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* [[Funding bias]] in scientific studies also known as the [[agent-principle dilemma]]. |
* [[Funding bias]] in scientific studies also known as the [[agent-principle dilemma]]. |
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* [[Medical bias]] is also known as a physician having a [[conflict of interest]].<ref>Cain, D.M. and Detsky, A.S. [http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/299/24/2893 Everyone's a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians)] ''JAMA'' 2008;299(24):2893-289.</ref> |
* [[Medical bias]] is also known as a physician having a [[conflict of interest]].<ref>Cain, D.M. and Detsky, A.S. [http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/299/24/2893 Everyone's a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians)] ''JAMA'' 2008;299(24):2893-289.</ref> |
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This list covers a wide range of bias in the English Wikipedia website.{{Citation needed|date=August 2012}} Although Wikipedia claims to have credibility{{Citation needed|date=August 2012}} because anyone can edit it, in fact the website represents the viewpoint of its most strident and persistent editors.{{Citation needed|date=August 2012}} This list together with the sublists linked below{{Vague|date=August 2012}} provide a wide variety of examples of the resulting bias. |
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On August 23, 2011, [[David Swindle]] published an article at ''[[FrontPage Magazine]]'' detailing how [[Wikipedia]] has been taken over by the [[Leftist|political left]]; he cited statistics relating to Wikipedia's articles on [[Anne Coulter]], [[Michael Moore]], [[Glenn Beck]] and [[Keith Olbermann]], which helped demonstrate that Wikipedia has a leftist bias, and he discussed the [[liberal]]/leftist cultural foundations of Wikipedia.<ref name="fpm">[http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/23/how-the-left-conquered-wikipedia-part-1/ How the left conquered Wikipedia - Part 1], ''FrontPage Magazine''</ref> |
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For example, Swindle wrote: |
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<blockquote>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?<ref name="fpm" /></blockquote> |
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The project was initiated by [[atheist]] and [[entrepreneur]] [[Jimmy Wales]] and the [[agnosticism|agnostic]] [[philosophy]] [[professor]] [[Larry Sanger]] on January 15, 2001.<ref>http://www.nndb.com/lists/288/000092012/</ref> An irony of internet history is that Jimmy Wales, despite being an atheist, refers to himself as Wikipedia's "spiritual leader".<ref>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/wikimedia_pron_purge/</ref> Despite its official "neutrality policy," Wikipedia has a strong liberal bias. In his ''[[WorldNetDaily]]'' article entitled "Wikipedia lies, slander continue", [[Joseph Farah]] stated Wikipedia "is not only a provider of inaccuracy and bias. It is wholesale purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever known."<ref>http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=83640</ref> According to ''WorldNetDaily''{{Citation needed|date=August 2012}} (of which he is the editor in chief), Farah has repeatedly been the victim of defamation at the Wikipedia website. In December of 2010, Christian blogger [[JP Holding]] called Wikipedia "the abomination that causes misinformation" in his blog. |
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==See also== |
==See also== |
Revision as of 07:43, 6 August 2012
Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of (possibly equally valid) alternatives. Anything biased generally is one-sided, and therefore lacks a neutral point of view. Bias can come in many forms.
In statistics
In judgment and decision making
A cognitive bias is the human tendency to make systematic decisions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These processes include information-processing shortcuts, motivational factors, and social influence. [1] Such biases can result from information-processing shortcuts called heuristics. They include errors in judgment, social attribution, and memory. Cognitive biases are a common outcome of human thought, and often drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. It is a phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology.
In the media
Media bias is the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media, in the selection of which events and stories are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative (Newton 1989). Since it is impossible to report everything, selectivity is inevitable. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries. Market forces that result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, concentration of media ownership, the selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience, and pressure from advertisers.
Political bias has been a feature of the mass media since its birth with the invention of the printing press. The expense of early printing equipment restricted media production to a limited number of people. Historians have found that publishers often served the interests of powerful social groups.[2]
Other aspects
- Economic: When People/Government interpret a law/contract in their favor for economic reasons.
- Inductive bias in machine learning.
- Cultural bias: interpreting and judging phenomena in terms particular to one's own culture.
- Racism, regionalism and tribalism: Judging people or phenomena associated with people based on the race/ethnicity, region of origin, or tribe of the people, rather than based on more objective criteria.
- Sexism: Judging based on gender, rather than on more objective criteria.
- Sensationalist:Favouring the exceptional over the ordinary. However this sentence structure makes is sound like an appeal to popularity or normalcy fallacy. This is actually a more complex problem, whereby, the proponent elevates the importance of the evidence to more subjects than it is relevant. This is accomplished by willfull bias, assumption or, putting conclusion ahead of evidence. In practice, this includes emphasizing, distorting, or fabricating exceptional news stories to boost popularity.
- Funding bias in scientific studies also known as the agent-principle dilemma.
- Medical bias is also known as a physician having a conflict of interest.[3]
See also
- Prejudice
- Impartiality
- List of cognitive biases
- Scholarly method
- Source criticism
- Weasel word
- Detection theory
- Experimenter's bias
- Social desirability bias
- Political correctness
References
- ^ Wilcox, C. W. (2011) Bias: The Unconscious Deceiver. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation.
- ^ Ann Heinrichs, The Printing Press (Inventions That Shaped the World), p. 53, Franklin Watts, 2005, ISBN 0-531-16722-4, ISBN 978-0-531-16722-9
- ^ Cain, D.M. and Detsky, A.S. Everyone's a Little Bit Biased (Even Physicians) JAMA 2008;299(24):2893-289.