Wikipedia’s Neutrality Under Fire as Studies Find Left-Leaning Bias

A pair of damning reports allege that open-sourced Wikipedia — a non-profit organization that was built on the tenets of political and ideological neutrality — has increasingly displayed bias favoring the left and progressive issues within its content.A study published by the Manhattan Institute and a New Zealand-based researcher and professor, David Rozado, used Large Language Models to analyze a vast amount of content posted on Wikipedia — whether pieces of content were positive, neutral, or negative. They also measured the emotional tone associated with politically charged terms like the names of American presidents, members of congress, and Supreme Court justices.What the professor uncovered in his study was that Wikipedia’s content possesses a moderate tendency to have a more negative sentiment associate with public figures who are right-of-center compared to people who are left-of-center politically. The study also learned that figures from the right are more associated with emotions like anger and disgust while those on the left are linked with more positive feeling like joy.“There is an average tendency in Wikipedia articles to use the names of prominent left-leaning U.S. politicians with more positive sentiment than their right-leaning counterparts,” the researcher says in a post on Substack, in which he summarizes his findings.Mr. Rozado raises further concern with his study, claiming that Wikipedia’s content could also affect the neutrality of AI systems as it’s used to train language models for systems like OpenAI.“Given that Wikipedia content is routinely used to train Large Language Models (LLMs) — the engines driving many cutting-edge AI systems such as ChatGPT — the biases observed in Wikipedia could infiltrate into the parameters of AI models, thereby propagating said biases further through AI generated content,” he writes. “In fact, I also found a mild to moderate positive correlation between prevailing sentiment polarity political associations in word embeddings derived directly from Wikipedia content and OpenAI embeddings.” “This suggests (though not conclusively) a potential transfer of Wikipedia biases into Artificial Intelligence models.”In a report released this summer by Pirate Wires, an independent news site that focuses on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture, Wikipedia is alleged to have moved away from its original mission of keeping a “neutral point of view” within its content.“When you start to peel back the kind skin of Wikipedia, where you’ve got this sort of veil of neutrality, and everything looks really balanced and you know with the minimalist user interface what you really see is this sort of boiling cauldron of dissent and debate,” a press commentator and essayist, Ashley Rindsberg, who authored the Pirate Wires expose, told The New York Sun. “But what ends up happening with a lot of these debates that have to do with anything political on Wikipedia, is that a very clear-cut group of editors seems to always come out on top. We don’t know who the editors are but the debates end up falling in favor of positions that are on the left.”Mr. Rindsberg cites one example, how Vice President Harris’s name was added and then removed from a list published on Wikipedia of executive branch tsars. In another article on Ms. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, the criticism section was completely removed from the page just eight days after he was picked to join the campaign.The article also points out how some of Wikipedia’s infrastructure and other content is shaped by a single editor, referring to the site’s, “Reliable Source/Perennial Sources” list, created and self-instituted by a top 100 Wikipedia editor using the handle “MrX.” The list filters press sources into a color-coded system with sites highlighted in green being “Generally Reliable,” and red for “Generally Unreliable.” While Associated Press, CNN, and the New York Times are listed as green, so are more progressive outlets like Mother Jones and the Intercept, while conservative counterparts like the Federalist and Washington Free Beacon are kept in the red.“Every single mainstream media outlet is considered reliable. Even stuff that’s way on the left, like Jacobin, which is obviously a socialist website, and The Nation, which is far left, and The Independent in the UK, also far left. Whereas almost everything on the right is considered generally unreliable,” he says.“And if you just take this at face value, what ends up happening is that that facts that are, let’s say, assertions from the mainstream media are just kind of grandfathered into Wikipedia, and from there you get this veil of neutrality, then there’s just this appearance of a neutral factor.”One of the founding principles of Wikipedia is that it would be operated under the “Neutral Point of View” Policy, which the organization claims to be a fundamental principle in which articles should favor explaining sides over taking them.“All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic,” reads a description on the policy on the site.An internet project developer who co-founded the Wikipedia program along with entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, tells the New York Sun that issues with neutrality were prevalent as they were developing the online encyclopedia.“I actually fought a bit in the first 14 months of Wikipedia’s existence to articulate the same neutrality we had in Nupedia,” Mr. Sanger tells the Sun, referring to his previous project. The developer cites an argument he had with some colleagues regarding articles pertaining to evolutionary theory.“Some people basically said ‘look, we cannot give any credence to creationism, and of course we’re going to make the articles about evolution. Express evolutionary theory as a fact with the latest science on it,’” recalls Mr. Sanger, adding that he had to stress adhering to the neutrality policy.In such a case, the policy requires that the views of everyone are carefully and sympathetically documented in a way that would be approved by all involved, he said.“There were some people, even in that relatively early stage, who had a serious problem with that. It’s like, why would we be concerned with sympathetically documenting creationism at all?”Mr. Sanger, who has often pointed publicly to issues within Wikipedia says that after the first few years of the website’s existence, the original intent of their NPOV policy was subtly changed to a way that undermined the original intent.“What’s amazing to me is that they’re capable of defending what is manifestly biased as neutral,” he says. “Essentially redefining neutrality as meaning objectivity and objectivity as meaning neutrality — whatever the expert point of view is according to approved establishment and experts in every subject.”“That’s what neutrality is now in Wikipedia-land.”

Wikipedia’s Neutrality Under Fire as Studies Find Left-Leaning Bias

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