Research talk:Newsletter/2012/February

See also the talk page of the Signpost version

"Wikipedia balances Democratic and Republican points of view"[edit]

Does en.wiki really have 30k articles only about USA politics? General topic articles are supposed to be global in nature (or at least to consider also UK politics) and USA political narrative and language is as far from e.g. European's as Mars politics would be. Nemo 18:18, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good point. See also the review of their earlier paper on (mostly) the same subject in the preceding Research Newsletter:

While the authors made efforts to exclude articles not pertinent to US politics (requiring the terms "United States" or "America" to appear at least three times in the article text), the sample also includes the clearly international article Iraq War. And in what Wikipedians may call out as systemic bias, the authors never question their assumption that for an international encyclopedia, a lack of bias would be indicated by the replication of the spectrum of opinions present in the US Congress. As early as 2006, Jimmy Wales objected to such notions with respect to the community of contributors: "If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. ... The idea that neutrality can only be achieved if we have some exact demographic matchup to [the] United States of America is preposterous."

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 19 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]