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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

My recollections from Wikipedia back in 2005 were quite impressive given the massive scale and open contribution barriers of the project.

In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.

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Indeed. There's studies in how to bias an article whilst maintaining the illusion of NPOV (simple example: if you support X, always add an adjective when describing its detractors, but leave supporters unqualified). There's also pretty well documented cases of people with an axe to grind on specific subjects locking an article in their favour.

Do you by any chance have links to those studies? I'm building a crowdsourced platform, so that info could be super-valuable to me.

It seems like a case of the fallacy generally known as "poisoning the well". You can start there.

Sorry, I don't. I recall reading something very intelligent about the edit war between Israeli and Palestinian sympathisers, but google didn't yield it up. (In general terms, it's quite hard to google stuff /about/ wikipedia.)

One special kind of bias I'm aware of is something obviously done by religious fanatics who invest significant amount of energy adding "a religion section" to every famous person's biography and formulating and selecting his/hers statements as the support for the belief even when the statement was obviously made as the opposite.

As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends."

The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."

Ha ha. I've noticed there's a particularly active British contingent as well who make sure to add a media section that cites primarily British media sources or usually in article about inventions and stuff will add a section to show that the actual origin was some obscure British inventor who had invented it before everybody else. Judging from the slant of many articles I've noticed, that country seems to be a little overrepresented among contributors on English language wikipedia (relative to other English speaking countries)

You might be surprised. Population of US: 300m, South Africa 50m, Canada 35m (but not all of those are English-speaking), Australia 20, New Zealand <5, Ireland <5, UK: 65m. You can cut this multiple ways.

So, the UK is the second largest English-speaking country by population. Also, you could say that around 1 in 7 of the English speaking world is from the UK (and that's a lot).

And that's before we consider the ridiculous amount of power and wealth the British Empire had, and just plain history. It's not entirely surprising to see the UK cropping up almost everywhere.

From what I've seen it's usually even less sophisticated than that: simply add a long list of "criticisms", "objections" or "controversy" related to the subject matter and provided they have links to notionally reliable sources they'll make the subject matter look more contentious than it is, and tend to survive attempts to remove per UNDUE WEIGHT because who's to argue with a whole list of reliable sources? For bonus points, delete universally understood facts for not having a citation or for merely paraphrasing the source.

The sourcing policy of course is most skewed towards the cranks when the subject matter is simply too esoteric or plain ridiculous for any reliable source to have ever bothered attempting a detailed critique.

Both this and the GP are tactics I've seen.

I think the community is waking up to this issue; there have been recent bans for people exhibiting this behaviour. It's hard though because you have to unpick a pattern of behaviour and show it's malicious.

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