The Norm of Neutrality in Collaborative Knowledge Construction

2017

Social media enabled collaboration at unprecedented levels. And while research points to the benefits of mass collaboration, it has also revealed challenges and problems. Here we explore biases in collaboratively constructed knowledge. To this end, we compared two online encyclopedias: Wikipedia and the extreme right-wing Metapedia. Both urge users to present topics from a neutral point of view. Using different measures we found that Metapedia articles (vs. Wikipedia articles) are significantly shorter, contain fewer references, contain relatively more anger- and anxiety-related words, rarely present more than one point of view in controversies, and often convey opinions – for inctance, by …