incorporating some items from Criticism of Wikipedia#Partisanship and Reliability of Wikipedia#Liberal bias with checks and updates |
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The notion of '''ideological bias on Wikipedia''' refers to analysis and [[Criticism of Wikipedia#Partisanship|criticism]] of the [[Reliability of Wikipedia#Liberal bias|reliability]] of the online encyclopedia [[Wikipedia]], and especially its [[English Wikipedia|English-language site]], in relation to whether its content is biased due to the [[Political spectrum|political ideology]] of its volunteer [[Wikipedia editors]]. |
The notion of '''ideological bias on Wikipedia''' refers to analysis and [[Criticism of Wikipedia#Partisanship|criticism]] of the [[Reliability of Wikipedia#Liberal bias|reliability]] of the online encyclopedia [[Wikipedia]], and especially its [[English Wikipedia|English-language site]], in relation to whether its content is biased due to the [[Political spectrum|political ideology]] of its volunteer [[Wikipedia editors]]. |
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==Public opinion== |
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Wikipedia co-founder [[Jimmy Wales]] claimed in April 2006: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from [[liberalism|liberal]] to [[conservatism|conservative]] to [[libertarianism|libertarian]] and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." <ref name="MediaShift">{{cite web|last1=Glaser|first1=Mark|title=Email Debate::Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia|url=http://mediashift.org/2006/04/email-debatewales-discusses-political-bias-on-wikipedia111/|website=[[MediaShift]]|accessdate=22 May 2018|date=April 21, 2006}}</ref> |
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In 2007, an article in ''[[The Christian Post]]'' criticised Wikipedia's coverage of [[intelligent design]], saying that it was biased and hypocritical.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.christianpost.com/news/design-proponents-accuse-wikipedia-of-bias-hypocrisy-27307/|title='Design' Proponents Accuse Wikipedia of Bias, Hypocrisy|author=Huntington, Doug|date=May 9, 2007|accessdate=May 22, 2018|work=[[The Christian Post]]}}</ref> |
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[[Lawrence Solomon]] of the ''[[National Review]]'' in 2008 considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like [[global warming]], [[intelligent design]], and ''[[Roe v. Wade]]'' all to be slanted in favor of liberal views.<ref>{{cite news|last=Solomon|first=Lawrence|title=Wikipropaganda On Global Warming|url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipropaganda-on-global-warming/|work=[[National Review]]|publisher=CBS News|date=July 8, 2008|accessdate=May 22, 2018}}</ref> |
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In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly ''[[Human Events]]'', [[Rowan Scarborough]] presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching [[United States midterm election|midterm election]]s as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of [[Tea Party movement|Tea Party]]-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on its rival [[Conservapedia]] as evidence of an underlying bias.<ref name="scarborough">{{cite web|last=Scarborough|first=Rowan|url=http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=39139|title=Whacks the Right|date=September 27, 2010|accessdate=October 3, 2010|work=[[Human Events]]}}</ref> |
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Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at [[Purdue University]], said in 2018 that, "For 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."<ref>{{cite news |last=Matsakis |first=Louise |url=https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-wikipedia-content-moderation-internet/ |title=Don't Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet |work=Wired |date=March 16, 2018 |accessdate=May 22, 2018}}</ref> |
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==Analyses== |
==Analyses== |
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====''Is Wikipedia Biased?'' (2012)==== |
====''Is Wikipedia Biased?'' (2012)==== |
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In ''Is Wikipedia Biased?'' (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics (as of January 2011) measuring their degree of [[bias]] on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) to measure [[media bias in the United States|bias in newspaper media]].<ref name="Econometrica">{{cite journal|last1=Gentzkow|first1=M|last2=Shapiro|first2=J. M.|authorlink1=Matthew Gentzkow|authorlink2=Jesse M. Shapiro|title=What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers|journal=[[Econometrica]]|date=January 2010|volume=78|issue=1|pages=35-71|doi=10.3982/ECTA7195|publisher=[[The Econometric Society]]}}</ref> This slant index measures an ideological lean toward either [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]] or [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] based on key phrases within the text and gives a rating for the relative amount of that lean. The authors used this method to measure whether Wikipedia was meeting its stated policy of "[[:Wikipedia:neutral point of view|neutral point of view]]" (or NPOV). They also examined the changes to articles over time as they are revised. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.<ref name="GZ2012">{{cite journal|last1=Greenstein|first1=Shane|last2=Zhu|first2=Feng|authorlink1=Shane Greenstein|title=Is Wikipedia Biased?|journal=[[American Economic Review]]|date=May 2012|volume=102|issue=3|pages=343-348|doi=10.1257/aer.102.3.343|publisher=[[American Economic Association]]}}</ref> |
