Talk:Ideological bias on Wikipedia/Archive 5

Archive 1

←

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

When far is too far.

 Courtesy link: Reform UK

I'm new at this and uncertain if this is the correct forum, but it seems as good a good starting point as any. I've noticed edits in an article changed from "right-wing" to "far right-wing" then back again. This worries me for several reasons.

First, the power of a single word. The slant analysis doesn't seem to allow for this. It might match "right-wing" and "far right-wing" as the same, when they trigger a wildly different set of thoughts and associations.

Second, the bar for what passes as far right is being constantly lowered in common usage. It's up to a source like this to be more disciplined. The pages on the left-right political spectrum are explicit about those meanings. Articles claiming the extremes should cite which characteristics of a person, or party justify the addition of the prefix "far".

Third, the to-and-fro of the edits would seem to indicate editors of different political views. It put me in mind of the Taiwan page being edited by ideologically opposed groups.

Fourth, the wisdom of crowds idea relies on homogeneity. If you target slant analysis at page level, things may look balanced. Within an individual page there can be fierce activity with one set of voices dominating through superior numbers.

I didn't want to mention it, but someone is bound to ask. The article in question is about a political party called Reform UK. I feel confident similar pages will suffer the same way.

Again, my apologies if this is not the correct forum. Please move and advise if necessary. Chas newport (talk) 10:36, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

We go by what wp:RS say, so what do the sources say? Slatersteven (talk) 11:44, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

There is inconsistency in the use of terminology to describe the Right in reliable sources, which is acknowledged in literature about the Right. Part of the reason for this is that European and U.S. politics were historically studied in isolation. Some writers, such as Sara Diamond, agree with you that the term right-wing is preferrable to far right. Oddly, the term right-wing today does infer extremism and is not used as a self-description except by extremists.

Some editors complain that the Left is treated differently. That's because left-wing groups typically have identifiable ideologies, such as socialism or communism, while right-wing groups do not.

What's important is that in every article it is clear what is meant by each term. If you think that Wikipedia should have a consistent use of terminology, then you should bring it up at the Village Pump. TFD (talk) 13:02, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces Thanks. That's interesting. I actually posted a reply including a quotation from the page for the term far -right, but it hasn't appeared.

I concluded that I'm showing my age (59) by associating the term with Nazism, Fascism, etc. It has now been conflated with a dozen or so additional meanings.

I do think it would help to make that distinction. Where is The Village Pump? Chas newport (talk) 13:27, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@Chas newport: Where did you post a reply? I'm not seeing it your contributions, did it fail to post? ––FormalDude (talk) 13:39, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@FormalDude I posted it here, but pasted with all the hyperlinks in. Pasting as "plain text" has solved it. Chas newport (talk) 07:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump. Let us know if you post there.

That's what I always understood the term far right to mean and what it means in much of the literature. But it also included a number of similar groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, that did not derive from historical fascism or nazism. Hence the need for an umbrella term that grouped them all together. TFD (talk) 13:44, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces I've posted there. Chas newport (talk) 06:49, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Second, the bar for what passes as far right is being constantly lowered in common usage. Are you sure that far-right isn't just becoming more prevalent and mainstream, resulting in the increased usage of the word? I agree that there is confusion around the meaning of the word, but ultimately we have to respect whatever reliable sources say. ––FormalDude (talk) 13:36, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@FormalDude Probably both. The page on far-right would seem to indicate the addition of more characteristics classified as far-right is a significant factor:

"Historically, 'far-right politics' has been used to describe the experiences of fascism, Nazism, and Falangism. Contemporary definitions now include neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, the Third Position, the alt-right, racial supremacism and other ideologies or organizations that feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or reactionary views."

A term with 17 characteristics, any one of which might cause something or someone to be called far-right during discourse has little utility. Chas newport (talk) 15:02, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

That is the historical definition. But more recently it is often applied to any groups that are to the right of the traditional right-wing parties. In the 1980s, there were a number of new parties with no connection with historical fascism that advocated for lower taxes or restricting immigration. They are usually for want of a better term called right-wing populists.

To cite a concrete example, Nigel Farage's UKIP was to the right of the Tories, but it certainly was not as extreme as the Nick Griffin's BNP. The two parties were distinct and joined separate caucuses in the European Parliament. TFD (talk) 15:21, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces Exactly. I can see four distinct waves in the text from the "far-right" page.

1 The original Fascism, Nazism and Falangism.

2 Neo-Nazis, etc. which attempt to revive those.

3 An expansion to include populist and nationalist parties.

4 A contemporary addition other people or parties seen as reactionary.

Lumping these together under a single term is unhelpful to the reader. They will interpret it according to their age, attitudes and political leanings.

I'm sure many people think UKIP was far-right, which loses the distinction from the BNP, EDL, etc.

I'm new to this, but I wonder if explicitly identifying those waves in sections which can be referenced individually might solve the problem the same way dictionaries do with overloaded word meanings.

As a bare minimum some terms should be moved to "right-wing", rather than "far-right" but I wouldn't know where to start to do that justice. Chas newport (talk) 07:10, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

"feature aspects of authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or reactionary views." Some of these overlap. Ultranationalism seeks the hegemony, supremacy, or control of one nation over others, and favors political violence to achieve its goals. Chauvinism seeks the superiority or dominance of one group over all others, and favors a "fanatical devotion" to the cause. Xenophobia is the fear or dislike for anything foreign or "strange", and manifests as a " fear of losing a national, ethnic, or racial identity". All three cases involve some kind of in-group seeking action against out-groups or the perceived "Other". And some lucky group will inevitably get to be the favorite target for attacks by the fanatics of such ideologies. Dimadick (talk) 13:48, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Dimadick So it's an even bigger mess than I first thought. Way too much to lump under one, hyphenated tag of "far-right", wouldn't you say?

Not sure if Wikipedia can single handedly fix it, but one reliable source trying to shed some light would be a start. Chas newport (talk) 14:22, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Problem is "right-wing" is even more vague. Slatersteven (talk) 10:47, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

That's why reliable sources either implicitly or explicitly define the terms they are using. My concern is when Wikipedia articles use these terms without doing this. But that's nothing we can resolve on this discussion page. TFD (talk) 11:47, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Slatersteven Agreed. We've inherited broad brush terminology from the French Revolution... then made the brush even broader! I'm trying to see a way to use the existing terms more constructively.

Even with two baskets I think we can agree too many things are in the far-right basket which dilute its historical usage. Saying "far-right" is code for dismissing opinion or policy as invalid and even evil.

It might not be possible, but my thinking is evolving because of this conversation. Chas newport (talk) 12:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Slatersteven I posted it on The Village Pump. Let's see what happens. Chas newport (talk) 12:20, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

You have? Link please? Slatersteven (talk) 13:51, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

@Slatersteven I don't know how to do that. I'm not even sure how to find my post unless someone replies to it... which they haven't! Chas newport (talk) 14:16, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Special:Contributions/Chas newport contains all your edits. I cannot see any Village Pump edit there. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:56, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Proposed extension of the Analyses section

I have extended and updated here the review of academic literature about this topic. This is a text I originally wrote for the Italian WP (intended to be an extended version of this page, but the page was eventually not accepted for publication in the main namespace and was published as essay - debatable choice, being a literature review, but that was the choice in that project about this topic). Compared to the current version of this article, it appears to me that the text may (1) extend the literature reviewed (2) do away with references to non academic surces (3) move beyond the US focus, currently prevailing. For advice from the curators of this article as full or partial contribution to section #1. Tytire (talk) 13:24, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Looks like good work. But if you are proposing putting in en masse, scrutiny of such requires as massive "compare and contrast" project. Also, I think that what might be seen as a "US focus" is inevitable (EN Wikipedia and the left/right sides of the US political divide, which is what most such discussions are about). Without that focus the subject of the article becomes thousands of subjects. Instances of bias of all of the Wikipedias on all of the subjects.North8000 (talk) 14:36, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

@North8000 thanks for your constructive feedback. I propose the following revisions to the secton "Analyses":

• Add additional sources and case studies as reviewed in my sandbox to enhance the breadth and depth of the analysis.
• Update the title of the first subsection to "Presence of ideological bias in entries related to politics" to reflect the broader scope of the issue beyond content solely related to US politics. This change acknowledges that additional academic literature addresses the presence of ideological bias in political content across various contexts.
• Remove references to media sources that were initially included to support the case studies. They seem to me unnecessary as they do not contribute to the main limitation of the article, which is the absence of secondary sources. This limitation may align with the current state of research in this domain, although some recent primary research papers include extensive literature reviews.

