Can we consider Wikipedia the most unbiased reference?

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3 Answers
Mindy McAdams
Mindy McAdams, I worked in journalism from 1984 to 1999. Now I teach courses about online journalism at a large U.S. unive...
Answered 294w ago · Author has 63 answers and 73.5k answer views
As a journalist and journalism educator, I would not consider ANY source to be unbiased. Every person has biases. Every organization has biases. Sometimes the bias is obvious. More often, it is subtle and complex, and so it may be hard to see.

Each Wikipedia article can have many authors and many editors. That should help to remove all biases -- but human nature doesn't work exactly like that. It's always possible that all the writers and editors on one Wikipedia article shared similar biases, and if those are subtle, they might be hard to detect.

A good journalist will always check any fact or assertion with at least two sources. Many Wikipedia articles cite reliable documents (with links), and each one of those might be considered a source. But a good journalist will also check with some other person, original document, book, institution, etc.

If you don't check it carefully, don't be surprised if you turn out to be spreading false information! This is not a fault of Wikipedia -- all data are suspect until they are checked against multiple sources.
609 Views · View 2 Upvoters · Answer requested by Toto Arahato
Amir E. Aharoni
Amir E. Aharoni, WMF language strategist, developer, PM; Wikipedia editor
Updated 217w ago · Author has 1.9k answers and 3.5m answer views
Wikipedia's content policies give it the potential to be an unbiased source. All added information must be attributed to a reliable source and all the different opinions about controversial subject are supposed to be presented fairly. When a lot of people are editing an article about an important, current or controversial topic, over time that article is likely to become less and less biased and more and more reliable.

That is simply the general statistical evolutionary assumption. It doesn't always work. For a very simple example, an article can be in a good shape most of the time, but you may view it a moment after somebody spoiled it in a subtle way. But there's also a rather simple solution for that: if the topic is important for you for some reason, double-check the references in Wikipedia and never trust it blindly.

There is a more general problem, however, which Wikipedians call "Systemic bias". In very general terms, most Wikipedia editors are young men from relatively rich countries who have access to the Internet and who are more knowledgeable about computers than an average person. This means that the Wikipedia has built-in bias against opinions of these groups of people:
  • Women. (Huge heaps of text were written about this. Here's an introduction: Gender gap - Meta.)
  • People over forty years old.
  • People who don't have money to pay an ISP.
  • People who bought a computer ten years ago and don't have money to buy a new one (new versions of Wikipedia's software gradually demand more powerful computers).
  • People who are not technically savvy.
  • People who live in places where the web is censored.
  • People who live in places without any Internet infrastructure.
  • People who don't know any of the major world languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Russian or Indonesian.
There are more disadvantaged groups, of course.

All of these problems can be resolved, but they are very non-trivial. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia's volunteer editors are aware of them and try to resolve them, but it requires a lot of resources.
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M.a.rahman Malik
M.a.rahman Malik, Engineer (2014-present)
Answered 26w ago · Author has 166 answers and 15.6k answer views

Yes it’s biased.. for the reference, have a look

Searched about “Moses” PBUH : Moses (/ˈmoʊzɪz, -zɪs/) was a prophet in the Abrahamic religions..

Searched about “Muhammad” PBUH : Muhammad (Arabic: محمد‎; pronounced [muħammad]; Latinized as Mahometus c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE) was the founder of Islam.

Now, if you study the Islamic literature, the most basic and fundamental believe is:

The last of the Prophets and Messengers is Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), so there is no Prophet after him, as Allaah said:

“Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the Messenger of Allaah and the last (end) of the Prophets”

[al-Ahzaab 33:40]

I used to trust Wikipedia for various information but after this blunder mistake on such an important topic.So,we can easily conclude that Wikipedia is not only unreliable and biased but also a wrong source of information.
Hence it’s always better to cross check the information available on Wikipedia with other reliable sources especially meant for that particular topic.

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