracy. Allsides, a Koch Institute organ, also asserts that Wikipedia unfairly deprecates sources like Brietbart and The Daily Mail as references for facts, despite their proven history of making stuff up. • Gene93k (talk) 14:45, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@Gene93k: Could you provide a source for Allsides being a Koch Institute organ? X-Editor (talk) 22:05, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

• @X-Editor: From AllSides.com: "AllSides has also worked with organizations and received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation," but they add that the Koch brothers have supported lots of liberal causes. Charles Koch Institute: Partner. Interesting to note: Columbia Journalism Review. The archived Wikipediocracy link at Allsides.com was the tip-off. • Gene93k (talk) 23:09, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

References

Thanks for the info! Don’t think there is anything useful to add to the article from the allsides page. X-Editor (talk) 23:17, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Allsides also has a non-standard definition of left that includes all but a handful of major news sources. That shouldn't be a problem anyway because so-called left and right media don't differ on the facts they report but on whether their editorial pages endorses right-wing Democrats or the Republican Party. Also, Wikipedia's stated policy is to provide weight to facts and opinions based on the weight they receive in the body of the literature. For that reason, one would expect to see the same bias in Wikipedia articles one finds on CNN or other major news media. Larry Sanger's position that would see equal weight between left and right would not actually be unbiased but just biased in a different way. Instead of being biased toward evolution for example, articles would present evolution and new earth creationism as equally valid viewpoints. TFD (talk) 06:29, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

non-standard definition of left that includes all but a handful of major news sources Well, it is the pretty common way of thinking also used in thinking up the Chinese name for China: Zhongguo 中国 means "middle country". The middle is where I am, "left" is everything left of me, "right" is everything right of me. If I am on the extreme right wing, of course nearly everybody is "left-wing". --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:34, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Unless we know who you is, the terms, especially left, are used in an absolute sense. A search of "left-wing" on Google books for example returns books about socialism and communism, not the New York Times and the Washington Post. Socialists and communists incidentally call themselves left-wing, even New Labour, while Democrats like the Clintons, Obama and Biden never do. TFD (talk) 12:48, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

I was not arguing in favor of using their peculiar definitions, just pointing out where they came from. --Hob Gadling (talk) 15:54, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate that. TFD (talk) 16:25, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Conservapedia edit

I am confused.

I edited the following sentence: "Conservapedia has itself received negative reactions from figures, journalists, and scientists for its bias and factual inaccuracies" -None, repeat none, of the sources used to back up this statement were from figures or scientists. in fact all of the sources were from left wing news outlets. "Its bias and factual inaccuracies" comes across as Wikipedia directly attacking this Conservapedia too, in contravention of Wikipedia's supposed neutral stance.

I changed the sentence to "Conservapedia has itself received negative reactions from some left wing media for its perceived bias and factual inaccuracies"

I know that the talk pages are basically to give the illusion that Wikipedia is a democratic, social project when it is tightly controlled by a few editors with approved views is but I do think that User:Soibangla should at least justify why the edit was reverted and/or why they did not look at the edit and provide their own. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk) 04:45, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Secondary sources, such as news media, can summarize what primary sources, such as scientific papers, say. Also note that what you call "left wing news outlets" is the mainstream pro-capitalist media owned by major corporations, not Marxist publications. Left and right is not a matter of the difference between pro-capitalist media and foaming at the mouth pro-capitalist media. TFD (talk) 04:59, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

• Not entirely sure I understand what part of this has anything to do with Marxism or capitalism... GMG^talk 09:54, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

negative reactions from figures, journalists, and scientists I am not quite sure what "figures" is supposed to mean in the context. In older versions, it was "political figures", which makes more sense. User:Madzroxx deleted the word in 2019 and became inactive shortly afterwards: [21] --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:33, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

• GreenMeansGo, the IP claims that "all of the sources were from left wing news outlets." TFD (talk) 15:09, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

  Still not entirely sure I understand what part of this has anything to do with Marxism or capitalism... GMG^talk 00:29, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

  Left-wing=Marxist. TFD (talk)

  No, it doesn't. The left, even the far left, includes a wide range of ideologies that aren't included in Marxism, and many of which are explicitly opposed to, and historical enemies of Marxism. Maybe a good place to start is the anarchist writings of Marx's mortal enemy Bakunin, and something about Marx being the proponent of the "parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people". (Though to be fair, Marx was also fairly anti-Semitic, despite being ethnically Jewish.) GMG^talk 12:53, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

  So for Marxist, read Marxist or revolutionary anarchist, so we include Bakunin. (I don't think that the IP sees much distinction between them though.) TFD (talk) 09:05, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I'm afraid that unfortunately no, no one within striking distance of having a clue what they're talking about includes Bakunin as a Marxist. They were very much not the best of friends.

