Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias

The Wikipedia project has a systemic bias that grows naturally out of the demographic of its contributors. This project attempts to fill in the gaps left by this bias, consciously focusing on those subjects and perspectives neglected by the encyclopedia as a whole. A list of articles that are in need of some attention may be found on the CSB Open Tasks list.

Systemic bias of Wikipedia

The origins of bias

The "average" Wikipedian on English Wikipedia is (1) technically-inclined ("white-collar"), (2) from an Anglophone country, and (3) from an industrialized nation. Observation suggests that males are over-represented, though there has not been a proper survey.

• In order to contribute to Wikipedia, a user must have access to both a computer and internet access. Much of the world, possibly most, of the world's population does not and their views and experience are not represented.. This includes both the developing nations and the population at a lower socioeconomic level within industrialized countries. In most countries, minority ethnic and linguistic groups have disproportionately less access to information technology than the majority group. This includes, among many others, the First Nations of Canada, the Aborigines of Australia, and Dalits of India.

• Despite the many contributions of Wikipedians who write English as a second language, en. is dominated by editors who grew up in Anglophone countries. These also tend to be industralized nations, accentuating the bias towards contributions from wealthy countries. While areas in which education in English is widespread, such as Netherlands, Hong Kong and India, have decent coverage when compared with many other nations, they remain under-represented compared to those countries that speak English natively.

• Due to the higher rates of adoption of new technology among the young, Wikipedians tend to be younger than the national mean of their countries. The Internet did not become a storehouse of general knowledge until the 1990s. Wikipedia did not appear until even more recently.

• Even among their general socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic demographic, Wikipedians tend to be more technically inclined. This is due to the simple barrier represented by the "Edit" button, which many readers either do not recognize or refuse to utilize. The inclination is more towards computer science and physics than areas such as agricultural science.

The bias

The systemic bias of Wikipedians manifests itself as a portrayal of the world through the filter of the experiences and views of the average Wikipedian. Each editor contributes to articles based on his or her interests and knowledge. This is obviously not objectionable but, multiplied across the entire body of editors, results in unbalanced coverage of topics in a global context.

Once identified, the bias is apparent throughout Wikipedia. It may be found in two major forms: lack of articles on a neglected topic and perspective bias (most notably geographic) within articles on universal subjects.

• A lack of articles on particular topics is perhaps the most obvious kind of bias. Both China and India separately possess populations greater than that of all native English speakers combined; by this measure, information on both specifically Chinese and Indian topics should at least equal that available on Anglophone topics. However, it is apparent that Anglophone topics dominate. While the conscious efforts of CSB participants have vastly expanded the information available on topics such as the Second Congo War, comparable conflicts in the West remain more detailed.
• The other kind of bias is internal to articles that are universal in aspect. It is not at all apparent from lunch or the linguistic term continuous aspect, that they exist outside of the industrialized world. The article on malaria, after stating that it causes "2 million deaths annually, mainly in the tropics and sub-Saharan Africa" briefly mentions Africa only once more. The United States receives the same number of mentions, and there are no subpages. The article on allergy, which affects the average Wikipedian but presumably kills less people, is almost twice as long and has a couple subpages.

There is further information on biases in in Geography, in Politics, and in History. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Project_details for an older introduction.

Why it matters and what to do

Many editors contribute to Wikipedia because they see Wikipedia as progressing towards, though never reaching, an ideal state as a repository of human knowledge. The more idealistic may see Wikipedia as a vast discussion on what is true and what is not from a "neutral point of view" or "God's Eye View". The idea of a systemic bias is thus far more troubling than even widespread intentional vandalism. Vandalism can be readily identified and corrected. The existence of systemic bias means that not only are large segments of the world not participating in the discussion, but that there is deep-rooted problem in the relationship of Wikipedia, its contributors and the world at large.

The systemic bias of Wikipedia is permanent. As long as the demographic of Wikipedians is not exactly identical to the world demographic, the vision of the world presented on Wikipedia will always be askew. Thus the only way systemic bias would disappear would be if the population of the world all spoke English as the same level of fluency and had equal acces and inclination to use Wikipedia. However, the effects of systemic bias may be mitigated through conscious effort. This is the goal of the Countering systemic bias project.

