Comment by konne88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by konne88 | Hacker News Reader

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I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).

The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."

The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."

I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.

I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.

I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.

Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.

It's impossible to write completely neutrally. Editorial decisions like what information to include or exclude, what sources to cite, what order to present information in, what illustrations to use cannot be avoided and inherently present some kind of narrative.

It absolutely is possible to write completely neutrally. All it takes is for the writer to be aware/honest of their biases and to have a goal of achieving a neutral perspective. Of course the goal of most writing is explicitly to not be neutral.

Take the example of circumcision. You could probably write a mere definition of circumcision neutrally, sure.

But do you include cultural practices of circumcision? Do you include criticism? If so, how many column inches do you dedicate to either? Which comes first? That surely is going to determine whether the article appears to support or oppose, which is basically the issue in the comment above.

But beyond that, do you group female circumcision in the same article as male circumcision? If not, you are tacitly approving of male circumcision by separating it from disapproved of practice. If so, surely you need to explain the difference in social and legal acceptability. If you do that without noting controversy, then you are implying the social acceptance of male circumcision is universal. If you note controversy, then you are necessarily elevating that to noteworthyness.

There's no way out of it.

well said, reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

Literally the first thing you will learn in journalism school is that there is no such thing as "objective neutrality". Even deciding what story to cover includes bias.

There are some subjects which various groups cannot agree upon by definition and nature.

Have you ever taken a media class? It really isn’t.

> I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias

I think this is the wrong way to look at bias. Bias isnt a binary, instead its a journey to try and get succesively less and less biased. You can never achieve absolute unbiasedness, you can just try to journey closer.

And yes, wikipedia is far from perfect.

Any attempt to "eliminate" all bias would just introduce massive bias. The only solution is building a healthier democratic community.

A major reason people are obsessed with bias on wikipedia is because it is the only usable encyclopedia now. Back then even just in the US and published in english there were more than a dozen different encyclopedias competing with different scopes, intended audiences, viewpoints, arrangements, features, editorial policies, etc. And the publishers were more diverse and not monopolistic. There simply wasn't a need for any single one of them to be bias-free.

> The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial.

No, they do have a sentence on that right before, talking about how sometimes it can make sense as a medical procedure:

> Die Zirkumzision ist eine von mehreren Behandlungsmöglichkeiten (s. z. B. Triple Inzision), die beispielsweise bei schweren Formen der pathologischen Phimose als indiziert gilt, wenn Behandlungsalternativen nicht erfolgversprechend sind oder zuvor keinen Heilungserfolg brachten.

I'd say overall the German one is a bit more balanced, if maybe not in the opening paragraphs. It goes over pretty much all of the benefits in similar detail to the English one, while spending much more words on "adverse effects" (which the English one spends very few words on in comparison, and no pictures at all).

Generally it seems that the English one does its very best to gloss over anything graphic, while the German one spares no detail - a product of underlying cultural attitudes no doubt. English Wikipedia would probably consider many of the contents of the German article "gratuitous detail", while German Wikipedia prefers a "factual and explicit" clinical style.

This is a very interesting take, however, it makes it a bit ironic to compare wikipedia across topics and domains.

Like, right here, let's not ask the question "Why is wikipedia deciding that gratuitous detail is consideration" for one page, and instead point out the amount of inconsistency in this regard on other surgical procedures (coronary bypass is tame, kidney transplant is not), and on non-medical topics, such as the absolute inscrutable travesty that is every single Mathematics Wikipedia page and how all of it amount to post-graduate oneupmanship competitions at this point.

It become heavily biased in last years indeed.

If something looks controversial for my tastes, I track when the change was made and look for last version before dubious content was added. And so, I've seen edits done to media-related articles which introduced sections that weren't present in some cases for even 20 years. Sections being replaced or included because there was a need for including particular bias prevalent in the namely United States sociopolitical scene in last 15 years. My country's wiki did suffer as well and there are ongoing edits replacing grammar to fit unjustified trends that damage our language. In the past hot topics which were controversial IRL were including "the Catholic Church's position" - now that's largely gone. Then, it's even impossible to edit articles without being logged in because the most popular ISP has blocked all IP ranges - all because a "trend" of vandalism that happen around 24 to 25 years ago, and which supposedly happens again according to the message presented.

My contributions weren't large and I stopped doing these quickly because fighting people who unload their complexes on the Internet on total strangers weren't worth trying to improve articles about e.g. Milky Way galaxy or some generic local non-political stuff.

Wikipedia looks good on a paper and surely it works for trivial stuff people all around the world can agree upon. But it fails whenever there's a possibility of endorsing a point of view, which is always disguised as "neutral", which applies to probably 80% of articles on English Wikipedia alone. It suffers same degradation as nearly every place on the Internet - just not from the usual ads and tracking .

It is not possible to have unbiased communication. Whenever you communicate with someone, you do it because you think it's important that the other person hears what you're about to say. This means that you filter all communication through your own moral system, which obviously has biases. When people say "this is unbiased" they usually mean "this matches the biases of my culture". Wikipedia illustrates this very well because both cultures can claim "obviously the article in my language is unbiased, while the other one is weird".

So in a way, I'd argue that Wikipedia having different biases in different language versions actually proves that it's quite unbiased. If all languages had exactly the same content, the most likely explanation would've been that one culture dominates, and the rest are just translations.

I'd love to see someone make a less biased encyclopedia. It's easy to throw stones. I think people hate that there is an open and valuable source of information on the internet that isn't monetized.

Wikipedia is a treasure

It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.

This suggests one article or the other is incomplete.

To have evidence of bias, you would have to show that a paragraph like the one in the English article would be rejected for the German one.

Re bias, it does depend which areas you are talking about. Some areas are better served than others.

When it comes to billionaires, some of the biographies are very biased indeed making them look like saints.

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