Wikipedia coverage of American politics

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, professor and associate professor respectively at the Harvard Business School, have authored several studies examining Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics and the editors that work on them to identify aspects of ideological bias within its collective intelligence.

In Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics as of January 2011, measuring their degree of bias on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro in 2010, to measure bias in newspaper media.[3] This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican based on key phrases within the text such as "war in Iraq", "civil rights", "trade deficit", "economic growth", "illegal immigration" and "border security". Each phrase is assigned a slant index based on how often it is used by Democratic vs. Republican members of U.S. Congress and this lean rating is assigned to a Wikipedia contribution that includes the same key phrase. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.[4][5][6]^:4–5

In a more extensive American follow-up study, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia (2018), Greenstein and Zhu directly compare about 4,000 articles related to U.S. politics between Wikipedia (written by an online community) and the matching articles from Encyclopædia Britannica (written by experts) using similar methods as their 2010 study to measure "slant" (Democratic vs. Republican) and to quantify the degree of "bias". The authors found that "Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased", particularly those focusing on civil rights, corporations, and government. Entries about immigration trended toward Republican. They further found that "(t)he difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions" and, when articles were substantially revised, the difference in bias compared to Britannica was statistically negligible. The implication, per the authors, is that "many contributions are needed to reduce considerable bias and slant to something close to neutral".[7][8][9][10][11]

Some Wikipedia edits by staff of the United States Congress have created controversy, notably in early to mid-2006. Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns,[12] Joe Biden, Tom Harkin, and Tom Coburn received significant media attention.[13] Others, such as those involving Gil Gutknecht,[14] David Davis,[15] and Mike Pence,[16] were reported but received less widespread coverage.

Biographical information on various politicians was edited by their own staff to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, add negative information to opponents' biographies, or replace the article in part or whole by staff-authored biographies.[13]

On January 27, 2006, The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, published an article entitled "Rewriting history under the dome", which revealed the editing by Congressional staff members of Representative Marty Meehan's Wikipedia entry.[13][17] Further investigation by Wikipedia editors discovered over a thousand edits by IP addresses allocated to either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Wikipedia editors found that most of the edits were considered to be in good faith, but a minority of edits were considered improper. At least one of the addresses involved was prohibited from further editing.[18]

Ed Summers created a Twitter feed to notify the world of any changes made from IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress: @congressedits was an automated Twitter account initiated in 2014 that tweeted anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles that originated from IP addresses belonging to the United States Congress. The changes were presumed to have been made by the staffs of US elected representatives and senators. In September 2018, an anonymous editor from Congress posted the personal information of several Republican senators into their articles,[19] leading to CongressEdits being banned from Twitter.

In August 2014, the Cato Institute suggested that Congressional staffers should spend spare time editing Wikipedia. A panel hosted by the institute endorsed the idea so that congressional staffers could use their time to write neutral and informative articles about proposed legislation to better educate the public. Experts on the panel considered the two main obstacles to doing this as being skepticism towards Wikipedia and the history of biased editing from Congressional staffers. The Cato Institute suggested one way to overcome these issues would be for the staffers to create user accounts and user profile pages disclosing their connections with Congress.[20]

On September 27, the disambiguation page for "Devil's Triangle" was edited from a House of Representatives IP address to describe it as a drinking game, matching the testimony of Kavanaugh.[21][22]

In the early stages of the 2016 United States presidential election, The New York Observer reported that Wikipedia's article on Donald Trump was the busiest of the 2016 U.S. presidential candidates.[23] The New York Times noted that the article usually attracted more views than his Republican rivals.[24] In September 2016, Business Insider reported that the article subject was one of the 29 most controversial people on Wikipedia,[25] and the following month The New York Observer reported that the article entry was bulkier than either the articles on George W. Bush and Barack Obama,[26] while The Washington Post reported that the article had more than three times the number of edits than Hillary Clinton since January 2015.[27] The article was the second most edited English Wikipedia article of 2016. It was reported by Billboard,[28] PCMag,[29] The Verge,[30] and others.

Following Trump's election, his article was the second most viewed English Wikipedia article of 2017, at 29.6 million views, and was covered in reporting by Mashable,[31] Newshub,[32] VentureBeat,[33] and others. In 2018, the article was covered for image vandalism.[34]