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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Is Wikipedia "Wokeipedia" as some have claimed? A 2024 paper[1] by Puyu Yang and Giovanni Colavizza sheds some light on the question. It is the latest addition to a corpus of research on ideological bias on Wikipedia; some previous studies have found leftist bias and one study found a center-right bias.
The paper looks at the English Wikipedia's citations to news sources and associates each source with a score corresponding to its political bias. The bias scores come from a dataset called Media Bias Monitor (MBM), described in this 2018 paper.
The MBM dataset is based on the propensity of Facebook users to share links to particular sources. For instance, it presumes that if a source is shared more by self-identified liberals than by self-identified conservatives, the source has a liberal bias.
Yang and Colavizza find that on a scale ranging from -2 (very liberal) to +2 (very conservative), the average Wikipedia news citation has a score of -0.5, which is halfway between "moderate" and "liberal".
Could editors be preferring liberal news sources because they are more factually accurate? The paper anticipates this question. Through further analysis using ratings of factual reliability from Media Bias/Fact Check, Yang and Colavizza conclude that the favouring of liberal sources "persists when accounting for the factual reliability of the news media."
The authors say their findings "can be attributed to several factors, including the political leanings of Wikipedia contributors, the prominence and accessibility of liberal-oriented news sources, and potential methodological biases in gauging political polarization." With regard to the last two factors, The Guardian, which makes up more than half of Wikipedia's "very liberal" citations, owes some of its popularity to its open access. Its classification as "very liberal" is debatable, as other sources have described it as closer to the centre.
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.
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