There are a many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:

• Sign up as a participant below and mention any CSB-related interests you may have.
• Add the Open Tasks box ({{WikiProjectCSBTasks}}) to your User or User talk page to let other people know about the issue.
• Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about whether they are written from a global perspective. If not, you might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by adding content with a different perspective.
• Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against. The net effect of consciously changing one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your "comfort zone" would be substantial.
• Create or edit one of the articles listed on the CSB template.
• If you don't particularly like any of the subjects on the template, our open tasks list has a wide array of articles in need of attention.
• Add to the open tasks list. No one person can fix a system-wide problem, so be sure to tell people when you find needy articles.
• Rotate articles from the open tasks list to the template, and other helpful tidying tasks.
• Give feedback on this WikiProject on the talk page.
• Change the demographic of Wikipedia. Encourage friends and acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented on Wikipedia to edit. If you are at a university, contact a professor in minority or women's studies, explain the problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write for Wikipedia. Contact minority or immigrant groups in your area to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to contribute. The worse they could say is, "No."

Related WikiProjects and regional noticeboards

There are several WikiProjects and regional notice boards that help correct systemic bias:

• Africa-related regional notice board
  • WikiProject Sudan
• WikiProject Islam

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The template {{limitedgeographicscope}} may be placed on the talk pages of relevant articles to produce

Members

Please add your name. If you have specific interests relating to CSB, feel free to briefly describe them so we can get a sense of the strengths of the project.

