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Examples of Bias in Wikipedia (view source)
Revision as of 04:50, November 18, 2012
, 04:50, November 18, 2012→Structural problems with Wikipedia: Margaret Bourke-White
Errors and bias can be introduced by robotic submissions. For example, many Wikipedia articles about populated places in the United States were created by robots using 2000 census data. A standard paragraph on demographics which included 2000 data was automatically included in each article. Wikipedia has not been able to program a robot to update all of those statistics, so most articles about places in the United States do not have more recent data from the 2010 census. Robots tagged many Wikipedia articles that had an article name in common with those in an early edition of ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' as having that book as a source -- even if nothing in the article was based on that book, and no human checked if the Wikipedia article was consistent with the Britannica article.
Errors and bias can be introduced by robotic submissions. For example, many Wikipedia articles about populated places in the United States were created by robots using 2000 census data. A standard paragraph on demographics which included 2000 data was automatically included in each article. Wikipedia has not been able to program a robot to update all of those statistics, so most articles about places in the United States do not have more recent data from the 2010 census. Robots tagged many Wikipedia articles that had an article name in common with those in an early edition of ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' as having that book as a source -- even if nothing in the article was based on that book, and no human checked if the Wikipedia article was consistent with the Britannica article.
Another level of error and bias comes from Wikipedia's reliance on poorly-trained volunteers instead of paid professionals. For example, someone proposed that a copyrighted photo of Joseph Stalin taken by [[Margaret Bourke-White]] be deleted in 2009.<ref>http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Joseph_Stalin.jpg</ref> It was kept because someone with a gmail account sent permission claiming to be her son. She died without children and the photo's copyrighted actually belonged to Time, Inc. but the mistake was not detected until 2012.
== Humorous quotes relating to bias and Wikipedia ==
== Humorous quotes relating to bias and Wikipedia ==