In ''Is Wikipedia Biased?'' (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics (as of January 2011) measuring their degree of [[bias]] on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) to measure [[media bias in the United States|bias in newspaper media]].<ref name="Econometrica">{{cite journal|last1=Gentzkow|first1=M|last2=Shapiro|first2=J. M.|authorlink1=Matthew Gentzkow|authorlink2=Jesse M. Shapiro|title=What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers|journal=[[Econometrica]]|date=January 2010|volume=78|issue=1|pages=35-71|doi=10.3982/ECTA7195|publisher=[[The Econometric Society]]}}</ref> This slant index measures an ideological lean toward either [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]] or [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] based on key phrases within the text and gives a rating for the relative amount of that lean. The authors used this method to measure whether Wikipedia was meeting its stated policy of "[[:Wikipedia:neutral point of view|neutral point of view]]" (or NPOV). They also examined the changes to articles over time as they are revised. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.<ref name="GZ2012">{{cite journal|last1=Greenstein|first1=Shane|last2=Zhu|first2=Feng|authorlink1=Shane Greenstein|title=Is Wikipedia Biased?|journal=[[American Economic Review]]|date=May 2012|volume=102|issue=3|pages=343-348|doi=10.1257/aer.102.3.343|publisher=[[American Economic Association]]}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=Study: Wikipedia perpetuates political bias|author=Khimm, Suzy|url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/study-wikipedia-perpetuates-political-bias/2012/06/18/gJQAaA3llV_blog.html|work=The Washington Post|date=June 18, 2012|accessdate=May 22, 2018}}</ref> |
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The findings have been confirmed by later research, such as ''[[#The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds]]'' (2017).<ref name="Wisdom" /> |
The findings have been confirmed by later research, such as ''[[#The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds]]'' (2017).<ref name="Wisdom" /> |
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=== ''The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds'' === |
=== ''The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds'' === |
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A 2017 study ''The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds'' (Feng Shi, Misha Teplitskiy, Eamon Duede, James Evans) investigated the effects of ideological diversity on Wikipedia entry quality scores for political, social issues, and science articles. To accomplish this, the authors estimated editor political alignment on the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their prior contributions and gauged article quality using a [[MediaWiki]] tool called "[[mw:ORES|ORES]]". The authors found that "polarized teams" (a balanced group of editors with diverse political viewpoints) "create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams", "engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates", and "generate a larger volume of debate and their balance of political perspectives reduces flare-ups in debate temperature". They found that homogenous or highly-skewed teams engaged in less, but highly [[acrimonious]], debate which produced articles scoring lower in quality.<ref name="Wisdom">{{cite journal|author1=Shi, F.|author2=Teplitskiy, M.|author3=Duede, E.|author4=Evans, J.A.|title=The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|journal=(paper)|date=November 29, 2017|url=https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06414|accessdate=22 May 2018|publisher=[[ArXiv]]}}</ref><ref name="Heterodex">{{cite web|last1=Stevens|first1=Sean|title=Research Summary: The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|url=https://heterodoxacademy.org/research-summary-the-wisdom-of-polarized-crowds/|website=Heterodex Academy|accessdate=22 May 2018|date=December 21, 2017}}</ref><ref name="Damore">{{cite web|last1=Damore|first1=James|authorlink1=James Damore|title=The Case for Diversity|url=http://quillette.com/2018/02/12/the-case-for-diversity/|website=[[Quillette]]|accessdate=22 May 2018|date=February 2, 2018}}</ref> |
A 2017 study ''The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds'' (Feng Shi, Misha Teplitskiy, Eamon Duede, James Evans) investigated the effects of ideological diversity on Wikipedia entry quality scores for political, social issues, and science articles. To accomplish this, the authors estimated editor political alignment on the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their prior contributions and gauged article quality using a [[MediaWiki]] tool called "[[mw:ORES|ORES]]". The authors found that "polarized teams" (a balanced group of editors with diverse political viewpoints) "create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams", "engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates", and "generate a larger volume of debate and their balance of political perspectives reduces flare-ups in debate temperature". They found that homogenous or highly-skewed teams engaged in less, but highly [[acrimonious]], debate which produced articles scoring lower in quality.<ref name="Wisdom">{{cite journal|author1=Shi, F.|author2=Teplitskiy, M.|author3=Duede, E.|author4=Evans, J.A.|title=The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|journal=(paper)|date=November 29, 2017|url=https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.06414|accessdate=22 May 2018|publisher=[[ArXiv]]}}</ref><ref name="Heterodex">{{cite web|last1=Stevens|first1=Sean|title=Research Summary: The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds|url=https://heterodoxacademy.org/research-summary-the-wisdom-of-polarized-crowds/|website=Heterodex Academy|accessdate=22 May 2018|date=December 21, 2017}}</ref><ref name="Damore">{{cite web|last1=Damore|first1=James|authorlink1=James Damore|title=The Case for Diversity|url=http://quillette.com/2018/02/12/the-case-for-diversity/|website=[[Quillette]]|accessdate=22 May 2018|date=February 2, 2018}}</ref> |
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==Effects== |
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===Conservapedia=== |
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{{main|Conservapedia}} |