Regarding your point about US politics, as an encyclopedic entry, I tend to think that the article should evolve over time to capture the underlying social mechanisms at play, regardless of whether they are specific to the USA or occur elsewhere. The intention should be to focus on the underlying social dynamics rather than providing a mere listing of individual cases, to the extent that this is supported by current research. Tytire (talk) 08:45, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

More power to you. I was just commenting that when people talk about ideological bias in Wikipedia they are usually talking about left/right bias in English Wikipedia. (With "left/right" usually defined by the US meanings of those terms). To me, the social mechanisms are pretty simple. It starts with there being some type of real world contest/tussle. And the combatants see tilting the related Wikipedia articles as a way to further their cause. The more complex issue is how Wkikpedia systems intended to prevent that bias don't prevent it, are easily game-able to enable biased coverage, and often are structured and used to actually enable or promote biased coverage. And more fundamentally how bias is defined by Wikipedia. If you define neutral as "we just cover what the wiki-whitelisted people who control the megaphones say" then you certainly end up with a biased definition of "neutral" caused by a systemic problem. North8000 (talk) 12:06, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Your comment highlights the importance of this article and its potential for expansion. IMO the existing literature does not entirely align with the viewpoint that Wikipedia's systems are so game-able. I rather find it interesting the hypothesis that increasing transparency in users' actual behaviors within their social mechanisms could potentially reduce the susceptibility of the system to manipulation. Tytire (talk) 12:40, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, an article on this topic has constraints that a discussion doesn't have. Since hundreds of things lead up to any happening, someone can subjectively pick any of them as the "cause". Of course the big "cause" is people seeking to further their real world agendas by biasing articles. This is unavoidable and so saying that it is the "cause" is like saying that gravity is the cause of airplane crashes. So for me the more useful question / "cause" is: "What in Wikipedia allows (or encourages) it to happen"? North8000 (talk) 17:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Collaboration source?

Anybody know where the cite is for the first paragraph in the collaboration section? GMG^talk 11:37, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Added, gone missing in my earlier editing. Thanks for spotting it. Tytire (talk) 19:48, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

“Reliable Sources”

There should be a section questioning the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources page. It has Fox News and New York Post listed as red for politics. Yet has New York Times, CNN and MSNBC green. Just the Biden laptop coverup alone should be enough to call them into question. I can’t argue against the Fox News bias, but it is just ignorant to be blind or lack any insight into the left bias.Johnnytucf (talk) 02:37, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

What Biden laptop coverup? HiLo48 (talk) 02:45, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

During the election in 2020 NYPost editor Emma Jo Morris published verifiable info on president Biden’s involvement with his son’s Ukrainian business deals- a story now accepted as true. At the time, prior to the election, Politico, CNN, MSNBC and others published unverified reports that it was “Russian disinformation”. It looks like those stories have all been removed from their sites, but I’m sure you can find them in the web archives. Johnnytucf (talk) 03:36, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

It's a story now accepted as true by whom? (Remember we're taking about reliable sources here.) HiLo48 (talk) 03:44, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Reliability is not based on the political bias of a source, but in its accuracy. Wikipedia editors have determined that Fox News and the New York Post are not sufficiently accurate in their reporting.

The fact that MSM reported people who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation is evidence of their bias, rather than their reliability. But all media are biased since they have to select which stories to cover and which to ignore.

In order to discuss banning Fox News in the article, you would need to provide sources that discussed potential bias in the decision.

Incidentally, those other sources are not actually left-wing as the term is generally understood by informed people. TFD (talk) 09:06, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

• There are a handful of sources on the talk page banner at RSPS. But reading through a few of them, they seem to be actually pretty positive. So if this is going to get any traction, we're gonna need to start with sources that specifically mention RSPS, and specifically in a critical way dealing with ideological bias. GMG^talk 10:51, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I see no reason why (as long as it is sourced) we canot have a section on allegations of biases in the use or implementation of RS policies. Slatersteven (talk) 10:55, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Finding analysis of systemic causes would be a good thing. And IMO one of the most intelligent and useful things to cover compared to just general allegations. North8000 (talk) 13:52, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Gg controversy

Probably needs mentioning, as it was a highly controversial event being fought over here on Wikipedia. 82.176.203.219 (talk) 13:37, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

What is it? HiLo48 (talk) 00:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Gamergate (harassment campaign). But again, we would need sources that specifically deal with it in terms of ideological bias on Wikipedia, and not just vague suggestions of related topics. GMG^talk 11:12, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Krebs et al, 2023

@X-Editor thanks for adding that very relevant paper. However, where does the paper say that "Wikipedia's content leaned slightly liberal"? I cant find that conclusion in it and I am not sure that the study was designed to indicate the extent of political slant as such. The gist of the paper is different than what is now portrayed in the article, IMO. Tytire (talk) 12:17, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

From Figure 1, I guess. Except because the error bar for Wikipedia just crosses over the middle they don't actually describe it as "leaned slightly liberal", they instead just say it's "in between" the other two wikis:

As can be seen in Fig. 1, we found the pattern we predicted, with Conser-vapedia articles leaning toward the conservative view and RationalWiki leaning toward theliberal view—with Wikipedia and Britannica as a homogeneous subgroup in between

Probably we should say the same thing. Endwise (talk) 13:45, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Or in the center. This has fail V and should be remvoed. Slatersteven (talk) 13:47, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

(It doesn't say it was in the centre either to be clear). Endwise (talk) 13:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

They dont say it probably because the test (figure 1) was not designed to answer the question implied by our line now. They rather wanted to test the difference between the encyclopedias on a selected sample to test the hypothesis over the influences of the respective declared policies . The sample was not designed to produce an assessment of the slant overall in absolute terms. In short, the paper does not say what we says it said, and we are not meant to interpret their results. The paper puts forward interesting results possibly relevant to this article but the summary should stick to what the authors say. Tytire (talk) 19:04, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

The slightly liberal part seems to come from the graph in the study. I think another study said that Wikipedia is more biased than Britannica simply because it has more content than Britannica does, meaning there is more space for biased material, so that might be why the graph shows a slight difference between Britannica and Wikipedia, but I might just be speculating. X-Editor (talk) 20:49, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

I corrected the text to summarize the conclusion of the paper and avoiding interpretations of data beyond what the authors say. Tytire (talk) 19:04, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia foundation bias

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Unlike Wikipedia, the Wikimedia foundation is partisan, and there have been many criticisms made of their ideological positions and claims that those positions may leak into Wikipedia. (For example, see here.) Should this be mentioned in this article? While indirect, it's a valid concern, and it reflects poorly on Wikipedia if it appears to be ignoring the existence of complaints like this. KingSupernova (talk) 03:31, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

A lot of people, including me, don't use Twitter/X, so that link is of no use to us. HiLo48 (talk) 03:37, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

The link is to a discussion involving unqualified people presenting their own conclusions based on a misrepresentation of sources.

For example, one writer claims that the Wikimedia Foundation is "partisan" because it supports a program to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in Wikipedia.

One way to become better informed is to stop reading X posts. It attracts a lot of cranks who can't get their views published elsewhere. TFD (talk) 04:09, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I think creative freedom should remain the cornerstone of Wikipedia.  Done Zemant (talk) 15:00, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, they did choose and mandate a side on the US culture war on pronouns (basing on biological sex vs. declared gender). North8000 (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Note: I edited to add "and mandate" simultaneous with Slatersteven's post. North8000 (talk) 15:00, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

How could they not? Slatersteven (talk) 14:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Apathy. It's remarkably effortless. GMG^talk 14:58, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't want to conduct the culture war here, just noting that they picked and mandated one side. North8000 (talk) 15:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Vague assertions are not helpful. Assuming they decided to allow no binary genders, would not deciding to only allow binary genders have also been "picking a side"? Slatersteven (talk) 15:13, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Not about that. Just about words. Deciding whether or not one can use them to refer to biological sex. North8000 (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• I've had may fair share of disagreements with the Foundation, but yer gonna need something with more meat than a tweet to make your case. GMG^talk 15:00, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I hear they're even against slavery. O3000, Ret. (talk) 15:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia has not picked one side on using gender pronouns. Instead, it follows the usage in reliable sources. See for example "‘He,’ ‘She,’ ‘They’ and Us" (NYT, Raillan Brooks April 5, 2017)

So the actual bias is toward reliable sources, whether using gender pronouns, or discussing evolution or climate change.

TFD (talk) 20:52, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Would you say mandating that people not use the N-word when referencing others is part of a "US culture war"? O3000, Ret. (talk) 21:25, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Perceived ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially on its English-language edition, has been the subj

Perceived ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially on its English-language edition, has been the subj.... What aboout ACTUAL ideological bias? Wikipedia has an idological bias of the western sphere, can this be discussed or even demonstrated by any source that isnt banned by the glowies? 2A00:23CC:B589:EF01:410D:3FD6:6C1F:867 (talk) 03:30, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Is that ideological though? Yes we can discuss this. And yes we have an article discussing it Criticism of Wikipedia which would be the place to put this. Slatersteven (talk) 11:43, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia is about what sources say, not about WP:TRUTH. Your question does not matter here.

I had to look up what a glowie is, and this makes neither sense nor does it look like an attempt to improve the article. --Hob Gadling (talk)

I am still non the wiser, I assumed it was an insult, but now I am less sure about even that. Slatersteven (talk) 17:38, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

"Perceived ideological bias on Wikipedia" vs "Ideological bias on Wikipedia"

There are edit wars seemingly occuring, of which I take part, between "Perceived ideological bias on Wikipedia" vs "Ideological bias on Wikipedia". Some are disputing the fact that there is any ideological bias on this platform to begin with. May those of you that dispute this perhaps discuss this matter here?

