I'd like to see a similar study about politicians not from the modern Western countries, but from the Nazi Germany. There were left-wing politicians, like communists and liberals, and right-wing politicians, like fascists and conservatives. Would there be more negative covarage of the right-wing politicians? Perhaps 1000% more claims of organizing mass murders and so on? Would the author also write that "these trends constitute suggestive evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles"? All these studies of left-right bias without considering the reality are such a bullshit. Wikisaurus (talk) 15:54, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of course Wikipedia has a left-leaning bias. People who spend all day online usually happen to be younger folk, who in turn happen to be more left-leaning folk. That much is obvious, and tends to be agreed upon. However, what many people don't really agree with is that we really let our biases affect our editing. We tend to use more liberal sources and deprecate conservative ones, while pretending that there is no motive behind it. Hell, the amount of times I've heard the phrase "reality has a left-leaning bias" makes it clear that NPOV gets routinely ignored. When the right attacks Wikipedia, they're completely correct. Not that it should matter, but I am writing this as a leftist. It's embarrassing to be a Wikipedian. Dialmayo18:04, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Dialmayo: Perhaps because left-leaning sources are more WP:RELIABLE than right-wing sources? Perhaps because the Overton window has shifted so much that sources considered left-wing are very close to the centrum or even right-wing, and sources considered right-wing are far right? That is the reality in the US, and this wiki is very Americentric. In any case, sentiment analysis is an art, not a science, so we should take this report by conservative think-tank (who clearly has a dog in this fight) with a giant grain of salt. Polygnotus (talk) 18:16, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just to be clear what I'm arguing against, your claim is that the Overton window has shifted right-ward? In the United States? Over what time period? Any key topics here? Jweiss11 (talk) 03:57, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Polygnotus, yes, the 2023 discussion on my talk page with Viriditas contains much of the argument I would make here. If the "left–right political spectrum is too much of an abstraction to be helpful in any serious discussion", then why did you use it in your opening comment here? Seems it would be impossible to have a meaningful discussion about Overton window shifts without employing some sort of directional political spectrum. This spectrum doesn't have to be one-dimensional, but it has to have at least one! And the more dimensions it has, more difficult it's going to be for participants to conceptualize it, make coherent arguments about it, and follow the arguments of others. Jweiss11 (talk) 12:17, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So you think it's Wikipedia editor's fault that right wing sources are more likely to put out misinformation and false stories? Our reliability rules are incredibly transparent and they are applied equally. SilverserenC18:23, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a non-American, I can tell you that the US right and the right wing media in general have gone off the deep end since Trump. It's not that they just become more extreme in their position, it's that they've become an echo chamber simply disconnected from reality because acknowledging anything that makes Trump looks bad is now a sin, because anything that makes Trump look bad is un-American leftist George Soros-backed Communo-Marxism . Headbomb {t · c · p · b}18:51, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One can argue that being a Wikipedian is itself a rather socialist idea/hobby, so perhaps active editors are to some extent self-selected in that direction. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:31, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People who spend all day online usually happen to be younger folk, who in turn happen to be more left-leaning folk. That much is obvious, and tends to be agreed upon. I hate to be the Ackchyually Guy, but the idea that younger people skew left and become more conservative as they age was debunked about a decade ago. I believe the current thinking on this subject is that people tend to be both hardwired as liberal or conservative and susceptible to environmental influences throughout their life. It is certainly true that the literature is full of "now that I pay taxes, I'm a conservative" anecdotes from the 1980s and up, but it looks more and more like this was conservative propaganda, not hard data. The fact is, the more you explore this question, the more you find the opposite is true in almost equal amounts; younger people also tend to skew conservative (for reasons) and become more liberal as they get older. I think everyone here can agree that information, knowledge, and education are a liberalizing influence, which is why conservatives in the US are against public education and are trying to promote homeschooling and private religious schools. Since the 1980s in the US, conservatism has transformed into a regressive, reactionary, anti-Enlightenment project. Prior to that time, these elements were mostly confined to fringe conservatism. However, the desegregation of schools in the US in the late 1950s and 1960s caused white supremacists to form a coalition with other fringe conservative groups. This includes the rebellion of paleo-conservatives and libertarians against government regulations, particularly environmental restrictions on polluters in the 1970s; opposition by evangelical Christians to taxation by the IRS; and