  As to the IPs innermost thoughts, I'm afraid I've had very limited success in my forays into mind reading. It may be somewhat more straightforward to read the cited sources and point out who exactly these scientists are that we're referencing, because I'm afraid I don't see them either. So it would seem the onus is on those reverting the IP to go find themselves a source that supports the content. In my experience, it tends to be more productive to assume good faith, and address the actual issue being raised, rather than opine on the existential nature of pro-capitalist media. GMG^talk 10:39, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  As a purported psychic wackjob routinely picking up bad vibes emanating from the nature of pro-capitalist media, I agree, the most deeply troubling dearth here is that of the supposed scientists (followed closely by the void of unseen figures). InedibleHulk (talk) 13:31, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I'm still trying to figure out who these scientists are. I dunno. Maybe @Soibangla: @Gene93k: or @GorillaWarfare: can enlighten us as to their identities, given that they seem to have all been fairly confident in their reverts. GMG^talk 13:57, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I thought this lesson would be quicker. Shows what I can tell of the future! Maybe some things aren't meant to be known. In any case, best of luck, I'm off to discover the other thing. At least I can rest reasonably assured that those strange figures were indeed once political figures... InedibleHulk (talk) 18:37, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I'm...uh...still kindof waiting for literally anyone who reverted to make an appearance on the talk page... GMG^talk 23:41, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I left a message on the talk page @GorillaWarfare:. Her response was simply to state "I did explain" (after she banned me for 24 hours). I just responded then to state that there is literally no record of her explanation anywhere. What is most troubling to me is the apparent unchecked authority to revert and ban without any justification, explanation or response whatsoever. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk) 02:17, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

I didn't revert, but I would have if I'd gotten here sooner. Your point about the sources not mentioning scientists is a good one, and I am confident that you have improved this article by calling attention to that issue. Sadly, you did not make that point right away. Your first series of edits removed "figures, journalists, and scientists", introduced "perceived" to cast doubt on the fact that Conservapedia is biased and inaccurate, and replaced the removed language with "some left wing media" (apparently referring to the Guardian, NYT, Wired, the Toronto Star, and Ars Technica). I would absolutely have reverted, though I probably would have provided an edit summary along the lines of "blatant POV-pushing". We generally don't revert without explanation except in cases of vandalism, and I wouldn't fault Soibangla seeing your edit as such.

You were reverted. It sucks. The best move is to then bring your case to the talk page. Which you did! But then, instead of waiting for consensus to build, you restored your edit minutes later before anyone had responded. You still had not made the point that other editors are responding positively to. You didn't share that you noticed no scientists in the sources, and you were still expressing your views in anti-left-wing-media terms. I would have reverted, as Gene93k did, and I shared TFD's belief that you simply didn't get that we can use reliable sources to verify the opinions of scientists.

After your revert, other editors joined in at the talk page. Still no conversation about the lack of scientists in the sources. That didn't happen until you made one comment about it and then immediately reverted again. At this point, you were edit warring. When you were reverted by GW a few minutes later, she posted an edit warring warning on your page. I find that to be a fair explanation of the reason for the revert. You were surely already aware about edit warring, since you were warned about it just two days prior. At this point, you were in the right about one thing from a content perspective. Wikipedia shouldn't say scientists criticized the bias and accuracy of Conservapedia without citing a reliable source. But being right is not an excuse for edit warring, which you continued to do. The revert that got you blocked occurred half an hour after you mentioned the "no scientists" point. You had built no consensus at that point.