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[[Andrew Schlafly]] created [[Conservapedia]] because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a [[Liberalism in the United States|liberal]] bias, had "biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views", and had become "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American".<ref name="Guardian">{{Cite web|last=Johnson|first=Bobbie|url=https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/mar/01/wikipedia.news|title=Conservapedia — the US religious right's answer to Wikipedia|work=The Guardian|date=March 1, 2007|location=London|accessdate=March 27, 2010}}</ref> Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia.<ref name="itwire">{{Cite news|last=Turner|first=Adam|title=Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right|url=http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/seeking-nerdvana/10160-conservapedia-aims-to-set-wikipedia-right|work=IT Wire|date=March 5, 2007|accessdate=May 22, 2018}}</ref> |
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==See also== |
==See also== |
Revision as of 05:08, 22 May 2018
The notion of ideological bias on Wikipedia refers to analysis and criticism of the reliability of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and especially its English-language site, in relation to whether its content is biased due to the political ideology of its volunteer Wikipedia editors.
Public opinion
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales claimed in April 2006: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." [1]
In 2007, an article in The Christian Post criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design, saying that it was biased and hypocritical.[2]
Lawrence Solomon of the National Review in 2008 considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views.[3]
In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events, Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on its rival Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias.[4]
Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said in 2018 that, "For 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."[5]
Analyses
Greenstein and Zhu
Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, both professors at the Harvard Business School, have authored several studies and articles examining Wikipedia from an ideological standpoint as component of its collective intelligence.
Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012)
In Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics (as of January 2011) measuring their degree of bias on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) to measure bias in newspaper media.[6] This slant index measures an ideological lean toward either Democrat or Republican based on key phrases within the text and gives a rating for the relative amount of that lean. The authors used this method to measure whether Wikipedia was meeting its stated policy of "neutral point of view" (or NPOV). They also examined the changes to articles over time as they are revised. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.[7][8]
The findings have been confirmed by later research, such as The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (2017).[9]
Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? (2017)
In a more extensive follow-up study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia (2017), Greenstein and Zhu directly compare about 4,000 articles related to U.S. politics between Wikipedia (written by an online community) and the matching articles from Encyclopædia Britannica (written by experts) using similar methods as their 2010 study to measure slant (Democrat vs. Republican) and to quantify the degree of bias. 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. They further found that "(t)he difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions" and, when articles were substantially revised, the difference in bias compared to Britannica was statistically negligible. The implication, per the authors, is that "many contributions are needed to reduce considerable bias and slant to something close to neutral".[10][11][12]
Jointly They Edit (2013)
A 2013 study, Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia, was conducted by Jessica J. Neff, professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and colleagues David Laniado , Karolin E. Kappler, Yana Volkovich, Pablo Aragón, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, all from the Barcelona Media-Innovation Centre. The study was conducted to "take a closer look at the patterns of interaction and discourse that members of different political parties have around information online, because they may have important consequences for the accuracy and neutrality of political information provided online". It investigated how Wikipedians (editors of Wikipedia) identified themselves as affiliated with any political party, whether their participation was divided along party lines, if they had a preference to interact with members of the same party, and how much affiliation impacted conflicts within discussions. The authors identified party and ideological affiliation using "userboxes" which some Wikipedians place on their user pages. The authors concluded:
"Although Democrats and Republicans seem to maintain their political identity within the Wikipedia community, our findings show that users displayed more 'Wikipedia' boxes than political boxes on their user pages, indicating that the identity of being a Wikipedian may be more salient in the context of this community. Further, the lack of preference to interact with same-party members in the context of article discussions does not indicate the same polarization that has been observed in other contexts. In this sense, the Wikipedian identity seems to predominate over party identity. Hence, the results of our analysis show that despite the increasing political division of the U.S., there are still areas in which political dialogue is possible and happens."