P.S. I am on the anti-percieved side :D 2A00:23CC:B589:EF01:410D:3FD6:6C1F:867 (talk) 03:35, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Make a case there is, using wp:rs. Slatersteven (talk) 11:44, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

• The sourcing largely presents the various discussions of bias in this article as a matter of opinion and not fact; therefore, we can't present it as fact in the article voice. Hence perceived. --Aquillion (talk) 11:51, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

  If we are to follow this reasoning, a lot of issues may qualify as "perceived". We should rename, for exemple, Perceived Great depression, Perceived Ideological repression in the Soviet Union, and so on, virtually for all pages of social and cultural domains. The point seems frankly preposterous and defensive, the title as it is introduces the topic and presents facts and assessments for the reader to judge. I also find ironic the distinction between opinion and facts as being biased by the title of the article. This implies that one does not trust the capacity of the reader to make his/her own mind, and therefore the need to shape that mind starting from the title. Sounds quite biased to me ! Tytire (talk) 12:36, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

  Not really as most historians and economists say there was a great depression. The problem here is there is no clear consensus about this topic. Also "This implies that one does not trust the capacity of the reader to make his/her own mind, and therefore the need to shape that mind starting from the title." is an odd thing to say when arguing for us to say something in our voice rather than letting the reader decide. Slatersteven (talk) 12:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

  I find your point a circular logic. However, I would like to understand whether we are discussing here the title of the article or the first sentence of the inception paragraph. If the latter case, since the incipit should summarize the article, I propose that we may phrase it as "The existence or lack of ideologia bias" or "The existence of ideological bias or its absence" or similar, because the body of research summarized in the first part of the article studies that (the existence or absence of IB) and not the perception of IB (which would mean studying the opinions about WP). This proposal is if we are really afraid that the first line might ...bias the biased unable to read the article in full and grasp the fuzziness of the evidence/facts available (whose balance is neither categorically black nor white).

  Certainly the second and third parts of the article are a mix of facts and reported opinions and more difficult to categorize in one sentence.

  Nevertheless, I maintain that the concern on the first sentence (and more so if about the title) is misplaced, because it introduces the topic as a subject of inquiry and does not represent, per se, a statement of facts. Tytire (talk) 22:26, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Under the current title, IMO it covers a wide range of possibilities from "pervasive bias" to "miniscule bias". And I think that there is a lot of sourcing that it falls somewhere within that range. "Perceived bias" carries a pretty strong connotation that it's a mere perception. I think that the current title is best. North8000 (talk) 21:53, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Liberal bias

This is going nowhere. O3000, Ret. (talk)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
--- Wikipedia editors overwhelmingly are leftist and that bias shows quite clearly. Look at the article for Robert Hur. They put his political donation history in his personal life section. Did they do that on Jack Smith's personal info? --------------- How is this white washed? It is supported by Harvard studies that wikipedia overall has a left bias. The allowed news sources a lot of them are very left wing like vox, slate. Yet there is nothing to balance this. Its shameful really. A paper from harvard researchers found left wint editors are more active and partisan here. These are facts. 98.217.161.235 (talk) 17:35, 1 February 2024 (UTC) Care to link to this paper, as to the treat, we also use a lot of right-wing sources (such as the Times and the Telegraph). Slatersteven (talk) 17:47, 1 February 2024 (UTC) Yes, there have been studies/prominent figures describing a left-wing bias on Wikipedia. Whether these are true or not, the mention of "white-washing" is likely due to the fact that most editors are White, and tend to write more about White people than any other race. See Wikipedia:Systemic bias. —Panamitsu (talk) 22:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC) I have had the issue of being banned by “trusted” editors for extremely minor infractions without warning. This appears like it could be intentional to stop others from achieving higher level edit status. This also makes the part where “anyone can edit” moot as they are often reverted with the claim that it’s not a RS when the same source is used for other articles and wikis. If you want to look at clear example look how the Canada convoy wiki depicts civil disobedience with extreme over quoting of unverified media reports. They refuse to accept video as a RS even though it’s very clear what is being said https://x.com/derekkaior/status/1750124209110442129?s=46 and compare it to the gorge Floyd protest which where the most destructive protest in North America history that had a bunch of deaths, a much longer blockade and actual violence. 2605:8D80:664:58B3:4DD1:8C4A:8944:B63E (talk) 21:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC) To make it more obvious Aquillion immediately tried to revert my comment to hide it under the claim I’m a “blocked user” yet they themselves have violated the 3 revert rule within the last 5 days where I was banned for a formatting error 2605:8D80:664:58B3:4DD1:8C4A:8944:B63E (talk) 21:17, 22 February 2024 (UTC) This page is not a forum. Its sole purpose is to improve the article using reliable sources, and you are not doing that. Deleting your comment above was the correct thing to do, and it is your problem that you not understand that, not Wikipedia's or Aquillion's. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:15, 12 March 2024 (UTC) bringing up a problem isn't a forum tho Its a complaint about Wikipedia's bias 46.97.169.87 (talk) 12:08, 20 March 2024 (UTC) No, it's a complaint about a user, that is what ANI is for. Slatersteven (talk) 13:18, 20 March 2024 (UTC) About the action an user in a position of influence on Wikipedia did Not about any regular sort of action but about action taken from a position of influence Fact that IS RELEVANT due to the nature of the topic discussed here He did not try to get justice but to add to the discussion related to the bias that Wikipedia has In this context the complaint holds relevance 46.97.169.87 (talk) 13:54, 21 March 2024 (UTC) Just a remark: "liberal" means "moderate right-wing". It does not mean "leftist". tgeorgescu (talk) 14:58, 20 March 2024 (UTC) Sir, this is a Wendy's. GMGtalk 13:57, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

description of criminality

Maybe I should write this text somewhere else, but I can not find out where. Sorry for that!

Most Wikipedia articles have a good accuracy, but some of them seem to be (more or less) biased. An example is the section about "criminality" in the article below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Kale

Some sentences in this article seem to be racist and not realistic. Even other articles seem to have similar problems.

Feel free to move what I write here to some better place! Regards! 130.238.112.129 (talk) 22:24, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Not every criticism of or every inconvenient statistic for a racial minority group amounts to racism. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:32, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Bias review

Is there a method to which pages can be reviewed for ideological bias? I feel If there was a forum to address these concerns then it could relieve a lot of debate on the subject 2001:1970:4AE5:A300:A13B:D3C6:5D5D:5078 (talk) 20:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

That's a huge topic involving editing practices at the individual article, and various policies, guidelines and noticeboards. A good place to start learning might be to watch Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard for a few weeks. But this talk page is limited to discussing improving this particular article. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

The scope of noticeboards is too narrow to allow for the open and transparent discussions needed to resolve the problem and/or perception of there being a problem. An open publicly accessible forum for discussing Wikipedia has been needed for a very long time. Washusama (talk) 10:01, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Do you know of a venue that can be used for this? Failing that, many Wikipedians have blogs: — Charles Stewart (talk) 10:14, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

The "neutrality" policy of Wiipedia all but guarantees that articles will have an ideological bias. That's because articles will give greater space to information and views that are most strongly supported in reliable sources. So for example, articles about evolution will provide more space to material supporting the theory than to those opposing it. TFD (talk) 10:50, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

That is not an ideological bias because science is not an ideology. --Hob Gadling (talk) 15:25, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Science as narrowly defined by the scientific method: hypothesis, observations, results – you are correct is not an ideology

Science as commonly thought of today i.e a materialistic worldview where understanding is dominated by “consensus” which helps us determine metaphysical reality, right & wrong & influence politics: this is very much an ideology Tonymetz 💬 03:16, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

No it's not, and this is not a forum. HiLo48 (talk) 03:52, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

which one? Tonymetz 💬 15:13, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to materialism, but the elephant in the room is that Wikipedia leans towards materialism. That needs to be in the article, it's a glaring omission. tgeorgescu (talk) 10:35, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

If you have good sources for it. I expect that only sources in favor of specific immaterial things - those in favor of specific religions and there fore biased against materialism as well as against other non-materialisms - will mention it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:25, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Christians + Muslims + Hindus are billions. Now, I am not saying they are right, nor am I saying they are wrong. Just that they are entitled to criticize Wikipedia. As Larry Sanger said in an YouTube interview, the religious POV of Wikipedia is that of mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism. Generally, I don't think that he is right about Wikipedia, but he is right about Wikipedia having such POV. And he is right that Wikipedia renders the view of the establishment—just that I think that's a feature, not a bug. So, yes, in both instances he is right about the POV, but he is wrong that that would be erroneous or mistaken. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:57, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

"Christians + Muslims + Hindus are billions." I tend to think about the spread of religion, as the spread of a disease. It keeps infecting more victims, and makes life worse for the world population. It does not give the infected any insight to the truth, or any particular reliability. Dimadick (talk) 03:36, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Reinforcing what Hob Gadlin said, that was a bad example. In this context, bias is bias against widely held credible opinions views. In the article, it is against fringe views which conflict with reality. North8000 (talk) 18:12, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

I am using the term bias to mean "a tendency to prefer one person or thing to another." (Collins Dictionary) In this case, the bias is to give weight reflecting relative acceptance in reliable sources.

Ideological bias shapes peoples' attitudes toward scientific information, and that becomes progressively so as one progresses from natural to social sciences.