In sum, you edit warred. There's your explanation. Other editors, who are now supporting you, are responding to your one good point in a sea of misconduct and POV-pushing. I join them in supporting that one point; as far as I can tell, "scientists" is unsupported by the given content. Can you continue to focus on great points like that, and drop the POV? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 03:30, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Firstly, I am not a conservative (nor a liberal), nor do I read or engage with Conservapedia. I retain that my initial edit was justified. The use of the term "bias and factual inaccuracies" is a loaded one, and should be used with care in a supposed neutral environment. There is no detailed explanation in the article itself of specific bias or factual inaccuracies and so the term was used accurately to describe the views held in the op-ed pieces used as references. The use of the phrase "some left wing media" is more debatable, but I argue still justified. The NYT, Guardian and the Toronto Star all have references to either left wing or liberal in their own Wikipedia article. Further, the use of the qualifier "some" was used to improve the neutrality of the overall statement. To suggest this is "POV" pushing is, quite frankly, offensive and unfair. I also note that I made the invitation to provide an edit rather than a simple reversion. A reversion without justification causes edit wars to happen. Your own statement "You didn't share that you noticed no scientists in the sources, and you were still expressing your views in anti-left-wing-media terms" is both inaccurate and troubling; one, because I did raise the fact there were no scientists in the article and two, because the phrase "anti-left-wing-media as a perjoritive in this case indicates a lack of neutrality on your behalf. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk) 03:42, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

  I am happy to engage in good-faith efforts to improve this article with you, but it's bizarre and worrisome to contend with your currently stated view. Am I understanding this correctly?

  • You believe "bias and factual inaccuracies" is POV, despite being sourced and (I hope we can agree on this) objectively true
  • You believe "some left wing media" is NPOV, despite being unsourced

  Firefangledfeathers (talk) 04:02, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

  I am also happy to engage in good faith efforts to improve articles, and even to register with Wikipedia to do so, but to me it is concerning that you are taking a positional approach to editing an article. That, to me, is quite disturbing. It appears that you do not understand context here: the context of "bias and factual inaccuracies" is highly aggressive as it is stated without any specific context. Meanwhile "some left wing media" is simply providing a neutral, consistent statement: the word "some" is a a qualifier which is deliberately there is neutralise claims of bias, while the references to "left-wing" are entirely self referential: Wikipedia refers to them as such. I think that it is troubling, from a centrist perspective, that "right-wing" and "alt-right" can be bandied around with abandon but that any mention of "left-wing" is treated defensively. As someone who prefers to look at all partial views objectively, this is deeply troubling in Wikipedia's supposed neutral workspace. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk • contribs) 18:00, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

  First, you need to learn how to WP:SIGN your contributions. Second, you need to learn that statements in Wikipedia articles need to be sourced. We can't just add "left-wing" or "right-wing" because we think something is left-wing or right-wing. And we cannot just delete a well-sourced statement because we think it is false. --Hob Gadling (talk) 19:23, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Evidently I missed the ping, sorry about that GMG. I came across the apparent edit war while Huggling and blocked 202.* after they breached 3RR after a warning. I have not evaluated the sourcing. That appears to already be underway, but let me know if I can be of more help. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 11:39, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Oh I'm just kindof an old fashioned fellow, and still cling to this pesky notion that it's kindof strange that three different users decided the revert button was easier than the talk page. Maybe some level of frustration is understandable when someone is technically correct (the best kind of correct) and the only person who can be bothered to discuss the issue wants to write a treatise on capitalism.

Dear everyone that I've already pinged, Huggle isn't a substitute for dialogue, and while anon might be a particularly intelligent dog, it's probably more likely that they are a person. GMG^talk 12:07, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

-There literally is not one scientist mentioned in any of the articles, one of which is a reprint and the others are op-eds — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk) 01:11, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

• Just an FYI to all of the above: At one time - back in 8 July 2018, the sentence in question read as follows:

Conservapedia has itself received negative reactions from political figures, journalists, and scientists for its bias and factual inaccuracies.

So, at one time, in those eleven references, scientists were indeed cited as giving negative reactions. That's all. Shearonink (talk) 03:36, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

References

Thank you, some of those sources are genuine references to established science bodies and scientists in a specific context (evolution) which could be raised. Not sure why they were then deleted and the opinion pieces retained. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.87.12.34 (talk) 03:51, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Great find! I restored that version of the sentence and sources. I would appreciate other editors taking a look with a view toward removing some of the sources as there are too many. We may want to add some to the Conservapedia article itself. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 04:48, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

This still needs to be greatly trimmed. I get that people really want to dig in their heels with the references^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10[11][12][13][14]} but this is probably a bit excessive, bordering on WP:POINTY. GMG^talk 12:11, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Aye, three max. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:49, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

WP:CITEBUNDLE? GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 19:19, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Probably, though when I reviewed the sources, a lot of them were just essentially interviews with the founder and his mom, and not really necessary by any measure. Doesn't really add much and it's not clear why they were included in the first place. GMG^talk 21:09, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Screw the bundle. Readers will just need to click an extra time to not know where to look. All you need to cite is a political figure's statement, a journalist's lament and a scientist's cold hard opinion. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:00, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Slanting towards the truth is not bias.