— Neff, JJ et al, "Conclusions", Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia, [13]
Brian Martin
In 2017, Brian Martin, a social scientist at the University of Wollongong, published a critique (Persistent Bias on Wikipedia: Methods and Responses) of the Wikipedia editing process, based on his observations of the development of his own entry in the encyclopedia. Martin described several techniques which he considered being used by editors of opposing viewpoints to introduce bias into the article, such as the removing or reducing positive information, expanding or adding negative information, selective sourcing, and negative connotation. Further, he describes process-based tactics used to maintain such bias: "(r)evert contrary edits", "(i)nvoke Wikipedia policies selectively", "(a)ttack and ban resistant editors". Martin also criticized the process for replacing scholarly citations with mass media or social media sources, especially newspaper articles which he described as "not high quality sources" in comparison. In his conclusion, Martin stated "(e)ffective imposition of bias will superficially conform to Wikipedia policies."[14]
The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A 2017 study The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (Feng Shi, Misha Teplitskiy, Eamon Duede, James Evans) investigated the effects of ideological diversity on Wikipedia entry quality scores for political, social issues, and science articles. To accomplish this, the authors estimated editor political alignment on the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their prior contributions and gauged article quality using a MediaWiki tool called "ORES". The authors found that "polarized teams" (a balanced group of editors with diverse political viewpoints) "create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams", "engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates", and "generate a larger volume of debate and their balance of political perspectives reduces flare-ups in debate temperature". They found that homogenous or highly-skewed teams engaged in less, but highly acrimonious, debate which produced articles scoring lower in quality.[9][15][16]
Effects
Conservapedia
Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias, had "biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views", and had become "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American".[17] Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia.[18]
See also
References
- ^ Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate::Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia". MediaShift. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
- ^ Huntington, Doug (May 9, 2007). "'Design' Proponents Accuse Wikipedia of Bias, Hypocrisy". The Christian Post. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
- ^ Solomon, Lawrence (July 8, 2008). "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". National Review. CBS News. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
- ^ Scarborough, Rowan (September 27, 2010). "Whacks the Right". Human Events. Retrieved October 3, 2010.
- ^ Matsakis, Louise (March 16, 2018). "Don't Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet". Wired. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
- ^ Gentzkow, M; Shapiro, J. M. (January 2010). "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers". Econometrica. 78 (1). The Econometric Society: 35–71. doi:10.3982/ECTA7195.
- ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (May 2012). "Is Wikipedia Biased?". American Economic Review. 102 (3). American Economic Association: 343–348. doi:10.1257/aer.102.3.343.
- ^ Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Wikipedia perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
- ^ a b Shi, F.; Teplitskiy, M.; Duede, E.; Evans, J.A. (November 29, 2017). "The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". (paper). ArXiv. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
- ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (forthcoming). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia" (PDF). MIS Quarterly.
{{cite journal}}
: Check date values in:|date=
(help) - ^ "Is Collective Intelligence Less Biased?". BizEd. AACSB. May 1, 2015. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
- ^ Guo, Jeff (October 25, 2016). "Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
- ^ Jessica J. Neff; David Laniado; Karolin E. Kappler; Yana Volkovich; Pablo Aragon; Andreas Kaltenbrunner (April 3, 2013). "Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia". PLoS ONE. 8 (4): e60584. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060584.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ Martin, Brian (June 21, 2017). "Persistent Bias on Wikipedia: Methods and Responses". Social Science Computer Review. 36 (3): 379–388. doi:10.1177/0894439317715434.
- ^ Stevens, Sean (December 21, 2017). "Research Summary: The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". Heterodex Academy. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
- ^ Damore, James (February 2, 2018). "The Case for Diversity". Quillette. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
- ^ Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Conservapedia — the US religious right's answer to Wikipedia". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
- ^ Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right". IT Wire. Retrieved May 22, 2018.