The reason articles on evolution pay little attention to creationism is entirely based on the degree of its acceptance in reliable sources. Wikipedia editors do not evaluate generally accepted beliefs, they just report them. If people in the ancient or medieval worlds had prepared an encyclopedia using Wikipedia's policies, it would have read very differently. TFD (talk) 03:14, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: I'm with you in spirit. I just think that choosing an example that involves true and false on objective matters of fact and saying that the choice is just from tallying up opinions of wp:RS's / wp:"R"S's might contribute to the problem. One can assert that the latter method is the cause of bias and scrutinizing of that by sources could be a valid part of the content of this article. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 17:35, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, and we are exercising it, consensus. Slatersteven (talk) 12:20, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a strong bias in favor of accuracy. How do we change this so that we can reduce accuracy to result in a better read for those whose biases only make sense given inaccuracy? O3000, Ret. (talk) 10:47, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

We are not saying this bias is bad. But we have to call it for what it is, namely a bias. tgeorgescu (talk) 10:53, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Which is why we have an article on it, but this is about a more general idea of bias policing. Which is not something we should even be discussing on this talk page, as this is not about improving this article. Slatersteven (talk) 10:56, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Anti-Israel Bias on Wikipedia

WP:ECR ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 00:26, 21 June 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Since October 7, Wikipedia has been accused of having an anti-Israel bias. This is supported by a publication and article on same. Since this Wikipedia entry relates to Ideological bias on Wikipedia, there is no reason why this fact should not be included. It is not cherry picked. It is well supported and it directly relates to the topic at hand. Apndrew (talk) 02:03, 20 June 2024 (UTC) Not sure the World Jewish Congress is a good source for this as characterizations of bias should come from unbiased sources. In any case, there will be suggestions and actions of bias from both sides.[1][2]. That happens when you are unbiased. O3000, Ret. (talk) 10:53, 20 June 2024 (UTC) "Not sure the World Jewish Congress is a good source for this" The World Jewish Congress is a Zionist organization. Wikipedia:Reliable sources sets a requirement for sources to have a "reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". Since when do Zionist organizations have anything resembling a reputation for fact-checking? They produce their own propaganda. Dimadick (talk) 00:17, 21 June 2024 (UTC) References

• What I think should be changed (format using {{textdiff}}):Under a heading labeled "Anti-Israel Bias", the following section should be added: "Since October 7, Wikipedia has been accused of having an anti-Israel bias."

• Why it should be changed: The evidence of anti-Israeli bias is well documented in a published report. There is also already a section on this Article regarding alleged accusations of pro-Israel content on Wikipedia. In order to be neutral, and show both viewpoints, the above section should be added or the alleged pro-Israel accusations (see CAMERA campaign) must be deleted.

• References supporting the possible change (format using the "cite" button):"

Apndrew (talk) 01:10, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You have four sources which all point to the same poor source. O3000, Ret. (talk) 01:20, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Also looks like another WP:ECR violation. O3000, Ret. (talk) 01:26, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

"Has been accused of" is unacceptable wording per WEASEL, You need to explain who is making the accusations. It's like saying the U.S. has been accused of faking the moon landing. Editors want to know who these accusers are and how accepted their views are. TFD (talk) 04:13, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Ok. The language should then state: "Wikipedia has been accused by the World Jewish Congress of having an anti-Israel bias, especially since the October 7 attacks." Apndrew (talk) 01:55, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

References

Arabic Wikipedia Bias

added section about the Arabic Wikipedia Bias, I would be happy if someone with authorization can check my addition, improve it if needed, and fortunately, add it back to the article.

Apparently I can't d so because I don't have enough edits.

Ty very much. 46.121.25.218 (talk) 22:39, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Bias Regarding War in Israel

Multiple articles, such as “Nakba,” “Gaza Genocide,” and “State of Palestine,” are dominated by language that is controversial, vague, inflammatory, and dubious, forming part of a disinformation campaign active on social media and countered only by the most diligent sources. For example, the figure for the death count in Gaza does not mention that the Gaza Ministry of Health does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, which is a dishonest omission.

And yet our article mentions only the CAMERA controversy, suggesting, bizarrely, that Wikipedia has some kind of bias in the other direction. Kandbsoalkan (talk) 02:36, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles summarize reliable sources. Therefore, this article is a summary of reliable sources about ideological bias on Wikipedia. This is not the place to document examples you have personally found of any such bias, as that would be original research, and Wikipedia does not publish original research. If you know of reliable sources about ideological bias on Wikipedia regarding the Gaza genocide or any related topic, feel free to propose them to this talk page. Grayfell (talk) 02:52, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

New paragraph added by Valjean

I'm concerned about the paragraph starting with "Wikipedia's editors seek to follow the site's policy about reliable sources, so they oppose the addition of content from unreliable sources." added by Valjean. As far as I can tell, the sources are about social media users not Wikipedia or the sources we cite. This makes me concerned about NOR issues, plus the research seems to apply only to the United States post 2016 (at a minimum this should be clarified in the text) and WP is a worldwide encyclopedia. (t · c) buidhe 04:20, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

it aint just USA wikipedia but the English version of Wikipedia, since english is one of the most used international languages its impact is wider 213.233.104.90 (talk) 04:40, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Do you have any sources backing up your claim this only applies to the USA? Slatersteven (talk) 10:23, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

The studies only reference US politics not any other country. Why should we assume that they are more broadly applicable when the researchers didn't study whether the same is true for French, Nigerian, or Indian politics? (t · c) buidhe 15:26, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Israel/Palestine section

Except the CAMERA campaign in 2008, the article doesn't mention the problem of Israel and Palestine at all. I think it should be mentioned that it's much more than just this 16 year old event, especially if there is even an article here that in the 2nd sentence says: "This coverage has often been criticized for perceived bias." I think a summary of that article should be here. --Pan Někdo (talk) 09:27, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Noticeboard discussion about reliability of cited Pirate Wires article

There is a noticeboard discussion about the reliability of Pirate Wires, as well as the Pirate Wires piece "How Wikipedia Launders Regime Propaganda" by Ashley Rindsberg, which is currently cited in this article. If you are interested, please participate at WP:RSN § Pirate Wires?. — Newslinger talk 04:13, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Regarding this reversion by @Newslinger: This article's section on Claims in the media about Wikipedia's ideological bias presents critiques from diverse perspectives. Unlike an RSN discussion, the focus here should be on accurately describing and attributing those viewpoints, rather than questioning the "reliability" of the individuals expressing them. 2601:340:8200:800:30C1:6FF8:F57B:FCF8 (talk) 06:31, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Per the verifiability policy, "verifiability means that people are able to check that information comes from a reliable source" and "All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists, and captions, must be verifiable." The consensus in the noticeboard discussion is currently against citing this article, partly because editors do not consider the article to be a reliable source and partly because editors believe the article constitutes undue weight. — Newslinger talk 01:44, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Questions of verifiability and undue weight are not relevant in this specific context because this section is simply documenting and attributing what various notable individuals and media outlets have claimed on the topic of Wikipedia’s ideological bias, including criticisms made by Larry Sanger and Conservapedia. There is no contention that these sources are reliable or that their critiques are "verified" (other than to show where those individuals did state such and such claims). Likewise, the proposal is not to cite Pirate Wires to substantiate any factual claims about Wikipedia, but only to attribute that Pirate Wires made a specific criticism. The question of whether the criticism is due or undue is also not relevant, as the section does not weigh the merit of the criticisms to present a neutral point of view, but simply documents the statements that have been made. There could be a question about whether Pirate Wires' criticism is notable, but I would argue it is, given that The Atlantic has recognized Pirate Wires as a notable platform in media discourse.2601:340:8200:800:D81F:E54C:112C:4F25 (talk) 08:41, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorry but we do require that cited sources be reliable. Pirate Wires is not. Simonm223 (talk) 12:20, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

The verifiability and due weight policies apply to every article in every context. The article does not directly cite Sanger or Conservapedia, but cites reliable sources that have covered their views. — Newslinger talk 14:36, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

References

Proposed added references of anti-Israel bias removed

I believe that this article would be improved by citation to sources showing significant bias in Wikipedia editing on topics related to Israel, Palestine, and Zionism. (Wikipedia arbitrators also recently found this to be the case.)

Here is my proposed edit:

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, sources have noted Wikipedia’s anti-Israel bias in its coverage of issues relating to the conflict, both in the Arabic and English versions. Zags55 (talk) 06:12, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

References

The Jerusalem Post is not going to be an independent source on this matter. All that the Examiner article tells us is that some Jewish people are unhappy with the coverage. I think you need to learn a lot more about independent sources. HiLo48 (talk)

Indeed, these are not appropriate sources to claim an anti-Isreal bias. See Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_459#RFC_Jerusalem_Post, in particular, and pay attention to the concerns about their coverage of the Isreal-Palestine conflict. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:31, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

I do not think you are being consistent about which sources are independent. Your article on Zionism defines the term based on an anti-Israel Palestinian activist who has perverted the term. You do not care about independent sources and you’re selectively choosing which sources are independent. I think you have a lot to learn about a lot of things. Is that how editors are usually spoken to?

If anyone who actually cares about truth is reading this, please fix the systemic editor problems you have that have led to your own arbitrators banning editors for coordinating to suppress any attempts at neutrality on this topic. Or expose what’s going on because it is gross. Zags55 (talk) 08:23, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Well lets say A, two wrongs do not make a right. B, wp:agf.C, (going back to A) other stuff is never a good argument as things are not always equal. Slatersteven (talk) 11:27, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

If there is an issue with the Zionism article, discuss it there. Slatersteven (talk) 11:28, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

They can't, nor can they discuss it here per WP:ECR. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:29, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough. Slatersteven (talk) 14:32, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia keeps taking down my replies. Zags55 (talk) 14:38, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Please read the messages that have been left on your talk page and review WP:ECR. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:39, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

This IMO should be an article about the broad mechanisms of generating or controlling ideological biases, not a place to hang all sort of controversies specific to this or that topic. Tytire (talk) 21:13, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Manhattan Institute

@Manuductive discussion at WP:RS/N in the past has found that the Manhattan Institute is generally unreliable. LLMs, meanwhile, are notorious for making things up - so-called "hallucinations". So there is no world in which a Manhattan Institute "study" conducted using a LLM is WP:DUE inclusion. Simonm223 (talk) 16:52, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Understood. However, in this case, the source for this information is a Daily Telegraph article, which is a very prominent and important newspaper. If you check out the article[3], they have done quite a bit of good reporting about the topic at hand and presented a well-balanced piece. Also, I had weakened the posture of my contribution to state that it was a "controversial publication", not a "study", and just briefly mentioned that they had "accused" Wikipedia of having a bias, rather than depicting their methodology, in order to make it look more like a critical viewpoint rather than a well-devised study. I would say that it is due in the sense that it received significant media coverage.

