Wikipedia:Systemic bias

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The Wikipedia project suffers from systemic bias that naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting as imbalanced coverage of a subject, thereby discriminating against the less represented demographic groups.

Contents 1 The "average Wikipedian" 2 The nature of Wikipedia's bias 3 Why it matters and what to do 4 See also 5 References

[edit] The "average Wikipedian"

The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is (1) a male, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) European–descent, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a majority-Christian country, (8) from a developed nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a labourer.^[1]

• Access to the Internet is required to contribute to Wikipedia. Most of the world's population, including most of the people in developing nations, the poor in industrialized nations, the disabled, and the elderly, do not have such access and thus their views and experience are under-represented. In most countries, minority demographic groups have disproportionately less access to information technology, schooling, and education than majority groups. This includes blacks and Latinos in the U.S., the First Nations of Canada, the Aborigines of Australia, and the poorer populations of India, among others.^[2][3][4][5] Even amongst the general demographic class of Internet users, Wikipedians are likely to be more technically inclined than average. There is a technical barrier represented by the software interface and the complex Wiki markup language that many readers either (a) do not recognize, (b) can't understand, (c) or choose not to use.

• 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. These Anglophone countries tend to be 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 under-represented. The majority of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere, which contributes toward a selection biased 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.^[6] Wikipedia is blocked in some countries due to government censorship, and editing through open proxies, the most common method of circumventing such censorship, is prohibited by Wikipedia policy.

• 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. Because reliable sources are required by Wikipedia policy, topics are limited in the material they can include by the sources available to editors. This is a particularly acute problem for biographies of living persons. Sources published in a medium which is both widely available and familiar to editors, such as a news website, are more likely to be utilised than those from esoteric or foreign-language publications regardless of their reliability. For example, a 2007 story on the BBC News website is more likely to be utilised than a 1967 edition of the Thai Post or Večernje novosti. Similarly, the cost of access to a source can be a barrier e.g. most research in astronomy is freely available to the public via arXiv or NASA ADS, whilst legal case law is only available via costly subscriptions.

• Wikipedians are people that have enough free time to participate in the project. The points of view of editors focused on other projects, e.g. earning a living or caring for others, will be under-represented.

[edit] The nature of Wikipedia's bias

The systemic bias of Wikipedians manifests itself as a portrayal of the world through the filter of the experiences and views of the average Wikipedian. Bias is manifested in both additions and deletions to articles.

Once identified, the bias is noticeable throughout Wikipedia. It takes two major forms:

1. a dearth of articles on neglected topics, and
2. perspective bias in articles on many subjects

• Since Wikipedia editors are self-selecting for social class (only a relatively small proportion of the world's population has the necessary access to computers, the Internet, and enough leisure time to edit Wikipedia articles), articles about or involving issues of interest to the underclasses are unlikely to be created or, if created, are unlikely to survive a deletion review on grounds of notability.

• As of 2006^[update], of the top 20 news sites used as references on Wikipedia, 18 were owned by large for-profit news corporations, while only 2 of the sites were non-profit news organizations.^[7]

• Perspective bias is internal to articles that are universal in aspect. It is not at all apparent from lunch (see tiffin) or the linguistic term continuous aspect that they exist outside of the industrialized world.

• A lack of articles on particular topics is the most common cultural bias. Separately, both China and India have populations greater than all native English speakers combined; by this measure, information on Chinese and Indian topics should, at least, equal Anglophone topics; yet, Anglophone topics dominate the content of Wikipedia. While the conscious efforts of WikiProject participants have vastly expanded the available information on topics such as the Second Congo War, coverage of comparable Western wars remains much more detailed.

• Similarly, popular culture, especially television, is often covered as if only the US or only the UK exists (depending on the origin of the Wikipedian).

• Establishment of Notability: Notability is more difficult to establish in non-Anglophone topics because of a lack of English sources and no incentive among anglophone participants to find sources in the native language of the topic. A lack of native language editors of the topic only compounds the problems. The lack of sources and therefore notability causes articles to wind up going through the deletion process of Wikipedia.

• Deaths of those in developed countries are seen as far more significant. The Al-Qaeda attacks on the US, UK and Spain, killing slightly over 3,000 people, are seen as having enormous significance. The Darfur conflict in Sudan, in which 400,000 civilians have so far been massacred, receives less attention.