This article badly misses the mark because it is based on a common but bogus misconception of what "bias" is that Wikipedia itself rejects. Bias can be measured, but not by whether there's a "slant" towards one or the other of two positions, either or both of which might be far from what a rational analysis would reveal. The fact is that, if Encyclopedia Britannica is completely neutral between the claims of the U.S. Democratic and Republican parties then the EB is biased, because one of those parties habitually trucks in lies and rejects science. -- Jibal (talk) 22:20, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

I share your understanding of bias. Can you be more specific about parts of the article that need adjustment or improvement? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 22:24, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

It's not that simple. Neutrality here means accepting facts in reliable sources and giving weight to facts and opinions according to their acceptance in reliable sources.

Since the U.S. has a narrow political spectrum, just presenting U.S. liberal and conservative views with equal weight would just provide a different bias. For example, one might frame the two sides of U.S. policy toward Cuba as how hardline it should be, when the rest of opposes sanctions.

TFD (talk) 13:18, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: The US political spectrum is very narrow and Wikipedia doesn't just cover US politics, so how biased Wikipedia is in regards to US politics paints a misleading picture as to how biased Wikipedia is as a whole. The majority of complains of bias on Wikipedia also come from this very narrow view of politics in the US. X-Editor (talk) 22:16, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Unbiased is not a helpful concept. We are biased for mainstream science, mainstream scholarship, and mainstream press is more honest, and can even be accepted as truthful by those who oppose Wikipedia, while they don't buy the claim that Wikipedia is unbiased (I don't buy that claim, either). tgeorgescu (talk) 23:34, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

@Tgeorgescu: I wasn't saying that Wikipedia is unbiased and I do agree with you that unbiased is a bad concept because it would mean giving more weight to certain ideas that don't deserve that much weight, such as Holocaust denial and alternative medicines. X-Editor (talk) 23:44, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

The above conversation looks a lot like general discussion on the topic of bias. Are we discussing any particular changes to the article? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 02:32, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

@Firefangledfeathers: I'm not sure what changes could be made to the article. Maybe more studies and commentary on claims of bias? X-Editor (talk) 03:41, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Please read wp:forum.Slatersteven (talk) 09:03, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

I have seen many biased articles in recent just browsing. Citing murder by police, terrorist, conspiracy theories; while holding up far left ideas in different tones. This site needs a pop-up that users acknowledge it is not a reliable source and contains individual views. IT'S CONTENTS ARE BIASED AND ELUDE TO FALSE INFORMATION! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:380:7e42:bf2a:c4b1:44c0:136d:5f24 (talk • contribs) 21:57, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Please read WP:FORUM, especially where it says, bear in mind that article talk pages exist solely to discuss how to improve articles. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:28, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

Conservapedia

I'll be frank here. Conservapedia is complete and total bullshit and should not be referenced in this article at all. We should not bend over backwards to be "fair" by including such utterly worthless trash. There, I said it. soibangla (talk) 13:59, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

I would agree, its not an RS, its a wiki.Slatersteven (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

That would also probably mean removing infogalactic as well. X-Editor (talk) 21:11, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

We're not citing Conservapedia, though. We're citing reliable sources that state that Conservapedia is a response to perceived/claimed bias on Wikipedia. If we're going to have an article about such bias, we should include it. But of course this article has always been a problematic coatrack for any such claim. It's hard to say that citing, say, the Guardian's coverage of Conservapedia, is out of place as compared to the rest. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:21, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

While Conservapedia and Infogalatic are top-tier bullshit they are also notable enough to be commented upon by reliable sources. Their existance is relevant to this article and there is no genuine reason to remove them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:I_just_don%27t_like_it. TheFinalMigration (talk) 07:27, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia notes that there is a significant bias. He should know. He helped found the organization and has published repeatedly on the subject:

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/  

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Semicircle2012 (talk • contribs) 05:12, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

He also believes in some conspiracy theories and nonsense from unreliable sources, so he would obviously disagree with Wikipedia. So that makes him an unreliable source whose opinions are not worth much. -- Valjean (talk) 05:42, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