Regarding LLMs in research, I disagree with your contention that they are always unreliable. As Mishra, T., Sutanto, E., Rossanti, R. et al. (2024) note: "...the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic research has increased tremendously" (Scientific Reports, 14, 31672. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-81370-6). Manuductive (talk) 17:28, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Just because something is in a newspaper doesn't make it automatically due inclusion. This is simply trying to lampshade in a garbage source. It is undue.Simonm223 (talk) 17:29, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

There's plenty of real academic sources on this topic. Use those.Simonm223 (talk) 17:30, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Of course, but this instance is more about documenting a particular critical viewpoint that is notable for having gotten plenty of media coverage, not necessarily because the viewpoint comes from a highly reputable source or that it has academic merit. It's just like Conservapedia and Larry Sanger in this sense. We could say that the MI is an "extremely conservative, corporate-funded" think tank.[4] Examples of media coverage of the publication:[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] Manuductive (talk) 17:46, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Again, it is undue. It's undue no matter how you frame it. It doesn't warrant mention. It's garbage. Simonm223 (talk) 19:49, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd be interested to see if anyone else watching this page would like to chime in. I proposed the following language be included in the section along with the Larry Sanger and Conservapedia content. It would fit naturally there, since those other sources are notable not for their credibility, but because they got a lot of attention in other reliable sources and thus played a notable role in the public discussion.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, an "extremely" conservative, corporate-funded think tank, published a controversial report, which has not been peer-reviewed nor published in any academic journal, claiming that Wikipedia's coverage of right-wing politicians contains more negative sentiment compared to that of left-wing figures. According to Media Bias/Fact Check, the Manhattan Institute is rated "Mixed" for factual reporting, citing concerns about transparency regarding its funding, the use of questionable sources, and past issues with fact-checking. Despite these concerns, coverage of the report in established media outlets contributed to mistaken beliefs about the publication's credibility.

Manuductive (talk) 19:55, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

My concerns are that:

1. Manhattan Institute is a generally unreliable think tank.
2. The "Study" in question involved asking a chat bot to say Wikipedia was biased which is weak methodology to say the least.
3. Regardless of if credulous newspapers published this putative "study" it is undue to include such garbage in an article where there are countless good sources available.
4. Media Bias/Fact Check is of questionable reliability especially if you aren't using the skewed Overton Window of the United States.

Simonm223 (talk) 20:04, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorry if it seemed like I was edit-warring--that wasn't my intention. The way I tried to frame it seems like a natural fit for that particular section along with Larry Sanger and Conservapedia--sources that nobody takes seriously I guess, but they get mentioned because there was a certain amount of influence that they had on the public discourse in the media. I took care not to describe it as a "study" with any kind of viable methodology, but rather as them just publicly "claiming" that there is a particular sentiment (could say "alleging", "suggesting" or "advocating") without mentioning the whole LLM business (since I guess that could be meant to make their allegations seem more "science-y" or authoritative). But if you have a source that deprecates their use of LLMs, maybe we could put that in. Media Bias/Fact Check has been used in a peer-reviewed study, but if that source is not good, I am sure there are others that can attest to the shoddy quality of MI's factual reporting. Manuductive (talk) 20:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

LLMs are garbage even when the prompts aren't being engineered by a highly ideological think tank with a dubious reputation. Simonm223 (talk) 20:21, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

As for Media Bias/Fact Check it's WP:GUNREL per WP:RSP. Simonm223 (talk) 20:23, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Did you see the Signpost newsletter that discussed this article? It said the report provides ample quantitative evidence and It is worth taking it more seriously than, for example, another recent report..., and discusses the use of LLMs.

Can you verify your claim that LLMs are "garbage"? I already shared a peer-reviewed study posted on nature.com that discusses the "tremendous" increase in the use of LLMs in peer-reviewed academic research and I'm not sure how your claim countenances that.

Can you suggest a different WP:GREL source that rates media outlets for their fact-checking? Manuductive (talk) 21:06, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

The Nature paper says, briefly, that in the medical field there is an increase in use of LLMs mostly for grammatical errors and formatting, revision and editing, and writing. What does this add here?

The Signpost article interestingly notes: "Rozado appears to have skipped the usual step of evaluating the accuracy of this automated method ". Small detail. Tytire (talk) 21:33, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Actually, the Nature piece says that LLMs offer AI driven support particularly in literature review, summarizing articles, abstract screening, extracting data and drafting manuscript, so it's quite a bit more than what you mentioned. Data extraction, literature review and summarizing articles, in particular, seem like they could encompass sentiment analysis.

The claim about Rozado skipping the manual accuracy check seems notable and I wonder if there's an RS out there that we could use to include that point in the article. Manuductive (talk) 21:44, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

The Nature's article does not add anything to the methodological soundness of the Manhattan paper, whose authors apparently did not not bother to prove it either. Tytire (talk) 21:54, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

The Nature article was just offered as a counterpoint to Simonm223's claim that LLMs aren't any good for analyzing text. Manuductive (talk) 22:03, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I won't bother with this diversion regarding whether more medical journal writers are cutting corners by using chatbots. The discussion regarding the Heritage Foundation has reinforced the broad agreement that, at best, think tanks are WP:PRIMARY advocacy groups. I suspect, if the issue goes to an RfC right now, we'd see the Manhattan institute WP:GUNREL at best and likely deprecated. Simonm223 (talk) 23:15, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Recent studies have found that LLMs perform well for a wide range of purposes, including ideological scaling, text annotation tasks, for simulating samples for survey research, and much more.

It seems as if there is no formal consensus yet about whether or not Manhattan Institute can be used cautiously as an opinion source. A previous RSN discussion acknowledged that their City Journal publication is extensively cited in certain academic fields.

However, I have cited numerous articles published by GREL and MREL sources that cover the Manhattan Institute's study. These sources are already sufficient for inclusion. Manuductive (talk) 23:37, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

These sources are already sufficient for inclusion. I'm seeing unreliable sources, except for one. Am I missing something? WP:THEINDEPENDENT (oops) WP:TELEGRAPH is reliable. Anyone know who the author, Jim Norton, is? He's not digging deep at all, but I don't see why it can't be used with care. --Hipal (talk) 02:40, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

The Jim Norton piece is in the Telegraph (WP:GREL). There are also some WP:MREL sources: [12][13][14] A few sources were discussed in RSN with "no consensus":[15][16] The New York Sun[17] is not explicitly rated in RSN, although a few editors have cited it there without any quibbles and it has a "High" factual reporting rating, per Media Bias/Fact Check [18] and "Mixed" reliability, per AdFontes Media[19] Manuductive (talk) 03:43, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

We shouldn't be using MREL or other "no consensus" refs, or at least not without clear consensus here to do so. WP:MBFC and WP:ADFONTES should not be used. --Hipal (talk) 18:29, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

OK. So just going off the Telegraph piece, how would you suggest phrasing it? Manuductive (talk) 20:20, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

TELEGRAPH, correct.

It's a poor source, almost churnalism. The author doesn't understand the subject matter (the research methodology) and didn't reach out for an independent assessment of the from an expert.

I think it might be used to give brief mention to the study, removing the need to rely on Manhattan Institute. The fact that it was not published in a reputable academic publication undercuts its value to the point where inclusion is still questionable.

Given others' comments, it's probably UNDUE without better sources. --Hipal (talk) 21:02, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

If the claim has to be phrased with this many qualifiers about its unreliability, then it is most definitely undue weight. — Newslinger talk 08:29, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

This is exactly what I'm saying. I'm not disputing that the source is mentioned by papers. But a source meeting basic notability standards does not mean it is due at any given page. The Manhattan Institute's so-called study is too low-quality and contributes too little to the understanding of Wikipedia's bias to be included on this article. Simonm223 (talk) 12:45, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't think it has to be phrased this way. I was just proposing some different language as a starting point so that you might feel more comfortable coming to a compromise about this. The Signpost article [20] and the RS mentioned give a good endorsement of the study's author's good qualifications, methodology and the extent of its weightiness, while mentioning that it's not perfect. Manuductive (talk) 13:44, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

References (Manhattan Institute)

References

Washington Examiner

Can we use this source? https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/3308849/wikipedia-blacklists-conservative-sources-favor-left-wing-bias/

RSN entry on the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Washington_Examiner

There is no consensus on the reliability of the Washington Examiner, but there is consensus that it should not be used to substantiate exceptional claims. Almost all editors consider the Washington Examiner a partisan source and believe that statements from this publication should be attributed. The Washington Examiner publishes opinion columns, which should be handled by following the appropriate guideline.

Manuductive (talk) 18:21, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

The same MRC "study" was also covered in The Times at https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/wikipedia-blacklist-sources-websites-rltf92jlx Manuductive (talk) 18:39, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

I don't have access to the Washington Examiner article, but I'd be hesitant to use it given the lack of consensus on its reliablity.

