Wikipedia:Systemic bias

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia strives for a neutral point of view, both in terms of the articles that are created and the content, perspectives and sources within those articles. However, the encyclopedia fails in this goal because of systemic bias created by the editing community's narrow social and cultural demographic. Bias can be either implicit when articles or information are missing from the encyclopedia, or explicit when an article's content or sources are biased. This essay addresses issues of systemic bias specific to the English Wikipedia.

As a result of

reliable sources are not recently published, easily available online, and in English are systematically underrepresented, and Wikipedia tends to show a White Anglo-American[1]
perspective on issues due to the preponderance of English-speaking editors from Anglophone countries. The perspectives of women are also underrepresented.

While there are some external factors that contribute to systemic bias (such as availability of sources and disproportionate global media coverage of events in predominately white Anglophone countries), there is also a vast body of

reliable sources that are relatively easy to incorporate into the encyclopedia and have enormous potential for countering systemic bias.[2]

The "average Wikipedian"

Wikipedia's systemic bias portrays the world through the filter of the experiences and views of the "average Wikipedian". The common characteristics of average

Global North
  • likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than being employed as a blue-collar worker
  • .

    Women are underrepresented

    Women are underrepresented on Wikipedia, making up only 8.5–15% of active contributors in 2011.[4][5] A peer-reviewed study published in 2013 estimated 16.1% of editors were women.[6]

    The gender gap has not been closing over time and, on average, female editors leave Wikipedia earlier than male editors.[7] Research suggests that the gender gap has a detrimental effect on content coverage: articles with particular interest to women tend to be shorter, even when controlling for variables that affect article length.[7]

    Women typically perceive Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do.[8]

    Those without Internet are underrepresented

    Population of Internet users by country (ITU figures, 2012)[9]
    Internet usage by percentage of each country's population (2016)[9]

    Internet access is required to contribute to Wikipedia, so people who have less access to the internet, including people in developing nations, the

    African Americans and Latinos in the U.S., Indigenous peoples in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and poorer populations of India, among others.[11][12][13][14] Wikipedians are likely to be more technically inclined than the average internet user because of the technical barrier presented by the software interface and the Wiki markup language that discourage many potential editors. The VisualEditor
    offered by the Wikimedia Foundation for many of its projects (including the English Wikipedia), is buggy and increases load times.

    Mobile device users are underrepresented

    While

    talk page discussions
    as the editing interface is less accessible on mobile devices.

    English-speaking editors from Anglophone countries dominate

    Despite the many contributions of Wikipedians writing in English as a non-native language, the English Wikipedia is dominated by native English-speaking editors from Anglophone countries (particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia). Anglophone countries are mostly in the global North, thereby accentuating the encyclopedia's bias to contributions from First World countries. Countries and regions where either English is an official language (e.g. Hong Kong, India, Pakistan and other former colonies of the British Empire) and other countries where English-language schooling is common (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands, and some other European countries) participate more than countries without broad teaching of English. Hence, the latter remain underrepresented. The majority of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, which contributes toward a selection bias to a Northern Hemisphere perspective. This selection bias interacts with the other causes of systemic bias discussed above, which slants the selection to a pro-Northern Hemisphere perspective.[15] Wikipedia is blocked in some countries due to government censorship. The most common method of circumventing such censorship, editing through an open proxy, may not work as Wikipedia may block the proxy in an effort to prevent it from being abused by certain users, such as vandals.

    An American or European perspective may exist

    Worldwide density of geotagged Wikipedia entries as of 2006
    Worldwide density of GeoNames entries as of 2006
    All geolocated images in Wikimedia Commons as of 2017

    Maps of geotagged Wikipedia articles and geolocated images on Wikimedia Commons show notable gaps in comparison to the density of items in the GeoNames database.

    Most English-speaking (native or non-native) contributors to Wikipedia are American or European, which can lead to an American or European perspective. In addition, Anglophone contributors from outside of the United States and countries in Europe are likely to be more familiar with those countries than other parts of the world. This leads to, for example, a 2015 version of "Demonym" (an article that ostensibly is on all demonyms for all peoples across the globe) listing six different demonyms in the article lede, with five of them being western or central European nationalities, and the other being Canadian. Another example is that a 2015 version of the article "Harbor" listed three examples in the article lede all from California.

    External factors

    Because

    biographies of living persons. The extent to which Wikipedia editors can correct for external factors is a matter of debate — should Wikipedia reflect the world as it presents itself
    , or as Wikipedians would hope the world could be?

