WikiProject Countering systemic bias

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Category	WikiProject Countering systemic bias
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The Wikipedia project suffers systemic bias that naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting an imbalanced coverage of a subject, thereby discriminating against the less represented demographic groups. See an explanation of systemic bias on Wikipedia for how this may impact articles and content. This project aims to control and (possibly) eliminate the cultural perspective gaps made by the systemic bias, consciously focusing upon subjects and points of view neglected by the encyclopedia as a whole. A list of articles needing attention is in the CSB Open Tasks list.

Generally, this project concentrates upon remedying omissions (entire topics, or particular sub-topics in extant articles) rather than on either (1) protesting against inappropriate inclusions, or (2) trying to remedy issues of how material is presented. Thus, the first question is "What haven't we covered yet?", rather than "how should we change the existing coverage?"

See further reading for studies, statistics, or other information that demonstrate contributor or subject imbalances.

[edit] Tasks

There are many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:

• Sign up as a participant and mention any interests you may have related to "Countering systemic bias" (CSB).
• Add the Open Tasks box ({{WikiProjectCSBTasks}}) to your User or User talk page to let other people know about the issue.
• Read news articles in as many languages as you know, from as many news sources as you can find, from as many political view points as you can find (especially those that you would normally not read) when examining a topical or recent event or editing an existing article related to a particular subject.
• Don't overlook the official news outlets of a country. Certainly they will be more one sided than wikipedians may like, but they may provide a different way of thinking about an article. They may also be useful as a primary source of information about why the government of that particular country has its opinion on a subject and why it acts the way it does. The readers of Wikipedia could benefit from this, regardless of whether they agree with that view or not (if they don't, they may use it to find errors in its logic or thinking). For example, official news outlets may be useful indicators of how Mainland China thinks about Tibet or Taiwan. Secondly, they may provide relevant non-controversial information about the country or its leaders which could help in improving the article on that topic, for instance, date and place of birth, occupation of leaders, cultural heritage of, links to and other tidbits which may not be available elsewhere.
• See if there are web pages on a particular subject which were written by people from other countries or cultures. It may provide you other places to look or other points of view to consider.
• Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about whether they are written from an international perspective. If not, you might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by adding content with a different perspective.
• Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against the pages of your natural interests. The net effect of consciously changing one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your "comfort zone" would be substantial.
• Create or edit one of the articles listed on the CSB template.
• If you don't particularly like any of the subjects on the template, our open tasks list has a wide array of articles in need of attention.
• Add to the open tasks list. No one person can fix a system-wide problem, so be sure to tell people when you find needy articles.
• Rotate articles from the open tasks list to the template, and other helpful tidying tasks.
• Check articles to see if they still need work, and if they've been improved move them to the right section or leave a note.
• Give feedback on this WikiProject on the talk page.
• If you're multilingual, add information from Wikipedia articles in other languages to their English Wikipedia counterparts.
• Contribute to articles on under-represented topics that you are familiar with.
• Be careful not to worsen the bias with your deletion nominations. If you are not familiar with a subject area, or it has meaning outside your experience base, discuss your concerns on the talk page or another appropriate forum before making an AfD nomination.
• Change the demographic of Wikipedia. Encourage friends and acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented on Wikipedia to edit. If you are at high school or university, contact a professor in minority, women's, or critical studies, explain the problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write for Wikipedia. Contact minority or immigrant organizations in your area to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to contribute. The worst they could say is, "No". But keep in mind that immigrant organizations may well have a different point of view than the majority of people in the countries they emigrated from (their members may, for example, be members of a minority themselves or may have emigrated because of a disagreement with the government not shared by the majority of the population), which introduces its own systemic bias.

[edit] Related WikiProjects and regional noticeboards

There are several WikiProjects and regional notice boards that have potential to help out in our efforts. We may also eventually want to create new WikiProjects as part of this effort.

• Article Rescue Squadron
• Middle Eastern military history task force
• WikiProject Authors
• WikiProject Biblical Criticism
• WikiProject Biography
• WikiProject Ethnic Groups
• WikiProject Gender Studies
• WikiProject Feminism
• Hinduism-related topics notice board
• WikiProject Islam
• WikiProject Languages
• WikiProject Organized Labour
• WikiProject political figures
• WikiProject Military history
• WikiProject World music (includes tasks to do)

See also:

• Category:WikiProjects relevant for countering systemic bias
• {{Infobox WikiProject}}, which has a |csb=yes parameter putting projects in that category

[edit] Africa

• Africa-related regional notice board

These are the African WikiProjects.

