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Talk:Examples of Bias in Wikipedia (view source)
Revision as of 01:17, March 16, 2007
, 01:17, March 16, 2007Six times? Not even close.
: Did you take actually alook at the page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedians_by_religion, other than scrolling to the end and squiting at the statistics? It starts right away by sayin that this is a self selected sample. And it is a small sample. And it contains the weirdest categories. And the page again says that the statitics are merely for entertainment, and not to be taken seriously. Its a joke. --[[User:Order|Order]] 16 March 2007 10:50 (AEST)
: Did you take actually alook at the page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedians_by_religion, other than scrolling to the end and squiting at the statistics? It starts right away by sayin that this is a self selected sample. And it is a small sample. And it contains the weirdest categories. And the page again says that the statitics are merely for entertainment, and not to be taken seriously. Its a joke. --[[User:Order|Order]] 16 March 2007 10:50 (AEST)
== Six times? Not even close. ==
I can't believe that an economics teacher could make these kinds of mistakes with basic statistical procedure. If Wikipedia were six times more liberal than 18%, it would be an impossible 108% liberal. Even assuming that 75% of Wikipedians consider themselves liberals (which, given that many people consider themselves neither liberal nor conservative, is ridiculous), 75/18 would give us a figure of roughly four times more liberal than the American public. (Not to say that that's the correct procedure.)
Regardless of the math, we must remember the stat teacher's old chestnut, "Garbage in, garbage out." Bad data gives bad results. The data from Wikipedia is based on voluntary response samples, which are notoriously prone to bias. (Remember Alf Landon and the ''Literary Digest'' poll?) The six times figure can only be attributed to serious mathematical error or intellectual dishonesty. [[User:John Brown|John Brown]] 21:17, 15 March 2007 (EDT)