Wikipedia’s liberal bias

You can read the whole article, but here are 2 good examples of the liberal bias of Wikipedia, a source virtually everyone uses even if they deny it: Coulter vs. Moore and Beck vs. Olbermann and how their personal lives and career are treated in the Wikipedia entries. This article is from a conservative source, Frontpage, because you probably couldn’t find one from liberals making a similar charge of bias in favor of conservatives (although I think the Communist Party of the USA makes this charge about American media). Wikipedia always provides sources, but when the sources are biased, plus the verbs and adjectives are loaded, the content shows the bias. There have been a number of unflattering biographies of President Obama, yet they wouldn’t be used as the primary source of a Wikipedia account of say, his legacy.

“Consider Ann Coulter versus Michael Moore. Coulter’s entry (on August 9, 2011) was 9028 words long.* Of this longer-than-usual entry, 3220 words were devoted to “Controversies and criticism” in which a series of incidents involving Coulter and quotes from her are cited with accompanying condemnations, primarily from her opponents on the Left. That’s 35.6 percent of Coulter’s entry devoted to making her look bad. By contrast, Moore’s entry is 2876 words (the more standard length for entries on political commentators), with 130 devoted to “Controversy.” That’s 4.5% of the word count, a fraction of Coulter’s. Does this mean that an “unbiased” commentator would find Coulter eight times as “controversial” as Moore?

The same disproportion can be seen in the former flagship stars of Fox News and MSNBC, Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann. Beck’s entry is 7810 words; instead of featuring a dedicated “controversy” section, as in the case of Coulter, the 1789 words of criticism from leftist opponents are scattered throughout -- 23 percent of the profile.

Beck’s page shows other metrics for measuring Wikipedia bias. First, the sources: Of the 206 references, 25-35 could be characterized as leftists critical of Beck, with frequent citations from Salon’s resident Beck antagonist Alexander Zaitchik and his attack book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. Another telling sign of bias is the fact that 9% of the entry, or 729 words, are comprised of potentially embarrassing details from Beck’s “personal life.” Such information is often more detailed in conservatives’ entries.

In Olbermann’s 3750 word entry 199 words (5 percent) could be characterized as criticism. However it is much more muted than that directed at Beck. Of the 199 critical words 113 are devoted to an incident in which Olbermann went off on a rant against Republican Senator Scott Brown that was so vulgar that Jon Stewart stepped in, eventually causing the MSNBC host to apologize. This is a frequent element in the treatment of leftist figures by Wikipedia. Criticism from those further to the Left (or, like Stewart, higher within progressives’ hierarchy of household gods) may be included which itself “centers” the subject of the profile. Incidents where the figure apologized for his or her transgressions may be featured as a form of exculpation, transforming a failing into a chance to show the subject’s humanity.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/102601/how-left-conquered-wikipedia-part-1-david-swindle