[edit] Latin America

• Argentina-related regional notice board
• WikiProject Mexican-Americans
• Caribbean Wikipedians' notice board
• WikiProject Echo, which translates pages from other WikiProjects

These are the Latin American WikiProjects.

Latin America and the Caribbean topic templates North America Mexico Central America Belize Costa Rica El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua Panama Caribbean Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Cuba Dominica Dominican Republic Grenada Haiti Jamaica Puerto Rico1 St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Trinidad and Tobago South America Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Guyana Paraguay Peru Suriname Uruguay Venezuela Dependencies not included.   1 Defined as a semi-autonomous territory.

[edit] Asia

These are the Asian WikiProjects.

Also

• Middle East, under Category:WikiProject Middle East
• Notice board for Pakistan-related topics
• Notice board for India-related topics
• Indonesia-related topics notice board|topics notice board
• Thailand-related topics notice board

[edit] Europe

• WikiProject Basque
• WikiProject Belarus
• WikiProject Bulgaria
• WikiProject Estonia
• WikiProject Galicia
• WikiProject Latvia
• WikiProject Moldova
• WikiProject Netherlands

[edit] Other projects

• meta:Wikimedia urban postering campaign
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Interlanguage Links/Ideas from the Hebrew Wikipedia - a project in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and in the first stages of being exported to other languages, to add interlanguage links to articles which don't have them. One of its positive side effects is that it facilitates writing articles about the culture specific to that language.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Mathematics

[edit] Related cleanup templates

The template {{globalize}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/Northern}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/UK}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/USA}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/Canada}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/South Africa}} may be placed to produce

The template {{globalize/North America}} may be placed to produce

The template {{overcoverage}} may be placed to produce

The template {{toofewopinions}} may be placed to produce

The template {{recentism}} may be placed to produce

The template {{religion primary}} may be placed to produce

See Template:Globalize for a list of region- and bias-specific sub-templates similar to {{globalize/UK}} and {{globalize/USA}}.

When these templates are used they should be accompanied by a brief note on the talk page to outline what exactly you feel needs to be addressed.

[edit] Members

Please add your name to the members page.

If you have specific interests relating to Countering Systematic Bias, feel free to briefly describe them there or on the this Wikiproject's talk page so we can get a sense of the strengths of the project.

[edit] See also

• No abstract available bias
• FUTON bias
• Wikipedia:Translation
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Global perspective
• Wikipedia:CSB Collaboration of the Week (inactive)
• Wikipedia:University of Würzburg survey, 2005 (old)
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies/Countering Systemic Gender Bias (inactive)
• Wikipedia:Geographic imbalance

[edit] Further reading

• Floating Sheep Collective's report "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" (pdf) is available from Visualizing Data at the Oxford Internet Institute and discusses places and time periods which Wikipedia articles tend to focus on or ignore.
• Wikipedia edits visualized shows the locations of editors worldwide as they edit on the randomly selected day of May 10, 2011.
• "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica" by Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue in the International Journal of Communication
• "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance" a conference paper by Lam, Uduwage, Dong, Sen, Musicant, Terveen, and Riedl. (commentary on this from Signpost)
• "Gender Gap: Recapping some basics about what we're doing" a note by Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director

WikiProject Countering systemic bias open tasks This project creates new articles and improves neglected ones.

Review and Improve: Eastern Europe · Central Europe · Medical assistant · Hoda Barakat · Persian women's movement · Roch Marc Christian Kaboré · Cultural Practice · Covance · History of East Asia · White pride · Ryke Geerd Hamer · Western Painting · American exceptionalism · American (word) · BRIC · Origin of AIDS Requests: Heather Dean · Marcel Météore · Oscar Pill · Sorbian literature Expand: Henrique Abranches · Ti-Grace Atkinson · List of Muslim educational institutions · Muntaqim v. Coombe · Turbi massacre · International labour standards · National Unity Party · Álvaro Mutis · African Progress Union · Surojana Sethabutra · Rachel Foster Avery · Media Awareness Network Update: Ivorian Civil War · Cotonou · Banjul · Darfur conflict · Stay-at-home dad · Ituri conflict other tasks | edit