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platzapS

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Wikipedia? It's generally pretty neutral especially on big controversial subjects, because competing partisans cancel each other out. At any one time, though, an article may have been recently vandalized by a crazy who says "abortion is worse than nuking the world" or "abortion is the ultimate sacrament". The vast majority of the time, you'll just get "Abortion is a medical procedure...that causes controversy due to..."
 
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Ryal Kane

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Everything is going to have some bias, but the larger your pool of contributors, the more things are going to balance out. Correction is very quick, often scarily so.
I was once looking up countries by order of landmass. I went back to double check the page and discovered that someone had put 'AMERCIA WOO!' at number one. I refreshed the page and it had been corrected.

A copycat like conservipedia is blatantly biased, even from it's title, yet pretends to be as fair and balanced as Fox. Where controversy or argument exists, wiki points them out.
 
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Skaloop

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Biased maybe only in that Wikipedia is an internet phenomenon, and ergo its contributors probably skew younger than the population at large. Younger people in general do tend to be more liberal, less religious, that sort of thing.

But as mentioned, input can come from all along the spectrum, so the extremists sort of cancel each other out.

Wikipedia biased? Probably. But bias is everywhere, and Wikipedia is no more so than any other legitimate source of information might be.
 
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cantata

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<rant>

"Wiki" is a noun (or a suffix or a prefix) referring to a kind of website which can be edited with a simplified markup language by anyone who uses it. It doesn't refer solely to Wikipedia and shouldn't be used to do so. Wikipedia wasn't even the first wiki. So if you mean Wikipedia, flipping write "Wikipedia".

</rant>

In other news, it's pretty easy to sort out when Wikipedia is especially partisan, if you read it with a measure of critical ability. It may simply be incorrect on points of fact now and again, but checking the references of an article can help. It shouldn't be relied upon, but it is a useful source for beginning your research into a subject and a well-referenced article should be considered fairly reliable.

In other words, user discretion is recommended.
 
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David Brider

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The two things Wikipedia has in its favour are its insistence on a.) everything being NPOV (neutral point of view), to attempt to eliminate bias within the articles, and on b.) statements being backed up by citations (so people can't just make facts up out of thin air).

Counting against this is the very nature of Wikipedia itself, that (virtually) anyone can write and contribute to and edit articles, which means that some articles can be badly vandalised, even though they may be fixed later. And also some articles seem to slip through the quality threshold (at least one I've read recently seemed more like marketing blurb than an encyclopadia article, and I'd've attempted an edit but it would probably have required starting from scratch).

I think on the whole, though, it tends to be fairly unbiased.

David.
 
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please define the act of being "biased." everyone has their own point of view, even when he or she is attempting to completely non-partial. wiki, i personally believe (oh the irony), is very close to unbiased. as much as it--and thus, the people--can, wiki is extremely factual. of course, there are some of the more "backwater" articles that no sane person would ever heed. but that's another story
 
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SallyNow

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QFT.

Wikipedia is a great place for quick, general knowledge, but for indepth study one still needs to actually go to a library and do things like read books, magazines, newspapers, and peer-reviewed articles.
 
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WatersMoon110

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It's very slightly liberal - most likely for the reasons Skaloop pointed out. It's about as fair as any other source, however.
In fact, Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Are there some biased articles on Wikipedia? Of course. Especially right after the Colbert Nation is told to claim that elephants are overpopulated, or any other situation when a given group feels the need to edit an article to further their given agenda. But there are just as many (if not more) people who basically dedicate their time to fixing biased articles and any vandalism (and articles that are constantly vandalized are often made harder to edit).

On the whole, I would state with some confidence that Wikipedia is not biased; and is not usually biased for very long, even if a biased person edits a given article.
 
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