"The Internet makes it so easy for people to aggregate some scholars worry that people will self-select into groups with a similar ideology," says Zhu. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Does the collective will of the majority lead to democratic consensus or fundamentalist groupthink?The massive, ongoing natural experiment of Wikipedia offers a unique view into these questions. Over the years, Britannica has handled this uncertainty by seeking out the most distinguished experts in their fields in an attempt to provide a sober analysis on topics while Wikipedia has urged its civilian editors to maintain what it calls a neutral point of view (NPOV).The fee-based Encyclopedia Britannica Online uses IP filtering as its primary mode of authentication for institutional subscribers and login and password for individuals.But is objectivity better achieved by considering one viewpoint or thousands? Along with cowriter Shane Greenstein of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Zhu asks that question in a new paper, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia.Zhu and Greenstein have long been interested in the question of crowd bias, which itself has been hotly debated by scholars in many fields including psychology and politics over the centuries.
Encyclopedia Britannica Online Subscription Code Words WereOther categories did not have enough data to significantly identify bias.Of course, those findings don't say which of the two sources is correct in its viewpoint—only how they compare to one another. Dividing articles into categories, the researchers found, for example, that stories on corporations were 11 percent more slanted toward Democrats, while observing similar leanings on topics such as government (9 percent), education (4 percent), immigration (4 percent), and civil rights (3 percent). Gentzkow and Shapiro studied speeches in the 2005 Congressional Record to scientifically identify the top 500 unique phrases used by Democrats (e.g., tax breaks, minimum wage, fuel efficiency) and Republicans (e.g., death tax, border security, war on terror), rating each according to political slant.Zhu and Greenstein then identified some 4,000 articles that appeared in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and determined how many of each of these code words were included, in an effort to determine overall bias and direction.They found that in general, Wikipedia articles were more biased—with 73 percent of them containing code words, compared to just 34 percent in Britannica.In almost all cases, Wikipedia was more left-leaning than Britannica.![]() In other words, for articles of the same length, Wikipedia is as middle-of-the-road as Britannica."If you read 100 words of a Wikipedia article, and 100 words of a Britannica , you will find no significant difference in bias," says Zhu. When compared word to word, most (though not all) of Wikipedia's left-leaning proclivities come out in the wash. "We can't say which is reflecting true reality."What's more, much of Wikipedia's bias seems to be due to the longer article length of the online publication, where word count is less of an issue than the historically printed Britannica. Halo 2 rom download"It has all the information about how many times people are reading and editing articles. "To some extent, we are not seeing the scenario where too many cooks spoil the broth, we are mostly seeing an insufficient number of cooks," says Zhu.If Wikipedia would like to improve its objectivity, Zhu recommends that it encourage editors to revise the most-read stories first, as well as encouraging people with different political leanings to edit the same article." Wikipedia can easily do this," he says. "The crowd does exhibit some wisdom, so to speak, to self-correct bias."The number of revisions required to start showing this effect, however, is quite large—at least 2,000 edits—and the articles most read by users aren't necessarily those most revised by editors. ![]()
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