Abstract
Psychology has accumulated ample evidence for the notion that individual information processing is biased. Little is known, however, about “collective biases.” The chapter presented here takes the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a sample of an outlet for socially negotiated, “collective” representation of events and elaborates on two biases in Wikipedia articles. The first investigation is into whether hindsight bias—the tendency to overestimate in hindsight what was known in foresight—is present in Wikipedia articles about certain events (e.g., the nuclear disaster of Fukushima). We next present evidence for another bias, namely, the biased representations of intergroup conflicts (e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) in the respective language versions of Wikipedia (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic). Although our findings indicate that Wikipedia is not free from bias, they do not suggest that these biases are universal (i.e., in all articles). Moreover, it remains an open question whether the biases we identified under collaborative circumstances (i.e., in Wikipedia) compare in magnitude to individual biases or whether they are attenuated or even possibly amplified in the process of collaboration. We discuss this issue with a view to potential necessary preconditions for collective biases and possible countermeasures.
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Notes
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We would like to point out that the present chapter employs a classically cognitive-psychological perspective (contrary to chapter “Mass Collaboration as Co-Evolution of Cognitive and Social Systems” by Cress, Feinkohl, Jirschitzka, & Kimmerle, 2016 and chapter “What is Knowledge? Who Creates it? Who Possesses it? The Need for Novel Answers to Old Questions” by Oeberst, Kimmerle, & Cress, 2016 that are based on radical constructivism), as it aims at investigating whether phenomena in information processing (here, biases) that have been demonstrated for individuals can be documented in collaboratively authored articles under Wikipedia’s guidelines as well.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability [2015-01-07]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias [2014-12-18]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias in the English Wikipedia and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Diskriminierungsfreie_Wikipedia in the German Wikipedia [2015-01-12]
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Source: http://stats.grok.se. This number includes the Internet traffic to the newly created article “Nuclear disaster of Fukushima Daiichi” to which the elaborations regarding the disaster migrated.
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It is important to note, however, that the case of language versions of Wikipedia is a special one since the same language is sometimes spoken in different countries. This does not only preclude comparisons of different cultural viewpoints on conflicts between countries sharing a language (e.g., the Independence War between the USA and Britain). More importantly, it makes clear that one language version of Wikipedia is not only written by people from one culture. Particularly for languages such as English, Arab, Spanish, and French, which are spoken in many countries, the possibility is high that the authors come from different countries (and for English, for instance, even nonnative speakers are prevalent).
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Oeberst, A., Cress, U., Back, M., Nestler, S. (2016). Individual Versus Collaborative Information Processing: The Case of Biases in Wikipedia. In: Cress, U., Moskaliuk, J., Jeong, H. (eds) Mass Collaboration and Education. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13536-6_9
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