• Alarm
• Ambi 08:48, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC) This has my absolute support - brilliant idea, and I'll do all I can to help out.
• BanyanTree: Greater East Africa, conflict, displacement
• BCorr|Брайен
• blankfaze - I'd like to cut down on as much bias/POV in the project as possible, but I'd especially like to keep Israel and its related articles free of bias. Some users, I've noticed, are on a mission to install a pro-Israel POV in the project.
• Bontenbal I think that there is systematic bias of the European Union. It's far more important than most UK/US people seem to think.
• Bsktcase
• cgfoz
• Charles Matthews Main interests mathematics, where I have created biographies to include more Soviet, Indian, Chinese and Japanese mathematicians; poetry mainly Anglo-Irish 1900-1940 but Nancy Cunard brought me here; Go hence general interest in East Asia; Uganda about which I have hardly written on WP.
• ChrisG
• Clubmarx I'm up for working on art and design
• DanKeshet I'd like to learn more about lots of subjects, especially labor unions from the Global South.
• Danny I am particularly interested in Africa and South and Southeast Asia, history and religion. Added a former prime minister of Burundi today to get the ball rolling.
• Datepalm17 - great project. I'd love to help. The place does rather need this.
• Elf-friend - Well, a lot of my articles seem to fall within this category already.
• Ericd - For anything I can help. BTW I believe I have some knowledge about the history of Burkina Faso.
• FarQPwnsJoo I'm really interested in the Middle East.
• Fastfission - history of scientific racism, African-American history, race/gender in science.
• Felix Wan - can help in translating Chinese articles and in issues around East Asia.
• Filiocht - Mainly literature, especially women writers, hispanic writers, anything else I can help on
• Gareth Hughes - mainly languages and religion: I've been working on various Semitic languages and trying to make the smaller Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian churches visible on pages that just suggest that Christians are Protestant, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.
• iFaqeer - Africa, Islam (not just in the convential Islamophobia-Apologist way but, hopefully, in a "Let's get real" way), and First World-"Third Word" parallax. (Talk to me!) 20:53, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)
• Ilya - Wikipedia has a systemic bias on technology issues – many of Wikipedians are techies and write from that perspective. I would like to explore removing unnecessary technical lingo bias from common-interest articles. This would include pacifying the nearly-religious wars of Linux vs Microsoft that sometimes is very obvious in technology articles.
• JCarriker. Mainly interested in Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S. South, and Eastern and Central Europe and Ancient Egypt. Usually write on geographic or political or historic subjects relating to my interests.
• JesseW - Good project. I hope you have great success.
• Jmabel
• Josiah 03:00, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC) - Karaite History - when I first arrived here, pages detailing Karaite history were horribly incorrect...
• Jxg
• Kylehamilton - Film Student
• KNewman - interested in anything that deals with Russia or USSR.
• Mark Dingemanse — Especially keen on countering the systemic bias of Wikipedia in the area of African languages and linguistics.
• Mustafaa - Good idea, for a bunch of stuff. North African History WikiProject, anyone? Or Afro-Asiatic languages? Or Islamic prophets? Or major, lethal conflicts which the media doesn't cover much cause they're between poor people?.... well, you get the idea.
• Neutrality (talk)]] (For women and feminism)
• Ngb 17:23, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• Pete 08:42, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Pedant I came here because some of my favorite editors have this page on their 'what links here link'. I'm interested in everything, but I've sort of adopted Clown and related articles, since I have worked with and booked clown acts for over 20 years, and have taught clowning to several professional clowns. I think that 'things that aren't on the web' are in desperate need of being added to Wikipedia. I'd like to see some of the idiomatic English reworded to be more globally understandable by people for whom english is not their native tongue. I also edit a lot on legal issues (I read "legalese" and am fairly good at translating it to readable English), human rights issues, environmental protection and anti-pollution issues. My home page is set to the random wikipedia page, I typically surf my way in through there. I often edit topics I know nothing about, to learn more and to make them more readable by someone who knows nothing about the subject. I'm a rabid cross-referencer. I will happily spend time on any page that's drawn to my attention.Pedant 22:52, 2004 Oct 25 (UTC)
• nixie- my main interests are in agriculture and development
• Peregrine981 - Can draw on my vague recollections of a few African history classes in university. Currently living in S. Korea, may learn enough to help with that area.
• Pteron - count me in! I'm most interested in issues pertaining to Africa & the African Diaspora, labor movements and gender issues.
• Rdsmith4 - I'll help where I can.
• ShaunMacPherson 01:21, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC) - I think that the people with the most edits should be looked at as their point of view is dominating. As well, I say that many of the math articles are pedantically biased towards an audience well above our average user .
• SimonP - Over the the last few weeks I have been trying to improve African history articles. (Did you know we didn't even have an article on the Rwandan Genocide until a month ago?)
  • I had been linking to History of Rwanda#The Rwandan genocide, which was ok as a short description, although clearly not sufficient. Pcb21|
• +sj+ - let's see about correcting Rambot and anti-North bias.
• Sjc - already involved in the elimination of bias from (particularly) articles on history, social sciences, etc. This looks a sensible and practical approach to the problems I am encountering en route.
• Solitude - Anything I feel I should have been thaught about in school, but wasn't.
• Steve Rapaport - I have lived in 4 countries, so I'll help correct country/language bias if I can. I'd love to say I'll try to remove American bias from pages on politics, but I'm afraid that's unlikely to succeed.
• Sundar - I've been contributing on things that I know something about; places in India with less representation here (eg Sikkim, Ettayapuram), languages (eg Tamil language), tools that are notable but not written about (eg GraphViz, Dotty) etc. I'll continue doing that and help copyediting under-represented articles whenever possible. -- Sundar 12:14, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
• Ta bu shi da yu 13:39, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC) - OK, I'll give this project a shot. Let's see how well you guys do at fixing Christian views of women.
• TK-P 02:35, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC) - I am a theatre artist, educator, and scholar working in the fields of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. I am also particularly interested in diverse teaching and learning styles. Students in the Introduction to Women’s Studies courses that I am currently teaching in the USA have been exploring Wikipedia. In mid-March 2005, these students will be contributing Wikipedia entries on gender issues. This assignment was inspired by the counter systemic bias project. I welcome your input on this assignment and invite you to comment on these entries which I will list on my user page in coming weeks.
• Trilobite
• Warofdreams - I've recently been writing about Paraguay; am mostly interested in international and labor articles.
• Wizzy - like Elf-friend said ..
• Xed - project initiator.
• zandperl - women in science. I was doing it anyway.
• Zosodada - I hate systemic bias! -- but not so much as outright misinformation... or excessive wordiness... but I hate it more than Yoda-speak! and that's a lot!
• Wikiacc
• Zach Alexander I'm interested in philosohpy and progressive forms of religion.