He has also expressed some fascinating views on Twitter, and in his essay about Wikipedia, that some might find are not fully aligned with reality, such as flatly stating as fact that Obama spied on Trump when there remains no evidence of it after years of wild speculation that went nowhere. He has not been a particularly notable figure since leaving WP soon after its launch. His POV has often been discussed here and the consensus remains it should be excluded. soibangla (talk) 05:53, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Well no he should not, as he may be biased (after all he has set up his own rival, twice).Slatersteven (talk) 14:01, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

He also said that Wikipedia is pro-Socialism or something to that extent, which I find hardly believable. Ask the leaders of Venezuela and they will say Wikipedia is right-wing. tgeorgescu (talk) 01:17, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority -- Jibal (talk) 22:20, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

...I see we now have a massive section about this, leaning heavily on Fox News (WP:RSP), and even going as far as citing Tucker Carlson's show. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 03:26, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

smh. Maybe we need an RfC. soibangla (talk) 03:28, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Until then, it should stay out. Deleted it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:49, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

With all due respect you don't get to decide whose opinions are and are not worth much as that would be original research. In addition, any false or incorrect beliefs he possesses are irrelevant especially if unrelated to this topic as this would be a attribution of his viewpoint as an influential and important figure as related to Wikipedia and not a presentation of his viewpoint as fact. Nowhere else on this website are the opinions of notable people discarded if they have said something dubious.TheFinalMigration (talk) 01:21, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Opinions and fringe ideas found in unreliable sources don't have enough due weight for inclusion here unless RS comment on them. (IOW, literally all content is based on RS.) Then it is the RS commentary's POV about them (sometimes a debunking or fact checking) that has more due weight. RS do put Sanger in his well-deserved place as a formerly notable person who now believes nonsense and conspiracy theories. His ideas for alternatives to Wikipedia are a far cry from the reliability and neutrality he claims. They are much worse, and he now lacks the ability to create a better alternative. Someone with his beliefs can't do it. It's all very sad. -- Valjean (talk) 02:11, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

@Valjean:

Any criticism of the accuracy of Sanger's viewpoints or his ability to run a wiki is again irrelevant as this is about the inclusion of his notable opinions and not an endorsement of them. If Trump for example says something moronic and provably false for example we don't not mention it, just because he's not a reliable source and the claim is false. In addition no individual can "lose notability" and no reliable sources call him a conspiracy theorist. It's also a stretch to call him a fringe source when he is the website's cofounder. TheFinalMigration (talk) 03:09, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

The use of Fox News Talk shows as a source for attributed opinions should not be an issue per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources TheFinalMigration (talk) 07:38, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Remains to determine if those opinions are WP:DUE. "And not an endorsement of them", precisely, then the best is independent coverage that also put those claims in context, instead of collecting a list of opinions without context/criticism. —PaleoNeonate – 04:37, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

What is this?

“Wikipedia has an internal policy which states that articles must be written from a neutral point of view, which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant points of view that have been verifiably published by reliable sources on a topic.” Does not mean it is any less biased. Why is there a counterargument as garbage as this. Go to Covid/coronavirus page and you’ll find out. Tisthefirstletter (talk) 07:53, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

It might be useful if you made a case here as to why THIS article needs changing.Slatersteven (talk) 09:40, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

If an article does not conform to the rule, you can go to its Talk page and point out the rule. So, actually it is a non-garbage counterargument.

But usually, when people say "this is biased", they mean, "this is based on scientific facts instead of on the crazy ideas I believe in". Which is actually exactly what the rules demand. So, someone else "going to Covid/coronavirus page" without knowing which crazy ideas you believe in will not know what exactly your problem is with that page. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:46, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps what they have in mind is the long-standing consensus for the COVID-19 pandemic page to "not mention the theory that the virus was accidentally leaked from a laboratory in the article."[22] Terjen (talk) 00:36, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, or perhaps they like drinking bleach and want it to be included as an effective cure. There is no point in speculating about it. See WP:TALK. --Hob Gadling (talk) 19:21, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

It might make sense to have an article about the neutrality policy, incorporating criticism of the policy itself and how it is implemented. As I stated above, the policy is not biased in favor of scientific "facts," but gives more weight to scientific opinion because it predominates reliable sources. Per Alternative theoretical formulations, scientific opinion changes, but Wikipedia editors do not have the expertise to evaluate scientific opinion and instead rely on scientists as sources for determining what weight to apply to minority opinions. TFD (talk) 13:33, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree that there should be an article about Wikipedia's NPOV and I'm surprised that there isn't one yet. X-Editor (talk) 21:00, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

