Wikipedia:Systemic bias

This is an explanatory essay about Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

Shortcut WP:BIAS

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia aims for a neutral point of view, but it falls short due to systemic bias caused by the narrow demographics of its editing community. This bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.

Wikipedia strives for a neutral point of view, both in terms of the articles that are created and the content, perspectives and sources within those articles. However, the encyclopedia fails in this goal because of systemic bias created by the editing community's narrow social and cultural demographic. Bias can be either implicit when articles or information are missing from the encyclopedia, or explicit when an article's content or sources are biased. This essay addresses issues of systemic bias specific to the English Wikipedia.

As a result of systemic bias, Wikipedia underrepresents the perspectives of people in the Global South, people who lack adequate access to the internet or a serviceable computer, and people who do not have free time to edit the encyclopedia. Topics for which reliable sources are not recently published, easily available online, and in English are systematically underrepresented, and Wikipedia tends to show a White Anglo-American^[1] perspective on issues due to the preponderance of English-speaking editors from Anglophone countries. The perspectives of women are also underrepresented.

While there are some external factors that contribute to systemic bias (such as availability of sources and disproportionate global media coverage of events in predominantly white Anglophone countries), there is also a vast body of critical and decolonial scholarship that offers broader perspectives than those that are presently available on Wikipedia. These peer-reviewed studies provide reliable sources that are relatively easy to incorporate into the encyclopedia and have enormous potential for countering systemic bias.^[2]