The Times article states

The Media Research Center, a conservative organisation, released a report on the free online encyclopedia’s list of “reliable sources”. The report said that all the US news sites the centre categorised as right-leaning had failed to meet Wikipedia’s criteria as a trusted resource for administrators. These included the New York Post, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller and Newsmax.

By contrast, the report added, Wikipedia deemed as reliable some 84 per cent of what the centre considered liberal media organisations, including Mother Jones, ProPublica, NPR, The Atlantic and The Guardian.

Has this research been discussed before? --Hipal (talk) 19:20, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

I doubt it as it was their research into what they considered right and left leaning news sites. It may be no accident that plenty of news organs considered conservative in Europe are RS.Slatersteven (talk) 19:30, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Can you clarify what you mean by that? Are you saying that conservative sources in the USA don't do as good a job of fact-checking, or that Wikipedia RS/PSN gives European "conservative" sites more authority because they are further to the left side of the political spectrum? Manuductive (talk) 21:43, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

If Wikipedia gives European conservative publications more "authority" the reason would be because they are more connected to reality than the American ones, which by far and large, mass-exiled themselves from the real world in 2016. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:27, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

NO I am saying that research that has never been done before will not have been discussed before. Slatersteven (talk) 11:32, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

What do you mean by It may be no accident that plenty of news organs considered conservative in Europe are RS.? Are you saying that conservative sources in the USA don't do as good a job of fact-checking, or that Wikipedia RS/PSN gives European "conservative" sites more authority because they are further to the left side of the political spectrum? Manuductive (talk) 16:42, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that does seems to be an issue with many of them. We bar them not because they are conservative (as there are plenty of conservative sources we do allow) but rather its because they publish lies. Slatersteven (talk) 16:47, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Can you provide some examples of conservative sources we do allow? Manuductive (talk) 18:06, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

The Economist. Simonm223 (talk) 18:39, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

The Wall Street Journal.

Not that it's a reliable source, but you might want to take a look at https://adfontesmedia.com/ where they look at reliability and political leaning separately. --Hipal (talk) 18:44, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

If I could scourge one website from the face of the internet it would be that one. Simonm223 (talk) 23:38, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Is there actually any website out there that we consider RS that gives its own separate ratings of source reliability? Manuductive (talk) 00:06, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

@Manuductive:, @Headbomb: and @Slatersteven: are correct. For one thing, what is considered far-left and far-right in Europe are not rated the same way by Americans. The American right-wing accuses the American left-wing of being communist, when it hasn't even changed its positions. Most American left-wing media still straddle the center to some degree. It is the GOP and its media sources that have radically changed into fascist and neonazi territory.

With the advent of Trump, nearly all right-wing sources were given special status and protection by Trump as he declared all mainstream media "fake news", and only right-wing sources were willing to abandon fact-checking and push his flood of lies. They had previously straddled the political center to some small degree, but Trump caused them to totally slide far to the right into very radical and counterfactual territory, demonstrating a radical change in thinking by those sources and their MAGA supporters.

Read about the Overton window: "The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." The GOP radically changed how it dealt with many topics: Racism, fascism, neonazism, pro-Russia, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, dictatorships, authoritarianism, etc. all became fashionable and accepted with the GOP and right-wing as Trump bulldozed anything he saw as political correctness. He targeted anything PC to enable the acceptance of his reprehensible beliefs and utterances. America, which had previously been seen as a nation of growing freedom and tolerance was bombed back to the dark ages of intolerance and diminished freedoms. Europe has been watching this change with shock and worry. Now all the progress of the last 100 years is being erased as his dictatorship takes form, and his alliance with super conservative Christian forces is really worrying.

Note that the Democrats and left-wing haven't changed their positions very much at all, and the Overton window remains pretty much the same for them. It is the GOP that has radically changed, and the right-wing American (not European) media with it.

The Washington Examiner is not the worst offender, but we must be careful. I occasionally use it when it aligns with the facts reported by good fact-checking mainstream sources. When it doesn't agree with them, it's usually pushing some lie or conspiracy theory. So you can blame Trump for the change in status of right-wing media here at Wikipedia. It is not the left- or right-wingness, but the fact-checking that we focus on, and right-wing media totally fail, so we can't use them very often. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 17:46, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Your statement is very broad and generalizes, but it's light on the specifics. Can you get more into concrete specifics? For example, RSN has "no consensus" on National Review (WP:NATIONALREVIEW), which basically means that we can't use it as a standalone source. But is there any instance where National Review actually published false information without correcting it? (It's typical of RS on the left to "make factual errors" and then issue a correction.) Sure, their coverage of climate change might be "misleading" because they published a temperature graph with too big of a Y-axis that made the line look flat--but that is not the same thing as publishing false information. Manuductive (talk) 18:36, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

It was released about 5 days ago, so no. Here's the underlying Media Research Center publication: [21]. Manuductive (talk) 21:56, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Off-topic
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The MRC study discusses how Katherine Maher, who served as an executive of Wikimedia Foundation, made controversial political statements that suggest a left-wing ideology. Some of this is verified in RS https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html Manuductive (talk) 07:26, 8 February 2025 (UTC) That New York Times source quotes her saying that "Donald Trump is a racist." That is only a controversial statement to a MAGA person. It is obviously true to the rest of the world. That should tell you something about the type of conservative agenda pushed by the Media Research Center. They cannot be trusted. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 17:57, 8 February 2025 (UTC) She also tweeted I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property. [22], and identified herself as having cis white mobility privilege,[23] but I couldn't find a secondary source we consider RS for it Manuductive (talk) 18:11, 8 February 2025 (UTC) We're getting off-topic here as this article isn't about her. (For further study, she is mentioning her white privilege. You may want to read Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.) -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 18:39, 8 February 2025 (UTC) So? Simonm223 (talk) 18:42, 8 February 2025 (UTC) So these statements demonstrate that the former CEO of the non-profit that operates Wikipedia possesses a far-left ideology. Manuductive (talk) 19:16, 8 February 2025 (UTC) A.) No they do not. B.) The Wikimedia Foundation does not write or curate any Wikipedia content. This is off-topic. O3000, Ret. (talk) 19:22, 8 February 2025 (UTC) First off, no, those are actually quite normal center-left bits of performativity. Far-left figures tend to be critical of liberal performativity as ineffective at the very least. Second, this has absolutely no connection to the reliability of a tabloid covering a far-right advocacy group's blog post. Simonm223 (talk) 19:23, 8 February 2025 (UTC) So what you're saying is that while serving as Wikimedia CEO, Maher put on a public performance of the sort that members of the political left routinely implement as a form of insignia for their ideological identity. Manuductive (talk) 22:25, 8 February 2025 (UTC) No idea what you are trying to claim. But her personal opinions are not relevant to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is not Wikipedia. O3000, Ret. (talk) 22:30, 8 February 2025 (UTC) Manuductive, you wrote "possesses a far-left ideology". Really? That seems to be an example of what I was talking about when I described the shift of most of the GOP from closer to center to the far-right when they became MAGA, and the accusations by them (who are now far-right) that those on the left are far-left or communists. So a big "no" on that judgment. You're pretty far off-base. Simon223 is right. Those are fairly normal center-left values being expressed. They aren't at all "far-left". They aren't even socialist or communist, but values held by decent people who aren't even political. They are considered "common decency" and are views that have been held by Democrats/liberals/progressives that way for generations. It is the GOP that has changed its views in a very short period of time, much of that change happening after the advent of Trump and the establishment of his MAGA personality cult. Note that the seeds have existed for a long time in the GOP, because their racism and homophobia was closeted and held in check. Trump gave them permission to be nasty and horrible in public. That's what happens when one stops being "politically correct". Suddenly it becomes okay to use the n word, justify nazi salutes, and start recreating Jim Crow laws and practicing racial discrimination. That's what all this anti-DEI stuff is about. It's regressive and tries to wipe out progress. It seeks to make the enemy look less than human, and thus justify injustice, concentration camps, etc. Just wait, it's already starting. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 22:36, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

It's a bit tough to drop a healthy wall of text asserting your viewpoint and then immediately hat the thread before anyone can reply. Anyways, I think these tweets are on-topic--would suggest that we un-hat that thread. The Wikimedia Foundation is the ultimate authority over what happens on this site, and they do play a role in the editorial process[24]. As for my comment about the tweets as "bits of performativity", O3000 Ret., what I meant was that Simonm223's comment seemed to suggest that Maher's tweets were published in order to signal her alignment with leftist values. That puts it squarely within the topic.Manuductive (talk) 00:22, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation is the ultimate authority over what happens on this site, and they do play a role in the editorial process. You need to stop this. Wikimedia comes into play in cases of "privacy violations, child protection, copyright infringement or systematic harassment" for legal reasons when not dealt with by the community, not the 99.9999% of content. In my 17 years here, I can't remember seeing such an office action and you cannot name one incident in any manner related to this article broadly construed. O3000, Ret. (talk) 01:51, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

This doesn't look like research. It looks like the opinion of a political advocacy group. Simonm223 (talk) 18:41, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd say this is clearly undue inclusion after having read it. It isn't even Baby's First critique of bias. Simonm223 (talk) 18:45, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

So now The Times is a tabloid? How many of these conservative grey papers and tweets that wind up covered in WP:RS do we need to encounter before we have to acknowledge that they represent some part of the set of significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic [[25]] and carry a bit of due weight--enough to warrant at least a passing reference? Manuductive (talk) 22:13, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

