Wikipedia articles are neutral

Less than a decade has been enough to make it the largest stores of knowledge of the human race: round 400 million people rummage every month at Wikipedia. Only 1.34 million articles of the German-language edition would fill at least 700 books printed with each 1,000 pages. The Brockhaus encyclopedia comes in its current issue to just 300,000 Artikel.Doch that has join encyclopedia to fight again and again with the accusation, to be vulnerable to manipulation. How objective are the articles which can anyone write and change and whose only Qualitätskontrolle is the oversight of the Internet community?Two US economists have been scientifically to the bottom of this issue. Shane Greenstein (Kellogg School of management) and Feng Zhu (Marshall School of business) have examined policy issues of the US version of the online Lexikon are as objective article about. Researchers make a mixed testimony from Wikipedia: neutrality have increased in the past few years - around 40% of articles, the scientists but found evidence of tendentious representations. Their study is Wikipedia biased? was presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in January.To identify problematic entries, the researchers used a common in newspaper analyses and accepted method: you examined how terms occur frequently, that provision clearly one of the two political camps. So for example the Republicans often talk of illegal immigration - Democrats, however, hardly ever take the combination of words into my mouth. It is just vice versa with the term ' civil rights', explains Greenstein.Die durchforsteten US researchers early 2011 more than 70,000 entries on the most common political rhetoric. In approximately 28,000 entries they encountered at least a problematic phrase in just under four percent of the cases they found equal to more than ten of the suspicious key sentences. texts are increasingly neutral most of the older articles tend more to the Democrats, write economists. The pendulum in the direction of the Obama party beat out especially on issues such as civil rights, the Government or social security. For controversial content such as the foreign and war policy or against abortion, the researchers accounted for hardly unilateral rashes.The researchers used the fact that when the Web encyclopedia also older versions to see, to understand how the distortions in the course of time have changed. The message positive from the perspective of the user: The impacts for the benefit of a party are weakening, the texts are converging at more and more a neutral position. That lies above all in the many completely new entries. The revision of existing articles by other authors, however, have little impact on the balance. Texts, which were once published with a particular bias, would later rarely clearly neutral.The researchers point out that their findings may be only the starting signal for further analysis. To draw clearer conclusions, many more puzzles would have to be lifted. It is for example still open whether very one-sided article refer to very often each other or whether always the same writer for they are responsible.Published in Handelsblatt