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=== English Wikipedia's news citations found to have "moderate yet systematic" liberal bias ===
=== ... ===
A preprint titled "Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia"<ref>{{Cite| publisher = arXiv| doi = 10.48550/arXiv.2210.16065| last1 = Yang| first1 = Puyu| last2 = Colavizza| first2 = Giovanni| title = Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia| date = 2022-11-21| url = http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16065}}</ref> finds
:''Reviewed by ...''
<blockquote style="padding-left:1.0em; padding-right:1.0em; background-color:#eaf8f4;">[...] a moderate yet systematic liberal polarization in the [English Wikipedia's] selection of news media sources. We also show that this effect is not mitigated by controlling for news media factual reliability."
</blockquote>
The study is based on a dataset of 30 million citations extracted in 2020, which the second author and others have already examined from different angles in other research publications (cf. our previous coverage: "[[m:Research:Newsletter/2020/August#6.7%_of_Wikipedia_articles_cite_at_least_one_academic_journal_article_with_DOI|6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one academic journal article with DOI]]",
"[[m:Research:Newsletter/2020/June#How_Wikipedia_keeps_up_with_COVID-19_research|How Wikipedia keeps up with COVID-19 research]]", [[m:Research:Newsletter/2021/December#"A_Map_of_Science_in_Wikipedia"|"A Map of Science in Wikipedia"]]).

Like research examining other kinds of bias (regarding e.g. gender, language or geography), studying political bias involves the non-trivial problem of defining a "neutral" baseline against which to compare Wikipedia's content. For example, in a series of earlier [[m:Research:Newsletter/2012/February#Given_enough_eyeballs.2C_do_articles_become_neutral.3F|papers]] that e.g. found Wikipedia to be [[m:Research:Newsletter/2015/November#Other_recent_publications|"more slanted towards Democratic views"]] than Britannica, although its [[m:Research:Newsletter/2012/January#Language_analysis_finds_Wikipedia.27s_political_bias_moving_from_left_to_right|bias was moving from left to right]], Greenstein and Zhu relied on the US [[Congressional Record]] as a kind of gold standard of unbiased language (opening themselves up to the question whether the spectrum of opinions present among US federal lawmakers is an appropriate baseline for an international encyclopedia, even if their analysis was focused on articles related to US politics). The present study relies a different source that has since become available:
<blockquote style="padding-left:1.0em; padding-right:1.0em; background-color:#eaf8f4;">To estimate the political polarization of Wikipedia citations, we use the Media Bias Monitor<ref group=supp>Filipe N Ribeiro, Lucas Henrique, Fabricio Benevenuto, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Juhi Kulshrestha, Mahmoudreza Babaei, and Krishna P Gummadi. Media bias monitor: Quantifying biases of social media news outlets at large-scale. In Twelfth international AAAI conference on web and social media, 2018.</ref> This system collects demographic data about the Facebook followers of 20,448 distinct news media outlets [...]. These data include political leanings, gender, age, income, ethnicity and national identity. For political leanings, the Facebook Audience API<ref group=supp>https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences-api</ref> provides five levels: Very Conservative, Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Very Liberal. To measure the political leaning of an outlet, MBM firstly finds the fraction of readers having different political leanings, and then multiply the fraction for each category with the following values: very liberal (–2), liberal (–1), moderate (0), conservative (1), and very conservative (2). The sum of such scores provides a single polarization score for the outlet, ranging between –2 and 2, where a negative score indicates that a media outlet is read more by a liberal leaning audience, while a positive score indicates a conservative leaning audience. In the original paper, MBM is compared to alternative approaches used to infer the political leanings of news media outlets, finding that this method highly correlates with most alternatives.
</blockquote>
Matching domain names between MBM and the Wikipedia Citations dataset, the study finds that
<blockquote style="padding-left:1.0em; padding-right:1.0em; background-color:#eaf8f4;">
"The average Wikipedia citation polarization score (red line) is -0.51 (median -0.52) [on the aforementioned MBM scale from -2 (very liberal) to 2 (very conservative)], therefore leaning towards liberal. The bulk of citations also falls between the range -1 and 0."
</blockquote>

The authors "speculate that editors may introduce political polarization in their sources in order to prioritise reliable ones." To test this hypothesis, they use the reliability ratings of [[Media Bias/Fact Check]] (but not that site's bias ratings). They note in passing that "that, while there are only 1467 citations rated as 'VERY LOW' [reliability], there remains a sizable fraction of citations to low or mixed reliability outlets" on English Wikipedia (as of 2020).

