[WikiEN-l] Biased "current events" stories

Fri Sep 17 19:26:34 UTC 2004

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Ed Poor
>A supporter of Jimbo's NPOV policy
>  
>
Ah, the eternal debate over NPOV. =]

My current empirical theory is that on highly-controversial topics, 
Wikipedia converges on a sort of compromise consensus of the main 
editors on the topic.  If you pick random stories, you can see that the 
slants are generally towards what you might expect given the sorts of 
people working on Wikipedia: rather strongly pro-civil-liberties, 
moderately anti-US (but with proper caveats usually mentioned), vaguely 
anti-religion, etc.

But, and I think it's an important point, I think we're coming closer 
than anyone else has so far.  There are no neutral biographies of John 
Kerry that I'm aware of, and I think ours is as close as I've seen.

-Mark