The Washington Examiner is a tabloid. Literally. Simonm223 (talk) 22:18, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

OK, but did you see this: https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/wikipedia-blacklist-sources-websites-rltf92jlx Manuductive (talk) 22:20, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

The Times is also literally a tabloid. Doesn't mean it's not reliable. But it isn't agreeing with the MRC opinion. It is just describing it, and is therefore not a source for for an ideological bias. O3000, Ret. (talk) 22:23, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Does the RS have to agree with the POV in order for it to warrant inclusion? Or does it merely have to report on its existence? WP:NPOV seems to say the latter. Manuductive (talk) 22:28, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

No - Wikipedia is not a mirror of newspapers. We don't need to document every time a paper says "look at these weirdos." Simonm223 (talk) 23:27, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources.[26] Which seems to entail that there is a certain threshold where something getting mentioned enough in WP:RS establishes its weight. By the way, that emphasis on the word "all" was included in the original. Manuductive (talk) 00:13, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

The Times reported that the "study" exists. But it did not publish it. We look for significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources. It is not significant if one highly biased source says it is. Look, most people think rape is bad. If a highly biased source says it is good and four sources just report on that idiocy, that doesn't make it DUE. O3000, Ret. (talk) 01:24, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

You seem to suggest that publishing a viewpoint requires that the source endorse the viewpoint, but that's not quite true, is it? A RS like The Times publishes the viewpoint that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias when it thoroughly describes the viewpoint and digs in with criticism or analysis, as it did here[27]. The Times obtained a comment from Wikimedia foundation, described the WP:RSN process, and then describes the perspectives of the NY Post and Elon Musk who happen to align with MRC. Manuductive (talk) 01:49, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

When better sources are available, there is not necessarily any threshold of number of mentions in lesser sources that would make a viewpoint "significant", as I understand our NPOV policy. Prioritionality is only relevant as subordinated to source quality - for example, no number of fawning mentions endorsing a vaccine-autism link will make it DUE to present this as a valid hypothesis, even if newspapers (and other low-quality sources) repeatedly present it that way. Not if better sources consistently say otherwise. Of course, debunked vaccine-autism claims may (and indeed are) a notable topic on themselves, but in determining NPOV we follow authoritative, high-quality sources, not a straw poll of newspaper articles. Newimpartial (talk) 01:32, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

But if the newspaper articles are in WP:GREL publications then that's published by reliable sources. I guess the question is--how many times does it have to be mentioned before we can admit that it has enough prominence to warrant mentioning? Manuductive (talk) 01:52, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

What I am saying is that source quality comes first. Hypothetically, if all scholarly sources reported that the Second World War was caused by conflicting ideologies, and all (recent, GREL) newspapers reported that the Second World War was caused by, you know, Germans being German, then the only perspective we would report in wikivoice would be the former. To discuss the latter, we would need an article or section like "anti-German sentiment" or "popular perceptions of national essence" or something, and we would use higher-quality sources to provide a frame for the lower-quality newspaper accounts.

What we would not do, is say "these GREL RS say it's German nature, so NPOV means we include that explanation proportionally to how often those sources keep saying it". Of course, in reality the scholarly sources do not converge on one single explanation of the causes of the Second World War. but because these high-quality sources exist, we must still base our proportionality on them for the most part, rather than leaning into lower-quality (but GREL) sources. Newimpartial (talk) 02:03, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

OK, but if NPOV says Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources., then in your hypothetical scenario, maybe we would spend 99.75% of the article talking about "scholarly opinion says WWII was caused by X" and maybe bury in the article somewhere a very brief and qualified passing mention of whatever the other RS says, and hedged by all kinds of counterarguments, right? Just like we do with the COVID-19 lab leak theory But, by the way, the scholarly opinion in this subject actually isn't set up the same way, with the "liberal bias" POV being "WP:FRINGE", since the literature actually includes a lot of material in favor of liberal bias, so your example isn't quite fitting. Manuductive (talk) 02:19, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

To answer your question: yes, we might indeed devote some tiny amount of text to interpretations put forward by lower-quality sources, appropriately hedged/framed by better sources. My point was simply that the "proportion" NPOV refers to is within the context of the quality of the source. Many, many low-quality mentions do not outweigh a smaller number of higher-quality mentions, where the higher-quality sources present a consistent picture.

And the same thing is true when higher-quality sources are divided: NPOV is based primarily on what they say, and not on the proportional division among lower-quality sources. So if the academic sources are 80% in favor of "the moon landing was staged" with 20% having the minority viewpoint, "Americans really landed on the moon", and the GREL RS newspapers presented things in the opposite sense, then the "real moon landing" folks would be the significant minority viewpoint and the "staged moon landing" would be the mainstream view. There isn't a magic amount of article text that would reflect that relationship, but we would be obliged to communicate to readers that the staged version was the predominant view presented in the best sources - even though the newspaper stories reflecting moon-landing realism might predominate. Newimpartial (talk) 02:36, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

So it seems like you're willing to assign some weight, however small, to the information contained in https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/wikipedia-blacklist-sources-websites-rltf92jlx Manuductive (talk) 02:39, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I think this type of artful weaving of the narrative with appropriate weights on each significant viewpoint per NPOV is conspicuously missing from this article. It stands to reason that this would be a contentious topic, but to just say "these viewpoints are totally undue" without pointing to any specific policy that explains why--it's a bit ironic, no? Manuductive (talk) 06:51, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

To answer your question, it would be a rare topic that brought out only the best angels of each enwiki editor when resolving content questions.

For this particular topic, we do have a few very good sources, some GREL RS sources, and a lot of reported or otherwise published opinions. The source you are asking about specifically falls into the last of these categories, so I would assess the weight to be attributed to it as negligible, though not precisely zero. Newimpartial (talk) 10:07, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

It can be mentioned in the article about the MRC along with all their other accusations of bias as that is where it is relevant. A fringe "study" is rarely relevant to an article about the target of their accusations. O3000, Ret. (talk) 02:04, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

It's an opinion of a minor political advocacy group. It's simply not of the quality necessary for this article. This isn't an ideological test - It's just not actually a study. It's an editorial. We don't want to crowd out significant criticism with trivia like this. Simonm223 (talk) 02:18, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

See, this is what I was getting at -- you're applying a standard here that is not about representing viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources but is rather based on you, the editor's, own amateur assessment of the quality of the group's methods, and the level of confidence you personally have in the group whose viewpoint it is. That isn't what WP:DUE talks about. Manuductive (talk) 02:26, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Appears that you have been here for eleven days and are lecturing multiple editors on the policies who have been here for over 15 years. Further discussion is obviously not of use here. There are welcome posts on your talk page that you can use. O3000, Ret. (talk) 02:43, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Nice little dig at me about "lecturing". No, this is a discussion about content and policy. If you think you have a better interpretation of the facts than what I've said, then please share it here or just drop the stick instead of casting aspersions. You might need to read Wikipedia:PULLRANK and Wikipedia:NAAC
Manuductive (talk) 06:31, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

And you continue. O3000, Ret. (talk) 11:43, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

You're just trying to shut down the conversation instead of making a constructive argument. Manuductive (talk) 19:05, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

I think it's convenient that we have all these other articles where we can stick viewpoints that the editors simply don't like enough to showcase on the article about the topic. Also, the viewpoint that Wikipedia has a liberal bias is not WP:FRINGE [28], but even if it were, its inclusion in independent sources warrants its inclusion. [29] Manuductive (talk) 02:36, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

Description of Online Information Review article

"Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia", a 2024 article by Puyu Yang and Giovanni Colavizza, is cited in the Articles related to U.S. politics section.

I included the following content in Special:Diff/1270850222/1270982554 to include additional information about how the article determined its conclusions (emphasis added):

A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia cited a greater proportion of sources that were consumed predominately by liberal-leaning audiences than sources that were mainly consumed by conservative-leaning audiences, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias". Using reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check, the study found that conservative sources tended to have "very high", "low", or "very low" reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of "high" or "mixed" reliability, and concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns.

This was later reverted in Special:Diff/1271027790, with no edit summary, to a description that only included the article's conclusions while removing some of the details of the methodology (emphasis added):

A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia cited a greater proportion of liberal sources than conservative sources, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias". To investigate whether this disparity could be the result of differences in reliability between liberal and conservative sources, the researchers compared news source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and metrics of political media polarization from the Media Bias Monitor. The study concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns.

I propose to restore the additional details about the article's methodology, which give readers more context about why the article came to its conclusions instead of simply stating them. — Newslinger talk 07:44, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I find your text hard to read and make sense of, sorry. Perhaps, after a reasonable short presentation here, the keen reader should go and read the original paper to explore the methodological nuances. Tytire (talk) 21:21, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

What if we change it to:

A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia cited a greater proportion of "Liberal" sources than "Conservative" sources, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias". To investigate whether this disparity could be the result of differences in reliability between liberal and conservative sources, the researchers compared news source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and metrics of political media polarization from the Media Bias Monitor. The study concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns. The study also found that "The relationship between reliability and political polarization is complex, with more conservative sources being associated with both high and low reliability, while liberal sources tend to more often be of mixed reliability."

I think the sentence To investigate whether this disparity could be the result of differences in reliability between liberal and conservative sources, the researchers compared news source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and metrics of political media polarization from the Media Bias Monitor, gives a much clearer description of the methodology.