However, in linear regression analysis (which also takes article topic areas into account), they "cannot see a clear pattern emerge. While high reliability shows a liberal skew, very high reliability shows a conservative skew in turn. Mixed sources tend to be more liberal, while low and very low reliability ones tend to be more conservative." Overall, the researchers conclude that "the case for a possible association between low reliability and conservative news outlets disappear[s]" in the end.


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:''Reviewed by ...''
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Revision as of 21:29, 2 February 2023

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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.


English Wikipedia's news citations found to have "moderate yet systematic" liberal bias

A preprint titled "Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia"[1] finds

[...] a moderate yet systematic liberal polarization in the [English Wikipedia's] selection of news media sources. We also show that this effect is not mitigated by controlling for news media factual reliability."

The study is based on a dataset of 30 million citations extracted in 2020, which the second author and others have already examined from different angles in other research publications (cf. our previous coverage: "6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one academic journal article with DOI", "How Wikipedia keeps up with COVID-19 research", "A Map of Science in Wikipedia").

Like research examining other kinds of bias (regarding e.g. gender, language or geography), studying political bias involves the non-trivial problem of defining a "neutral" baseline against which to compare Wikipedia's content. For example, in a series of earlier papers that e.g. found Wikipedia to be "more slanted towards Democratic views" than Britannica, although its bias was moving from left to right, Greenstein and Zhu relied on the US Congressional Record as a kind of gold standard of unbiased language (opening themselves up to the question whether the spectrum of opinions present among US federal lawmakers is an appropriate baseline for an international encyclopedia, even if their analysis was focused on articles related to US politics). The present study relies a different source that has since become available:

To estimate the political polarization of Wikipedia citations, we use the Media Bias Monitor[supp 1] This system collects demographic data about the Facebook followers of 20,448 distinct news media outlets [...]. These data include political leanings, gender, age, income, ethnicity and national identity. For political leanings, the Facebook Audience API[supp 2] provides five levels: Very Conservative, Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Very Liberal. To measure the political leaning of an outlet, MBM firstly finds the fraction of readers having different political leanings, and then multiply the fraction for each category with the following values: very liberal (–2), liberal (–1), moderate (0), conservative (1), and very conservative (2). The sum of such scores provides a single polarization score for the outlet, ranging between –2 and 2, where a negative score indicates that a media outlet is read more by a liberal leaning audience, while a positive score indicates a conservative leaning audience. In the original paper, MBM is compared to alternative approaches used to infer the political leanings of news media outlets, finding that this method highly correlates with most alternatives.

Matching domain names between MBM and the Wikipedia Citations dataset, the study finds that

"The average Wikipedia citation polarization score (red line) is -0.51 (median -0.52) [on the aforementioned MBM scale from -2 (very liberal) to 2 (very conservative)], therefore leaning towards liberal. The bulk of citations also falls between the range -1 and 0."

The authors "speculate that editors may introduce political polarization in their sources in order to prioritise reliable ones." To test this hypothesis, they use the reliability ratings of Media Bias/Fact Check (but not that site's bias ratings). They note in passing that "that, while there are only 1467 citations rated as 'VERY LOW' [reliability], there remains a sizable fraction of citations to low or mixed reliability outlets" on English Wikipedia (as of 2020).

However, in linear regression analysis (which also takes article topic areas into account), they "cannot see a clear pattern emerge. While high reliability shows a liberal skew, very high reliability shows a conservative skew in turn. Mixed sources tend to be more liberal, while low and very low reliability ones tend to be more conservative." Overall, the researchers conclude that "the case for a possible association between low reliability and conservative news outlets disappear[s]" in the end.

...

Reviewed by ...

...

Reviewed by ....

Briefly

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.


"Political representation bias in DBpedia and Wikidata as a challenge for downstream processing"

From the abstract:[2]

"Diversity Searcher is a tool originally developed to help analyse diversity in news media texts [...] We compare two data sources that Diversity Searcher has worked with – [the Wikipedia-based] DBpedia and Wikidata – with respect to their ontological coverage and diversity, and describe implications for the resulting analyses of text corpora. We describe a case study of the relative over- or underrepresentation of Belgian political parties between 1990 and 2020 in the English-language DBpedia, the Dutch-language DBpedia, and Wikidata [...]. In particular, we came across a staggering overrepresentation of the political right in the English-language DBpedia."