There is Reliability of Wikipedia and it may also be a possible merge target for this article, perhaps. —PaleoNeonate – 04:31, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

• I don't think it is necessarily intended to convince the reader that Wikipedia is unbiased - it's not there as a counterargument. The purpose is just to cover what Wikipedia's policies with regards to bias are, since they are a central part of the topic and are covered as such in the source. (In fact, the source specifically notes how that policy succeeds and fails, which we summarize in the next sentence or so - ie. Wikipedia generally, roughly, compares to other reference works of similar stature when it comes to high-traffic articles, but lower-traffic articles are more swingy.) --Aquillion (talk) 01:56, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
• This seems undue for the lead, though; it's pulling essentially one paragraph from a single source out of context, and it presents a lopsided view of the situation given that we're already summarizing the conclusions of higher-quality sources. Also, the only named critic in that paragraph is Sanger, who we have an ongoing RFC above that is trending towards excluding his views entirely; obviously it's a nonstarter to drop them directly in the lead, even (especially!) without attribution. --Aquillion (talk) 04:35, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

  It is a straight-forward fact from the cited source that "critics claim that Wikipedia has abandoned neutrality in favor of political bias" and is hardly a lopsided summary of the cited article paragraph. It mentions Sanger as an example of a critic, so he doesn't have to be attributed. If the outcome of the RfC is to exclude viewpoints just because Sanger happens to share them, we're doing it wrong.Terjen (talk) 05:06, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

RfC: Should Larry Sanger's views be included?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The outcome of the discussion was Do not include – the general consensus both in numbers and in arguments is that these views should not be included. Stifle (talk) 11:42, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

---

Should Larry Sanger's views be included in the article? soibangla (talk) 23:55, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

• Depends If WP:RS report it, it should be included, also include their comments upon his view. Otherwise no. tgeorgescu (talk) 00:42, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• The hard thing about this isn't about whether or not to add Sanger to the article, but that this article is already such a WP:COATRACK with arbitrary inclusion criteria. If the question were whether to include Sanger's criticism of Wikipedia at Criticism of Wikipedia, then absolutely I would support it. But until someone can specifically say what exactly falls under "ideological bias on Wikipedia" and what the standard for sourcing should be, it's hard to answer. Is it just any time someone says Wikipedia has a political, religious, etc. bias we include it? Is it limited to academic studies? That this is a separate article from the criticism article suggests it's either a subtopic that was spun out or that it's about "actual" ideological bias in Wikipedia rather than various times when this or that person has said "Wikipedia is biased"? ("actual" is slippery, of course, hence the scare quotes, but I mean it in the sense of "backed by evidence, preferably published with some rigor/peer review"). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:11, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: How do you think this article can be improved? Should some info from this section be added to the article? X-Editor (talk) 21:22, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

By coming up with a clear definition/scope and clear inclusion criteria. As for how specifically, I don't know. I'm pessimistic that it can really be improved. Hence why I supported deleting it a while back. It was then and is still an ill-defined WP:COATRACK. Copying material from criticism of Wikipedia just turns it into more of a WP:POVFORK. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:29, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm coming around to agreeing the scope should be limited to academic research, or the article is an WP:AFD candidate. soibangla (talk) 22:57, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

• Of Course - I just read his WP article. If his views are not worthy of inclusion, whose are? Jusdafax (talk) 02:55, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Did you see in his essay that he stated as fact that "Obama was personally involved" in spying on Trump (there remains no evidence of it, Trump's own DOJ refuted Trump's wiretap claim twice in two court filings and the DOJ IG found no evidence a spy had been planted in his campaign); that the Benghazi attack was a scandal even though ten investigations (including six by GOP committees) did not find it was, despite Fox News and others relentlessly promoting it as such for two years; characterizing Solyndra as a scandal (which it was not, despite efforts to make it seem so by Fox News and others) and that HRC's emails should be counted as an Obama scandal in his BLP? Have you taken a scroll through his twitter feed? It seems to me his criticism has to do with his strong POV that Wikipedia does not reflect, which tends to render his being present at the inception some 20 years ago, and having gone on to little of note, irrelevant. He's just another guy on the internet. soibangla (talk) 03:32, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