• Articles which contain a "Religious views" section frequently include Christianity, Islam and Judaism while neglecting the views of other religions. Ideally, an article describing religious views on a topic should incorporate Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist views, at a minimum, though the exact choice of religious opinions will depend upon the topic's scope (e.g. a Chinese topic might not necessitate a Christian view, but a Taoist view). Views of more prominent religions should be given more space, in accordance with the policy on NPOV.

• The size of articles is often based on the interest that English-speaking Wikipedians have in the subject (which to some extent is based on the involvement of their nations). For example, the article on the Second Congo War, the deadliest conflict in the past 60 years, is shorter than that on the Falklands War, with a death toll of under a thousand. Also, the amount of information available to researchers is disproportionately biased towards events involving more economically developed countries.

• Articles where the article name can mean several different things tend to default to subject matter more familiar to the average Wikipedian.

• Recentism: Current events (especially those occurring in developed, English-speaking nations) often attract attention from Wikipedians, and are edited out of proportion with their significance. Jennifer Wilbanks, an American woman who attracted media attention when she was presumed kidnapped, but actually ran away to avoid marrying her fiancé, has a longer article by a factor of several dozen than Bernard Makuza, who has been Prime Minister of Rwanda since 2000. Additionally, because of recentism bias, the "In the news" section on Wikipedia's front page may be limited by an unequal proportion of significant news from English-speaking nations compared to news from others.

• Articles often use Northern Hemisphere temperate zone seasons as time references to describe time periods that are longer than a month and shorter than a year. Such usage can be confusing and misleading for people who live in the Southern Hemisphere and people from tropical areas that do not experience temperate-zone seasons.

• Similarly, articles frequently take the perspective of a resident of the Northern Hemisphere and ignore the Southern Hemisphere perspective. Some articles on astronomy discuss the night sky as seen from the Northern Hemisphere without covering the Southern Hemisphere to a similar extent, and sometimes "not visible from the Northern Hemisphere" is used as a synonym of "not visible at all". Generally, Northern Hemisphere astronomical topics are covered in greater depth than Southern Hemisphere astronomy. Obscure constellations in the Northern sky such as Scutum and Camelopardalis are covered in more depth than prominent Southern constellations such as Grus and Carina.

• Due to severe restrictions on the use of images that are not free content, certain groups of articles are more likely to be illustrated by associated images than others; for example, articles on American politicians often have images while articles on Nepalese politicians usually do not.

• Political activism: editors are free to insert information that has not been checked. While this does not follow the rules on editors, it exists in frequency high enough that all readers need to review all information they are reading unless there is a direct footnote to back up the information.

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.

[edit] Why it matters and what to do

Many editors contribute to Wikipedia, because they see Wikipedia as progressing to (though perhaps never reaching) the ideal of a repository of human knowledge. The more idealistic editors may see Wikipedia as a vast discussion on what is true and what is not from a "neutral point of view" or "God's Eye View". Thus, the idea of systemic bias is more troubling than intentional vandalism; vandalism is readily identified and corrected. The existence of systemic bias means that not only are large segments of the world not participating in the discussion at hand, but that there is a deep-rooted problem in the relationship of Wikipedia and its contributor editors with the world at large.

The systemic bias of the English Wikipedia is permanent. As long as the demographic of English speaking Wikipedians is not identical to the world's demographic composition, the version of the world presented in the English Wikipedia will always be the Anglophone Wikipedian's version of the world. Thus, the only way systemic bias would disappear is if all of the world's population spoke English with the same fluency and had equal access and inclination to use the English Wikipedia. However, the effects of systemic bias might be mitigated with conscious effort; this is the goal of the Countering Systemic Bias Project.

As Michael Snow and Jimmy Wales have said in an open letter:^[8]

How can we build on our success to overcome the challenges that lie ahead? Less than a fifth of the world's population has access to the Internet. While hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to Wikimedia projects today, they are not fully representative of the diversity of the world. Many choices lie ahead as we work to build a world wide movement to create and share free knowledge.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Example cruft
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Global perspective
• Wikipedia:Geographic imbalance
  • List of countries by number of Internet users
• {{systemic bias}}

[edit] References