From the "Method" section:

"As a null hypothesis, a knowledge source represents a political constellation in an unbiased way if the relative number of politicians from a given party who are represented as an entity in a knowledge source [...] equals the relative number of this party in a relevant real-life context. [... We] consider “having a Wikipedia page” (etc.) as an important contributor to public visibility of a person and their party. [...] The baseline is then – relatively – easy to define: the shares of the vote or the number of seats of parties Y at times T in a given political body. We started by concentrating on the national parliament, the Chamber of People’s Representatives (Kamer van volksvertegenwoordigers, henceforth KVV) and used the number of seats at the beginning of a legislature. We also looked at the regional (Flemish) parliaments (Vlaams parlement, VP) [...]"

From the "Results and interpretation" section:

"These results not only confirm our first informal observation of over-representation of rightwing parties (especially the N-VA) in the English-language DBpedia, with a trend growing over time. (During these years, the N-VA’s share of the popular vote increased, but the DBpedia growth clearly exceeds the baseline growth.) Different biases seem to occur in the Dutch-language DBpedia: although on the whole comparatively similar to the baseline, this ontology seems to over-represent the main centrist party (CD&V). Wikidata, in contrast, gives a rather accurate picture of party shares in the national parliament. The French-language Walloon parties are (understandably, given the language focus) under-represented in the Dutch-language DBpedia. Both the overrepresentation of rightist and centrist parties in media coverage have been identified in earlier international research [...]"

"Assuming Good Faith Online"

In this legal essay[3], US legal scholar Eric Goldman (whom some Wikipedians might recall for his - later retracted - 2005 prediction prediction of Wikipedia's demise due to volunteer burnout) contrasts Wikipedia's "Assume Good Faith" principle with current attempts by Internet regulators to rein in on user-generated content websites and Section 230.

...

"..."

From the abstract:

...

References

  1. ^ Yang, Puyu; Colavizza, Giovanni (2022-11-21), Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2210.16065
  2. ^ Karadeniz, Ozgur; Berendt, Bettina; Kiyak, Sercan; Mertens, Stefan; d'Haenens, Leen (2022-12-29), Political representation bias in DBpedia and Wikidata as a challenge for downstream processing, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2301.00671
  3. ^ Goldman, Eric (2022). "Assuming Good Faith Online". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.4277296. ISSN 1556-5068. Retrieved 2023-02-02. 30 Catholic U.J.L. & Tech. __ (Forthcoming), Santa Clara Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4277296, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4277296 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4277296
Supplementary references and notes:
  1. ^ Filipe N Ribeiro, Lucas Henrique, Fabricio Benevenuto, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Juhi Kulshrestha, Mahmoudreza Babaei, and Krishna P Gummadi. Media bias monitor: Quantifying biases of social media news outlets at large-scale. In Twelfth international AAAI conference on web and social media, 2018.
  2. ^ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences-api

This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}


Images and Galleries
Sidebar images

To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):

[[File:|center|300px|alt=TKTK]]

O frabjous day.
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2
 |image     = 
 |size      = 300px
 |alt       = TKTK
 |caption   = 
 |fullwidth = no
}}

This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes.

Inline images

Placing 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Inline image
 |image   =
 |size    = 300px
 |align   = center
 |alt     = Placeholder alt text
 |caption = CAPTION
}}

(link) will instead create an inline image like below

[[File:|300px|center|alt=Placeholder alt text]]
CAPTION
Galleries

To create a gallery, use the following 

<gallery mode = packed | heights = 200px>
|Caption for second image
</gallery>

to create

Quotes
Framed quotes

To insert a framed quote like the one on the right, use this template (link): 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler quote-v2
 |1         = 
 |author    = 
 |source    = 
 |fullwidth = 
}}

If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes.

Pull quotes

To insert a pull quote like

use this template (link): 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Quote
 |1         = 
 |source    = 
}}
Long quotes

To insert a long inline quote like

The goose is on the loose! The geese are on the lease!
— User:Oscar Wilde
— Quotations Notes from the Underpoop

use this template (link): 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/block quote
 | text   = 
 | by     = 
 | source = 
 | ts     = 
 | oldid  = 
}}
Side frames

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

A caption

Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2
 |1         = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
 |caption   = A caption
 |fullwidth = no
}}

gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like.

