Abstract
Social media enabled collaboration at unprecedented levels. And while research points to the benefits of mass collaboration, it has also revealed challenges and problems. Here we explore biases in collaboratively constructed knowledge. To this end, we compared two online encyclopedias: Wikipedia and the extreme right-wing Metapedia. Both urge users to present topics from a neutral point of view. Using different measures we found that Metapedia articles (vs. Wikipedia articles) are significantly shorter, contain fewer references, contain relatively more anger- and anxiety-related words, rarely present more than one point of view in controversies, and often convey opinions – for inctance, by using pejorative language. Thus, norms might not be very effective in preventing biases – particularly if they largely remain a projection screen.
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Oeberst, A., de Vreeze, J., Cress, U. (2018). The Norm of Neutrality in Collaborative Knowledge Construction. In: Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Wittum, G., Dengel, A. (eds) Positive Learning in the Age of Information. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19567-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19567-0_12
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