Study: Wikipedia has Overwhelming Liberal Bias

On Thursday, the Manhattan Institute released the results of a study which determined that the website Wikipedia has a clear bias against conservative articles and in favor of liberal articles.

As the Daily Caller reports, the study was conducted by analyzing 1,628 words that were used in various articles to refer to political subjects. It found that negative terms were used far more often to describe right-wing figures than left-wing figures. Wikipedia was also found to use emotions such as anger and disgust to discuss the Right, and to use emotions associated with happiness or positivity to describe the Left.

The study noted that the same potential for bias exists in OpenAI language models which study Wikipedia as a reference, thus increasing the risk of biased and unfair language being implemented as a result of OpenAI technology, in addition to the direct actions of individual users on Wikipedia.

“There is a degree of overlap in the prevailing sentiment associations of political terms in word embeddings derived from Wikipedia content and word embeddings from the OpenAI GPT series,” the study explains. “This is not surprising, given that Wikipedia articles are likely a prominent part of OpenAI’s secret corpus of data used to train ChatGPT.”

A similar study conducted in 2022 determined that OpenAI and its ChatGPT software displayed similarly left-wing prejudices.

Even Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, admitted in an interview in 2021 that the website he created is no longer a reliably neutral website. He denounced its current state of political coverage as “propaganda,” pointing out that conservative websites are forbidden from being used as sources for citation on Wikipedia articles.

“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned,” Sanger revealed. “So, what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3). Wikimedia also runs the Wikimedia Endowment, a “collective action fund,” which is run by the Tides Foundation, a left-wing grantmaking organization that has donated millions of dollars to left-wing causes.