The following phrasing is unclear and not verified, since the source article doesn't use that language anywhere: sources that were consumed predominately by liberal-leaning audiences than sources that were mainly consumed by conservative-leaning audiences. They simply refer to the sources as either Liberal or Conservative, which is the conventional phrasing, and it overcomplicates our description to invent such a verbose interpretation.

Also, the phrase conservative sources tended to have "very high", "low", or "very low" reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of "high" or "mixed" reliability does not actually add any context about the article's methodology, but emphasizes a tangential point, and sort of buries the most important information, which would the methodology and the findings. I would be OK with leaving that part in, if necessary, but putting it at the end of the paragraph, so that it doesn't have such a dominant presence. Manuductive (talk) 12:57, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

I disagree with your phrasing. There are two separate claims from Yang (2024) to be addressed, so I am splitting this discussion into two subsections, one for the "Media Bias Monitor" methodology and one for the Media Bias/Fact Check methodology. — Newslinger talk 08:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Media Bias Monitor methodology

Per Yang (2024), Media Bias Monitor is not a publication or an organization (and should not be italicized), but a methodology that uses the political orientation of a publication's Facebook followers to "infer" the political orientation of the publication (emphasis added):

To estimate the political polarization of Wikipedia citations, we use the Media Bias Monitor (Ribeiro et al., 2018). This system collects demographic data about the Facebook followers of 20,448 distinct news media outlets via Facebook Graph API and Facebook Marketing API. These data include political leanings, gender, age, income, ethnicity and national identity. For political leanings, the Facebook Audience API provides five levels: Very Conservative, Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Very Liberal. To measure the political leaning of an outlet, MBM firstly finds the fraction of readers having different political leanings, and then multiply the fraction for each category with the following values: very liberal (−2), liberal (−1), moderate (0), conservative (1) and very conservative (2). The sum of such scores provides a single polarization score for the outlet, ranging between −2 and 2, where a negative score indicates that a media outlet is read more by a liberal leaning audience, while a positive score indicates a conservative leaning audience. In the original paper, MBM is compared to alternative approaches used to infer the political leanings of news media outlets, finding that this method highly correlates with most alternatives.

Based on this methodology, Yang (2024) has determined that Wikipedia articles cite sources with more liberal-leaning Facebook followers more than sources with conservative-leaning Facebook followers. The following would be a clearer and more representative summary of Yang (2024) than omitting any details about the Media Bias Monitor methodology:

• A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia tended to cite news sources with more liberal-leaning than conservative-leaning Facebook followers, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias".

I do not oppose also mentioning the name of the methodology (Media Bias Monitor), but if included, the name should be included alongside (and not in replacement of) a brief description of what the methodology entails. — Newslinger talk 08:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Re: the Media Bias Monitor, it strikes me as worth noting somewhere that the authors "focus only on the US-based Facebook users for this study," whereas many en.wiki editors aren't US-based. It's a little hard to know the distribution of en.wiki edits by country, but this 2020 source, which based its assessment on geolocation of IP edits, placed less than half of en.wiki's IP edits in the U.S. However, there's no way of knowing whether the geolocations of IP edits are representative of all edits. I've seen more than one editor state that news sources assessed as liberal in the US would be assessed as centrist in some other countries. I don't know if there are any studies confirming that, though Yang and Colavizza did say that "The US-associated [Wiki]project leans more toward conservatism, while the India-related [Wiki]project exhibits a predilection for liberalism." At any rate, to the extent that there's a mismatch between the sample used in creating the Media Bias Monitor and the locations of WP's editors, it raises questions re: the conclusions about the degree of bias in the news sources. There may not be way to note this without it being OR. Only peripherally related: why is the paragraph about the Yang and Colavizza study placed in the Articles related to U.S. politics section? FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:54, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

Media Bias/Fact Check methodology

 Media Bias/Fact Check (RSP entry), abbreviated as MBFC, is a website that uses a six-level scale for factual accuracy, according to its methodology:

Factuality Rating Levels

• 0: Very High – Consistently factual, uses credible information, no failed fact checks.
• 0.1–1.9: High – High factual, minor sourcing issues, reasonable fact check record
• 2.0–4.4: Mostly Factual – Generally reliable but may have occasional fact-check failures, transparency, and sourcing issues.
• 4.5–6.4: Mixed – Reliability varies; multiple fact-check failures, poor sourcing, lack of transparency, one-sidedness.
• 6.5–8.4: Low – Often unreliable; frequent fact-check failures and significant issues with sourcing, transparency, propaganda, conspiracies, and pseudoscience promotion.
• 8.5–10: Very Low – Consistently unreliable, heavily biased, with intentional misinformation likely.

Yang (2024) found the following trends using MBFC data (emphasis added):

As we delve into the assessment of news media reliability, the data does not unveil a straightforward or uniform pattern. Rather, it unveils a nuanced relationship between media reliability and political leaning. High reliability sources lean toward a liberal inclination, while very high reliability sources display a tendency toward conservatism. Conversely, mixed sources tend to favor a liberal perspective, while low and very low reliability sources align more closely with a conservative viewpoint.

Yang (2024) argues that there is no association between reliability and political orientation, because when the authors used their "multiple linear regression" methodology to interpret the MBFC ratings, the "very high reliability" conservative sources counterbalanced the "low and very low reliability" conservative sources:

When using a model with reliability and topics, our results converge and become very similar to the model discussed above which also includes WikiProjects. As mentioned previously, we also test our final model without citations to YouTube. After removing them, the most important change is that the low reliability coefficient becomes non-significant and goes close to zero, thus making the case for a possible association between low reliability and conservative news outlets disappear.

The MBFC data and analysis have nothing to do with content on Wikipedia, so if the argument is that these findings about MBFC are too "tangential" to include, then the article's claim about how "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" should also be excluded from this Wikipedia article. Otherwise, if the information is included, then this Wikipedia article should specify the MBFC rating levels that correspond to both conservative and liberal sources to explain how Yang (2024) came to its conclusion. The latter case forms the basis of the following text:

• Using reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check, the study found that conservative sources tended to have "very high", "low", or "very low" reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of "high" or "mixed" reliability, and concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns.

— Newslinger talk 08:40, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Very well. Would you be comfortable with:

A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia tended to cite news sources with more liberal-leaning than conservative-leaning Facebook followers, which the authors interpreted as a "moderate yet significant liberal bias". To investigate whether this trend might be the result of differences in reliability between liberal and conservative sources, the researchers used a multiple linear regression to explore the relationship between source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and source political polarization metrics from Media Bias Monitor. The study found that conservative sources tended to have "very high", "low", or "very low" reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of "high" or "mixed" reliability, and concluded that "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns. Manuductive (talk) 14:03, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I think something shorter. I will absolutely concede this is a reliable source. However I am ambivalent about using reliable sources to back-door WP:GUNREL sources into articles. As such I'd say there is due inclusion of the paper but that it should be significantly shorter than a full para. Simonm223 (talk) 14:35, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

OK, would you like to propose some language? Manuductive (talk) 20:26, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I support this phrasing, which looks accurate and representative of the study. While citing MBFC directly would generally be inappropriate due to it being self-published, Yang (2024) uses MBFC as a source of raw data and combines it with additional data from a different study (the Media Bias Monitor paper) to draw its own conclusion. Citing Yang (2024) is similar to citing a study that analyzes social media posts to draw conclusions about them; while it is unacceptable to cite most social media posts directly or to conduct original research using them, it is acceptable to cite reliable sources that interpret them. — Newslinger talk 02:04, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

 Implemented in Special:Diff/1274258923/1275979824. Simonm223, if there is a way to reduce the length of the text without eliminating necessary context, I'm interested in seeing how that can be done. — Newslinger talk 05:26, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I personally don't see the need for ... conservative sources tended to have "very high", "low", or "very low" reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of "high" or "mixed" reliability, and... It seems like excessive detail, extraneous to the topic at hand, and a bit of a distraction. I only put it in because it seemed necessary for consensus. The important bit is The study found that ... "there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings" that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns. Manuductive (talk) 06:33, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

As I explained before, because the study's entire Media Bias/Fact Check analysis was not based on Wikipedia content at all, "The study found that conservative sources tended to have 'very high', 'low', or 'very low' reliability, whereas liberal sources tended to be of 'high' or 'mixed' reliability" is necessary to explain how the study came to the conclusion that "'there is no clear relationship between a news media source's reliability and its political leanings' that would account for Wikipedia's sourcing patterns". Including the latter claim while excluding the former claim would mislead readers into believing that such a conclusion was drawn from Wikipedia content. If this is such a distraction, then all of the MBFC-related content should be deleted, including both the former and the latter claims. My preference is for keeping both statements in the article. — Newslinger talk 10:05, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I really don't see it the same way as you. We clearly specify that the conclusion is based on a multiple linear regression to explore the relationship between source reliability ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check and source political polarization metrics from Media Bias Monitor. The latter claim (no clear relationship) is obviously essential to the whole thing. Really this all boils down to the fact that A 2024 study published in Online Information Review found that Wikipedia tends to cite more liberal than conservative news sources, even when controlling for variations in source reliability. But let's not re-litigate the whole thing if you disagree--let's just keep it the way it is. Manuductive (talk) 10:16, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Let me chew on this a bit and see what I could do to shorten without removing necessary context. Simonm223 (talk) 14:14, 16 February 2025 (UTC)