    And his beef with Wikipedia is that it does not allow editors to make shit up like he does. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:01, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  • whose are? - Yes, that's been an unanswered question in this article since it was created :P — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:16, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• Comment We do, is it being suggested we remove that whole section?Slatersteven (talk) 09:22, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  Article history will tell you that it was not there, then it was, then it was not, then it was, then it was not, then it was. So, yes. As an example: [23]. See also [24] for earlier discussions about this. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:59, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  Then it should not have been kept while this RFC is in place. I will now remove it until we have a consensus. IN addition dislike "blank Cheques" What is meant by "Should Larry Sanger's views be included in the article?" what version?Slatersteven (talk) 10:05, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  Right. There is a difference from before: now there is a reliable source, The Independent, reporting on it. Green in WP:RSP. At the time of earlier discussions, there was only Fox and irrelevant netizens. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:09, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  So we need to know what text we are discussing, there are issues of wp:undue here.Slatersteven (talk) 10:11, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

• Is Sanger is a recognized expert on ideological bias? If not, his views belong at Larry Sanger. Johnuniq (talk) 10:17, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• No. He's non-expert whose opinions are fairly fringe-y; his connection to Wikipedia is historical in nature and doesn't imply any particular expertise given that he left in 2002, long before it came to resemble anything close to its current form. The section on his views is clearly undue. --Aquillion (talk) 23:49, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• Depends/Probably Sanger's views on this topic tends to get a lot of attention ([25], [26], [www.fr24news.com/a/2021/07/no-one-should-trust-wikipedia-warns-co-founder-larry-sanger.html], [27], [28], [29], etc.) and even gets mentioned in academic research ([30], [31], [32], etc.) from time to time. There's no need to overburden the article with his views but removing them completely doesn't make a lot of sense. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 07:28, 6 August 2021 (UTC)
• Yes. There is no point to leave it out. Sea Ane (talk) 21:16, 6 August 2021 (UTC)
• Yes. He's an authority on wikipedia given his critical historical role in laying foundations that still persist today, granting him an authoritative understanding of the flaws and structure of current wikipedia, and how it differs from his time here. The fact it was in the past is irrelevant, as his work and expertise is still present in the current wikipedia. Sanger also holds a doctorate in philosophy, focusing on epistemology, and makes him qualified on matters involving knowledge and bias. His beliefs on wikipedia ideological bias are also not fringe, and are at the very least, part of a significant minority, and supported by other already listed peer-reviewed studies. 110.145.81.134 (talk) 10:01, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
• Probably not, but this is a rather silly question. What are the criteria for inclusion and which of his criticisms meet those criteria? As Aquillion & Johnuniq point out, Sanger has no particular expertise or authority in the subject area and as Rhododendrites points out, the article has no consistent criteria for inclusion at present. So, what is the aricle about? Pincrete (talk) 15:22, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

The thing that I found extraordinary in Sanger's article is the extent to which he sees keeping US Republicans and US 'fundamentalist' Protestant Christians happy as defining 'absence of bias' in the examples he gives. Apart from it being an inherently irrational criteria, defining 'effect' on a particular type of reader, rather than 'content' or presentation, apart from this, most of the English speaking world is not American or defined by US right-left politics, and most world and historical Christians, don't share the US evangelical obsession with the Bible being the literal word of God. That's before we speak of the atheists, and those of other religions of course. It's difficult to see what Sanger actually wants other than that WP should be more biased towards people who share his views. Pincrete (talk) 09:40, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

It reminds me of the bar in the Blues Brothers where they played "both types of music: country and western." TFD (talk) 01:56, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

