Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia: its open contribution policy allows everyone to edit and share their knowledge. A challenge of radical openness is that it facilitates introducing biased contents or perspectives in Wikipedia. Wikipedia relies on numerous external sources such as journal articles, books, news media, and more. News media sources, in particular, take up nearly third of all citations from Wikipedia. However, despite their importance for providing up-to-date and factual contents, there is still a limited understanding on which news media sources are cited from Wikipedia. Relying on a large-scale open dataset of nearly 30M citations from English Wikipedia, we find a moderate yet systematic liberal polarization in the selection of news media sources. We also show that this effect is not mitigated by controlling for news media factual reliability. Our results contribute to Wikipedia's knowledge integrity agenda in suggesting that a systematic effort would help to better map potential biases in Wikipedia and find means to strengthen its neutral point of view policy.
翻译:维基百科是最大的在线百科全书:它的开放贡献政策允许每个人编辑和分享知识。 激进开放的挑战在于它有利于在维基百科中引入偏见的内容或观点。维基百科依靠许多外部来源,如期刊文章、书籍、新闻媒体等。 特别是新闻媒体来源占维基百科所有引文的近三分之一。然而,尽管新闻媒体来源对提供最新和事实内容很重要,但其从维基百科引用新闻媒体来源的理解仍然有限。 依靠从英文维基百科引用近30米的大规模开放数据集,我们在选择新闻媒体来源时发现一种中度但系统的自由分化的两极分化现象。 我们还表明,对新闻媒体真实可靠性的控制并没有减轻这一影响。 我们的成果有助于维基百科的知识完整性议程提出系统的努力将有助于更好地绘制维基百科中的潜在偏见,并找到加强其中立观点政策的手段。