    Availability of sources may cause bias

    Availability of sources is not uniform. This manifests both from the language a source is written in and the ease with which it can be accessed. Sources published in a medium that is both widely available and familiar to editors, such as a news website, are more likely to be used than those from esoteric or foreign-language publications regardless of their reliability. For example, a 2007 story on the

    are available only through costly subscription services.

    full-text-on-the-net bias also make it more likely that editors will find reliable coverage for topics with easily available sources than articles dependent on off-line or difficult to find sources. The lack of sources and therefore notability causes articles to go through the deletion process
    of Wikipedia.

    Representation in sources may cause bias

    Representation within sources is not uniform due to societal realities, and the external lack of coverage results in an internal lack of coverage. A 2015 survey[16] of material from 2000 U.S. newspapers and online news found that:[17]

    • Between 1983 and 2008 in 13 major U.S. newspapers, 40% of mentions went to 1% of names, and the people that received the most mentions were almost all male.
    • Male names in those 13 newspapers were mentioned four times as often as female names.
    • When the dataset was expanded to all 2000 sources, the ratio increased to nearly 5:1.
    • The authors proposed that "the persistent social realities of acute gender inequalities at the top in politics, the business world, and sports translate into highly imbalanced gender coverage patterns".

    The

    Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) follows trends in newspaper, radio, television, internet news and news media tweets and, as of 2015, finds that women make up 24% of persons that are heard, seen, or read about. GMMP also noted imbalance in the subject matter of topics reported in the news overall: 27% social/legal, 24% government/politics, 14% economy, 13% crime/violence, 11% celebrity/arts/sports, and 8% science/health (and 2% other).[18]

    Examples

    There is further information on biases in Geography, in Politics, in History, and in Logic. See also Countering systemic bias: Project details for an older introduction.

    Why it matters

    Systemic bias violates

    five pillars
    , so it should be fixed.

    What you can do

    Read about other people's perspectives, work to understand your own biases, and try to represent Wikipedia's NPOV policy in your editing. Invite others to edit, and be respectful of others' views. Avoid topics where you expect that you are biased or where you don't wish to make the effort to overcome those biases.

    Read newspapers, magazines, reliable websites, and other versions of Wikipedia in languages other than English. If you know only English, read articles from other countries where English is a primary language, like Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, or Nigeria. Also, some countries where English is not an official language do have important English-language press (such as Brazil, Egypt, or Israel). Where such English-language press is not available, automated translation, though imperfect and error-prone, can enable you access articles in many languages, and may be a reasonably adequate substitute. Consider learning another language.

    There is a vast body of

    reliable sources that are relatively easy to incorporate into the encyclopedia and have enormous potential for countering systemic bias.[2]

    Use judicious placement of the {{

    Globalize-inline
    }} templates in Wikipedia articles which you believe exhibit systemic bias, along with adding your reasoning and possible mitigations to the corresponding talk pages.

    Barnstar

    The Systemic Bias Barnstar
    This
    Barnstar
    may be awarded to Wikipedians who help reduce the encyclopedia's systemic bias.


    See also

    Notes

    References

    1. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-06-27/Recent research", Wikipedia, 2021-07-25, retrieved 2022-11-23
    2. ^
      S2CID 234286415
      .
    3. .
    4. ^ Cohen, Noam (January 30, 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List". The New York Times. Retrieved January 7, 2012.
    5. ^ "Editor Survey Report – April 2011". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved January 7, 2011.
    6. PMID 23840366
      .
    7. ^ a b Lam, Shyong (Tony) K.; Uduwage, Anuradha; Dong, Zhenhua; Sen, Shilad; Musicant, David R.; Terveen, Loren; Riedl, John (October 3–5, 2011). "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance". WikiSym’11.
    8. ^ S. Lim and N. Kwon (2010). "Gender differences in information behavior concerning Wikipedia, an unorthodox information source?" Library & Information Science Research, 32 (3): 212–220. DOI: 10.1016/j.lisr.2010.01.003
    9. ^ a b http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2013/Individuals_Internet_2000-2012.xls[bare URL]
    10. ^ Nelson, Anne (19 July 2011). "Wikipedia Taps College 'Ambassadors' to Broaden Editor Base". www.pbs.org. Retrieved 4 September 2014.
    11. .
    12. .
    13. .
    14. .
    15. ^ See Mark Graham (2 December 2009). "Wikipedia's known unknowns". The Guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 9 December 2009.
    16. S2CID 52225299
      .
    17. . Retrieved May 18, 2019.
    18. . Retrieved 18 May 2019.

    External links