• No until I know what it is I am being asked.Slatersteven (talk) 15:36, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
• Maybe Even though you think you are asking something you really aren't. Should his views be included? If they are relevant to the article. Not every comment he'd have about Wikipedia would be relevant in an article about Ideological bias on wikipedia. It need to be weighted properly.-Serialjoepsycho- (talk) 02:46, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
• Depends. I would like to see a proposed edit and its sources before taking a view. JBchrch talk 21:09, 15 August 2021 (UTC)
• Invalid question - This type of question is usually answered by being precise about the claim and then listing reliable sources that report it, to determine if it's WP:DUE. Independent sources will also likely include details like why Sanger's opinion was relevant to report about and may also put those claims in context, potentially allowing to cover it in an NPOV way... —PaleoNeonate – 04:28, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• No. (Summoned by bot) Some are complaining about the question, which I can sympathize with because it is very broad and simply put. I think it has a short and simple answer though too: There's no evidence Sanger is a recognized expert on ideological bias, so his opinions here are irrelevant. ––𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗗𝘂𝗱𝗲 talk 08:34, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• No. We have a reliable source, but it only tells us what Sanger says, without anybody commenting on whether it makes sense. Since his beliefs are pretty WP:FRINGE, it would need to be balanced. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:04, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• No. No clear evidence to show that he's an expert on the subject matter. BristolTreeHouse (talk) 10:41, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• No The sources that have paid attention to his opinions are unreliable, one way or another: tabloid muck, screeching in political opinion columns, and more-or-less open wikis. (Of the academic sources given above, two are from a decade ago and the third, from 2006, appears to be content copied from Wikipedia itself.) We don't automatically regard Jimmy Wales's opinion about things he was involved with 20 years ago as noteworthy, and likewise, without reliable sources giving significant coverage to Sanger's statements, they're not worth our attention. I'm sympathetic to the concerns that this page has no clearly-established criteria for inclusion. But wherever we draw the line, basic policy means that Sanger will currently be on the wrong side of it. XOR'easter (talk) 17:17, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
• Invalid question - per PaleoNeonate. We shouldn't exclude viewpoints just because Sanger happens to share them. Whether we should include relevant viewpoints attributed to Sanger should depend on our usual policy-based criteria - whether he hold other viewpoints we may dislike or find WP:FRINGE is not relevant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Terjen (talk • contribs) 06:22, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

  Oh, yes, WP:FRINGE is a guideline and therefore very relevant. Of course we do not exclude viewpoints just because Sanger happens to share them. That would be crazy, and nobody suggested that reason for excluding any viewpoints. --Hob Gadling (talk) 19:19, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

  Actually, @Aquillion already argues that the RfC is "trending towards excluding his views entirely" as reason to remove a viewpoint shared by him. Terjen (talk) 19:55, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

  You put a very malicious and fantastic interpretation on those words. What Aquillion very obviously means is that everything sourced to Sanger should be deleted. Of course, views from another source will not be deleted "because Sanger happens to share them". That would be crazy. And stupid. And not feasible. We would have to compare everything in the article with Sanger's views!

  From your difficulties in understanding what normal people write, I think Wikipedia is not the right place for you. --Hob Gadling (talk) 15:51, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

  That isn't an appropriate commnent Hob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_personal_attacksTheFinalMigration (talk) 02:35, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

• To all, lets stop commenting on users or dismissing their views.Slatersteven (talk) 15:52, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

• This question doesn't make sense. Are we talking about "mentioning that Sanger has expressed opinions"? Are we talking about "describing what the opinions are"? Are we talking about "repeating the opinions as fact"? These are pretty different questions. I think it's pretty wild to say that the co-founder of a project isn't qualified or notable enough for us to say what his opinions about the project are. Most of the people here seem to be making an argument that his opinions are dumb -- sure, maybe they are dumb, whatever -- but I don't get what that has to do with anything. I'm not aware of any policies or guidelines preventing us from saying that people said dumb stuff. How would we write articles about politicians, for Pete's sake? jp×g 10:07, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

To elaborate on this a bit: "the Department of Energy is run by a cabal of leprechauns" is a fringe opinion. If a former President claimed (in a non-joking manner) that the Department of Energy was run by a cabal of leprechauns, however, this would be noteworthy. This does not require anyone to evaluate the likelihood of the leprechaun conspiracy; that's relevant to the context of how this claim is presented, but not to whether it warrants mention. jp×g 10:12, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Comment: Sanger's views have now been included in anonymized plural form: Critics claim that Wikipedia has abandoned its neutrality policy in favor of a left-wing political bias, sourced to a Slate article which indeed says that "critics" do that and quotes exactly one "critic", namely Sanger. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

The same material has been added to multiple articles it seems. It's also at reliability of Wikipedia (talk page discussion). Oddly, it's not in the one place it has a good claim to be: criticism of Wikipedia, where high-profile criticism can be included without concerning ourselves with whether it's relevant to reliability, whether it's relevant to [however we define] ideological bias, and we don't have to evaluate whether they're a reliable source for those claims in the same way. The reliability article and this article should really be about conclusions and evidence, not "someone you might've heard of said this thing about Wikipedia". — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:17, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.