Wikipedia has become more neutral than Britannic

Why on "Habrahabr" and Geektimes do not like articles about politics? Not because the topic is not interesting. The reason is rather different: comments on such articles turn into a real testing ground for armies of zombies, with mutual insults and a low level of intellectual discussion. Leading programmers and business analysts suddenly drop to the level of street attendants, using an IT site to let off steam.



This problem is not only XX / GT. See what's going on in the comments sections on other sites, including Facebook and other media. There are real serpentariums with irreconcilable disputes, attacks and obscene vocabulary. Against this background, it is completely surprising to read the controversy of the editors of Wikipedia regarding edits to articles even on the most sensitive political topics, such as Trump’s sexual insults and racist remarks ( editors ’discussion ) or the murder of Arsen [Motorolla] Pavlov ( editors’ discussion ). As if you find yourself in another world of academic calm and scientific correctness. It's fine.



Each person has his own political position, but these positions balance each other in order to ultimately correspond to the principles of Wikipedia . The most important of them is neutrality.

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Wikipedia holds a neutral point of view - this means that if there are different opinions, Wikipedia articles should not give preference to any one of them. Expressing in the article several different points of view, one should act as carefully as possible, accompanying each of them with the necessary context. This or that judgment should not be presented as “the only true one” or as “ultimate truth”. Compliance with the NTRP also means the need to provide links to verifiable authoritative sources wherever possible, especially when working on controversial topics. In the event of a conflict over the neutrality of the statement, you should temporarily suspend editing of the article in order to calm the passions, mark the article with an appropriate template and try to discuss the details on the discussion page, following the conflict resolution guide.

Here is how it happens in practice:







In the present conditions, when the United States and Russia are faced with an unprecedented level of populism in politics and the information space, the principles of neutrality of Wikipedia are more important than ever.



The Wikipedian community has always had its flaws. Editors were accused of excessive pedantry , sexism, and epic edited wars .



A study of “information wars” last year on Wikipedia revealed that controversial topics attracted much more attention from editors and readers of Wikipedia. For example, an article on global warming according to statistics for 10 years was edited two or three times a day with a change, on average, hundreds of words.







The question is, how does a huge number of edits and thousands of people with different points of view participate in the preparation of articles affect the neutrality of an article? This question was raised by scientists from Harvard University. Last week, they published a scientific paper comparing the neutrality of articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica according to a certain method , which was proposed in 2010 by economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro. Those used the method of semantic analysis of the speeches of American congressmen to identify specific phrases that predominate in the vocabulary of some and are practically absent in the vocabulary of others (for example, “border security” among resupblicans and “poor people” among democrats).



Using the identified characteristic idioms, the Harvard researchers were able to analyze how much the political articles of the encyclopedia have a “right” or “left” bias and how the situation has changed over the years.



The result showed that now Wikipedia is more neutral than ever in its 15-year history. If in past years articles strongly dodged to the left, but over the years there has been a clear movement towards the center, that is, towards neutral politics. From the articles, characteristic phrases (so-called “code words”), which correspond to political subjectivity, gradually disappear. Total marked 3918 code words.



A typical example is the article “Afghanistan”, which slowly but surely got rid of the left-wing vocabulary and, after thousands of corrections, achieved complete neutrality.







The table shows how different articles on various subjects deviate from the neutral tone in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica by the number of code words (slant).







The second table shows the same statistics, taking into account the bias of each code word (bias).







As you can see, on most themes, Wikipedia has almost reached parity in deviation from the neutral tone, compared to Britannica. The only exceptions are a few categories in which Wikipedia presents a slightly more left-wing ideology: these are articles about governments, civil rights, and corporations. Articles about immigration, on the contrary, in “Wikipedia” have a more “republican” orientation. In the remaining 19 of the 23 categories, the difference between the two encyclopedias is not statistically significant.



In general, the analysis showed that Wikipedia articles contain an average of 4,113 words, and in the Britannica 1778 words. This increases the probability of finding code words in the Wikipedia data set. If we normalize code words by the length of articles, then Wikipedia becomes more neutral than Britannic, in all thematic categories.



The research results show that crowdsourcing encyclopedia has proven to be really effective. No matter what the detractors say in the early years of Wikipedia, the edits of thousands of ordinary people do produce a more neutral result than the weighted editing of elite experts.



Once we dreamed that fast, cheap global communications would unite people into one society. The reality was almost completely opposite. It seems that thanks to the Internet, the marginalized were able to find like-minded people - and as a result, they are even more marginalized. Groups in social networks are isolated in their circles of communication, effectively isolating information from another camp. It turns out that the Internet has further divided people. Only Wikipedia remains - the only area of ​​light in this dark world. Only here is real consensus possible.