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'Trump bad, Obama good' - Wikipedia's bias REVEALED, and how it affects you
Researchers have uncovered what many Wikipedia users have long feared — that it's slanted against conservatives.
A study from the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, says it has uncovered 'evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.'
Donald Trump and other former right-wing presidents are presented in a negative light, the study says, while Barack Obama and other liberal leaders are puffed with positive write-ups.
It's important, says researcher David Rozado, because Wikipedia entries — and their slant — have a bigger impact when they're soaked up by AI chatbots and regurgitated across the web.
His report comes in a divisive election year, when voters are increasingly worried about whether they can trust information in the mainstream media and supposedly authoritative online sources.
Ronald Reagan is the only recent Republican former president to get presented in a positive light
Wikipedia has a 'mild to moderate' bias against Republican politicians, says David Rozado
'There is a quantifiable, mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate right-of-center US public figures with more negative sentiment compared to left-of-center public figures,' Rozado posted on X.
The Wikimedia Foundation nonprofit that runs the crowdsourced online encyclopedia did not answer DailyMail.com's request for comment.
On its hugely popular site, it describes its 'neutral point of view' policy, known as NPOV, that aims to present facts 'fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias.'
For his study, Rozado looked at mentions of 1,628 political leaders, lawmakers, and judges from the US and other western countries on the English-language version of the site.
The computer scientist then looked more closely at the 3.8 million paragraphs on Wikipedia in which those names were mentioned.
He counted how frequently the target names appear next to negative terms, such as 'anger' and 'distrust,' as compared to such positive terms as 'joy.'
Much of the time, he found that right-of-center leaders were framed negatively, while those on the left got a more positive spin.
The 'trend is common but not ubiquitous,' Rozado said.
American politicians, judges, journalists and media organizations, as well as leaders of western countries, were distorted by the bias, he found.
But British politicians and US think tanks were presented impartially, he found.
'Wikipedia's NPOV policy is not achieving its stated goal of political-viewpoint neutrality,' says the 23-page report.
Worse still, he adds, the distortion is not limited to Wikipedia's 6,838,821 English-language articles.
English Wikipedia raked in more than 84 billion views last year, says the non-profit
Republican senators and governors also tended to get a more negative spin than their Democratic counterparts on Wikipedia, the study showed
The study looked at mentions of 1,628 political leaders, lawmakers, and judges from the US and other western countries
That's because Wikipedia is routinely used to train Large Language Models and their chatbot counterparts, such as ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI.
Rozado says he spotted Wikipedia's leaning 'popping up in OpenAI's language models.'
'This is suggestive of the potential for biases in Wikipedia content percolating into widely used AI systems,' he says.
It's not the first time Wikipedia has been accused of a slant.
The site's co-founder Larry Sanger said in 2021 that Wikipedia had become 'propaganda' for the left-leaning 'establishment.'
Conservative voices were 'kicked out' and negative content about Joe Biden and other liberal bigwigs was wiped off the platform, he said.
A 2012 study found that the site used phrases favored by Democrats to describe such issues as taxes and the Iraq war, while Republican terminology was sidelined.
Others have bashed how Wikipedia is written by more than 800,000 registered volunteer editors — and how they tend to be straight, white men from western countries.
This, critics say, leaves articles loaded with a western male perspective.
English Wikipedia raked in more than 84 billion views last year, according to numbers released by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind the free, publicly edited online encyclopedia.
The top countries that accessed English Wikipedia last year were the US (33.2 billion) and Britain (9 billion) — followed by India (8.48 billion), Canada (3.95 billion) and Australia (2.56 billion).