Example − Graph/Charts
Further information: Category:Graph, chart and plot templates
A caption

For example, to insert the {{Graph:Chart}} generated by 

{{Graph:Chart
 |width=250|height=100|type=line
 |x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8|y=10,12,6,14,2,10,7,9
}}

in a frame, simple put the graph code in |1= 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2
 |1=
{{Graph:Chart
 |width=250|height=100|type=line
 |x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8|y=10,12,6,14,2,10,7,9
}}
 |caption=A caption
 |fullwidth=no
}}

to get the framed Graph:Chart on the right.

If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes.

Two-column vs full width styles

If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything.

However, every time you have a |fullwidth=no and change it to |fullwidth=yes (or vice-versa), the article will take that style from that point onwards (|fullwidth=yes → full width, |fullwidth=no → two-column). By default, omitting |fullwidth= is the same as putting |fullwidth=no and the article will have two columns after that. Again, this is perfectly fine in most cases, and you don't need to do anything.

However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article.

To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2|fullwidth=yes}}

where you want the switch to happen.

To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert 

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2|fullwidth=no}}

where you want the switch to happen.

Article series

To add a series of 'related articles' your article, use the following code

Related articles
Visual Editor

Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
1 January 2023

VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief
5 August 2015

HTTPS-only rollout completed, proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts
17 June 2015

VisualEditor and MediaWiki updates
29 April 2015

Security issue fixed; VisualEditor changes
4 February 2015

More articles

Draft namespace, VisualEditor meetings
25 December 2013

Sockpuppet investigations, VisualEditor, Wikidata's birthday, and more
6 November 2013

Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor
25 September 2013

Making Wikipedia more accessible
4 September 2013

Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia
28 August 2013

The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change
31 July 2013

Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles
31 July 2013

VisualEditor in midst of game-changing deployment series
3 July 2013

VisualEditor will "change world history"
12 June 2013

VisualEditor, elections, bots, and more
12 June 2013

The Visual Editor: Where are we now, and where are we headed?
25 March 2013

Visual Editor "on schedule" for July rollout
18 March 2013

Looking ahead to 2013
7 January 2013

The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual
10 December 2012

Second Visual Editor prototype launches
25 June 2012

Visual editor demo launched, hailed as "most important change to our user experience ... ever"; but elsewhere over-hasty deployments criticised
19 December 2011

Full steam ahead on Visual Editor, the avoidance of lock-breaking and 1.18b1 release
7 November 2011

{{Signpost series
 |type        = sidebar-v2
 |tag         = VisualEditor
 |seriestitle = Visual Editor
 |fullwidth   = no
}}

or 

{{Signpost series
 |type        = sidebar-v2
 |tag         = VisualEditor
 |seriestitle = Visual Editor
 |fullwidth   = yes
}}

will create the sidebar on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. A partial list of valid |tag= parameters can be found at here and will decide the list of articles presented. |seriestitle= is the title that will appear below 'Related articles' in the box.

Alternatively, you can use 

{{Signpost series
 |type        = inline
 |tag         = VisualEditor
 |tag_name    = visual editor
 |tag_pretext = the
}}

at the end of an article to create

For more Signpost coverage on the visual editor see our visual editor series.

If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet.

Links and such
  • News and notes:

By the way, the template that you're reading right now is {{Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue}} (edit). A list of the preload templates for Signpost articles can be found here.

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Ech. So they compared an international encyclopedia to American publications and claim it's bad we don't perfectly align with them? Most of the Anglosphere is left of America. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 16:23, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Yeah a bit silly of a story - of course stuff will be more left-leaning, that's most of the academic world LegalSmeagolian (talk) 21:10, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the Anglosphere is the United States of America. Somers-all-the-time (talk) 04:36, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
2/3rds of the Anglosphere is a majority, but not so much of one that Wikipedia would be expected to match American biases. Frankly, the premise of the study is that American political biases are some objective standard that Wikipedia should be trying to emulate. Since that's not and has never been Wikipedia's goal, and given the weirdness of the dataset (Facebook user data and Media Bias Monitor?), it's questionable. Oddly enough, though, Media Bias Monitor itself rates Wikipedia as "least biased". Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 18:50, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That InternetArchiveBot blurb is quite concerning. Any attempts to fix this issue? DFlhb (talk) 09:23, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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