My favorite example of bias introduced to Wikipedia is by some obviously religious fanatics that managed to add the big section of "Religious views" to biographies of most of famous people of science, and then misinterpret their quotes to support the view that all were religious, in a sense of "supporting/believing in the existing religions."<p>The best example, Einstein:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein's_religious_views" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein's_religious_vie...</a><p>"Albert Einstein's religious views have been studied extensively. He said he believed in the "pantheistic" God of Baruch Spinoza, but not in a personal god, a belief he criticized." And there's no citation re "pantheistic." That is, as stated the claim appears to support the view that there were Einstein's words that mention the "pantheistic" as the most important thing of "Spinoza's" God.<p>If fact, the only quote, of course not cited in Wikipedia, where Einstein explicitly mentions "pantheism" is apparently:<p><a href="http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/spinoza.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/spinoza.html</a><p>"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist."<p>The only fair description would be "he was an agnostic" and that's all. Instead, the "pantheism" is effectively promoted before, making "agnosticism" his second choice, which it wasn't. Specifically, he quotes Spinoza in order to point to the previous thinker that rejected the belief that the soul exists separately from the body. That's why he mentions him (as seen in the full quote linked above).<p>He was frequently quoted to declare himself agnostic, whereas he mentions Spinoza's God only in one mail.<p>Still, try to remove obviously lying "pantheistic" pseudo quote/promotion from Wikipedia's texts about Einstein.<p>And the same thing is repeated for a lot of other scientists!
What's also interesting is the bias that appears when the same topic is covered in different languages. Take the English and Spanish articles about the Battle of Vitoria:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vitoria" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vitoria</a><p><a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batalla_de_Vitoria" rel="nofollow">http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batalla_de_Vitoria</a><p>You don't need to be able to speak Spanish - just check out the list of the battle commanders. (And if you do speak Spanish, you can see how the description of the battle differs quite radically too...)<p>I'm not sure what the solution to this and the main article's problem is, though, other than vigilance.
this is at best a sub-point of the main article, but it's one that I find particularly chilling: if you want people to believe something, the easiest way to accomplish that is to lie to them. From the article:<p>"""
It is important to know, though, that in the battle over reliable sources anything goes - lying, trickery, the basest chicanery. Jaakobou complained that Peace Now - a group devoted to researching the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank - had made up a citation from a government report on the West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Ha'ai that appeared on the group's website. "I went ahead and checked their claim that an official report requested by the Prime Minister stated something on Mitzpe Ha'ai. The Mitzpe was not mentioned in the original," he wrote in the discussion on the Reliable sources noticeboard. When someone pointed out the section and page where the settlement was mentioned, he claimed that the mention did not include the specific information that was included in the article. When the original passage was quoted in its entirety, he still didn't give up; he claimed that the addition of a satellite photo of the settlement on the web page made the citation unreliable ("citing the content to Peace Now is problematic, since they add their own words and images to wiki-reliable information").<p>The point is: never give up. If you don't win this time, maybe you will win next time.
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I ran into my first experience with this sort of thing while looking into Mormon initiation rites on wikipedia. I certainly understand why Mormons may be interested in keeping initiation secrets off of wikipedia, but wikipedia has no interest in censoring that information. And yet, at least the last time I checked, I had a very hard time finding that in part because of the mess of articles I ran across and the reshuffling of articles.<p>Is there an easy way to search for deleted articles and read the discussion history for them?
Sometimes I feel that I don't spend my time on earth in an optimal way. Then I read about people living their life by doing editing wars over a salad(!). Life is not that bad actually when I think about it.
Step 1, add a talk page about "How to add bias into Wikipedia" discussing bias from a very pro-Israeli point of view.<p>Seed distrust, misinformation and be obvious that this article is biased, make no attempt to hide it, this blatant display will despite the reader knowing about it, build trust in the article and writer. Its magnificent. Use this trust to point out the negative sides of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Step back and watch as the readers take your/the Israeli side, as the trust built from exposing bias is still valid as previously mentioned. Go Israel. There is no Israel lobby in USA, but there is an Arab one. Its called an Israeli salad not Arab salad. And so on...
Politics on Wikipedia is terrible. IMHO there are certainly organized covert groups (commercial and military) who are editing it on behalf of governments (and corporations) already. Basically it's a war of attrition, and those with resources win. It's very sad, looking at the spirit that Wikipedia emerged from.<p>In short, as Einstein said: <i>Nationalism is an infantile disease; the measles of mankind.</i> IMHO the OP needs to grow up and broaden their perspective. By distributing such rants (s)he is attracting interest in the deliberate abuse of Wikipedia for partisan goals, which is not in its spirit. It's not something to be proud of.
In a way it's quite terrifying to consider the possibilities of bias in Wikipedia. After all, if you're not an expert on a particular subject, how are you to know that even an article which seems neutral in content and tone isn't subtly selecting for and emphasising a certain portrayal of its subject? Tricky stuff.
politics, Middle East, and environment, are three areas I only go to Wikipedia for dates of occurrence and names of those involved. All the rest related I assume is biased.<p>Need to look up a song and artist, anime character, or what years a car was available, I am pretty much going to trust what I read there, not so with much else anymore.
Honestly, the whole "neutral point of view", despite being a universal Wikipedia rule, is most prominent in the English one.<p>If you go read some of the Balkan Wikipedias, you'll have blatant nationalist propaganda and completely contradictory viewpoints. What one wiki will decry as chauvinism, another calls national identity. Most blatant is the propaganda in the Macedonian Wikipedia.
This is great. I'm honestly going to go over this with my 11 year old to complement the section of her Language Arts class on the media and advertising. Lots of great things to learn to watch out for in the news and general media, not just in Wikipedia.
For a long while now I've thought that some articles should simply stop trying to be perfectly neutral.<p>Just have two sections in the article: Each clearly biased in a different direction (maybe use colors and do it per paragraph).<p>Historically newspapers used to do that, each paper was clearly biased a certain way and you knew that when reading it.<p>Insist on accuracy of course, but the slant in the way something is written can matter a lot even if completely accurate.