opposition to equal rights for women in the late 1970s. This fringe coalition became a large voting bloc (although still a voting minority that uses the electoral college and voter suppression to win elections). They made great use of culture war wedge issues, like the anti-abortion movement, to draw votes to their side. Prior to this moment, most conservatives in the US supported abortion and were pro-education. Most Americans are not aware of this history. (Surprisingly, the last pro-choice conservatives lasted in the GOP up until the early to mid-1990s until they went extinct.) This new coalition of grievance-motivated conservatives then joined the Reagan Revolution, and with the help of the Koch network, replaced the old values of conservatism with the fringe values. Sadly, most people in the US agree that these newer conservative values are anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian, pro-fascist, and anti-American. This is where we are today. Recently, and in an altogether fresh approach, Rachel Maddow has investigated the much narrower history of right-wing extremism during the 1930s and 1940s, greatly expanding our knowledge of how foreign-influence operations have played a large role in US politics on the right. Viriditas (talk) 00:09, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Think about "The sentiment classification rates the mention of a terms as negative, neutral or positive." There's an underlying assumption that the underlying topic is somehow neutral, and that being negative or positive implies being inaccurate or biased. Where then, is there room for a discussion of the merits of a case, or for viewpoints on a particular topic? People can be both critical and correct. If there is a page on (pick your favorite disinformation- or bogus health-related topic), then I would hope that criticism of that incorrect viewpoint would appear on that Wikipedia page. Does being critical of something mean that Wikipedia is unreasonably biased against that topic? Or does it mean that we are doing our job properly? Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 18:36, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's also worth noting that a major goal of disinformation is to undermine trust: in authority, in science, and in information sources, so that people don't know who or what to believe and are incapable of acting effectively. Wikipedia is a major source of information in today's world. We should not take this lightly. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 18:36, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The fundamental problem is things are quickly accelerating, to the point where Wikipedia might be under attack in the very near future. Time to start planning for that scenario now. You don’t need Hari Seldon to see that the future is upon us. Viriditas (talk) 03:08, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[It] classifies Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan as "journalists with the left". Greenwald and Sullivan are both lifelong Republicans who have identified (I believe) as civil libertarians, or right-libertarians. Greenwald and Sullivan have built their entire careers criticizing the Democratic Party. The authors of this study should be embarrassed by their research, and it’s safe to say it can be dismissed as flawed. Viriditas (talk) 00:19, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Viriditas, while Sullivan has been a long-time Republican, I'm pretty certain Greenwald never has been. I suspect maybe at one point he might have been a Democrat. Greenwald can be difficult to pin down. He's definitely some sort of libertarian, which generally has the effect of making him seem right-wing on domestic issues and left-wing on foreign policy. Greenwald took effectively right-wing (or libertarian) positions on mandates and other measures during Covid. But on foreign policy, he like many libertarians, is almost indistinguishable from the "progressive" left in that they paint the United States as some sort on uniquely evil force of death and destruction around the globe. I recently attended a debate in NYC with Greenwald and Alan Dershowitz, in which Greenwald ran significantly to the left of Dershowitz, an actual life-long Democrat, on the topic of US military intervention with the respect to Iran's nuclear program. See: [1]. Jweiss11 (talk) 00:45, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't the opposite true? In 2003, Bill Clinton said: "...Democrats want to fall in love. Republicans just fall in line." Viriditas (talk) 00:57, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The left doesn't "eat its own". It engages in circular firing squads based on who is the biggest victim. That's very different than eating its own and falling in line. Obama in 2019: "One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States...is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, 'Uh, I'm sorry, this is how it's going to be' and then we start sometimes creating what's called a 'circular firing squad', where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues."[3]Viriditas (talk) 01:05, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly, the writer like many accounts that get indeffed very fast has just read the title of the policy and then made assumptions about what the title means. TarnishedPathtalk01:55, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of course a research piece for a American think tank is going to confuse left-wing with liberals. Calling the Democrats, who are strongly is support of capitalism and engage in continuous wars, left-wing is wrong-headed when considering global politics. That the research found positive sentiment for Scott Morrison (a conservative Australian former prime-minister) just makes a joke of the whole argument. TarnishedPathtalk01:53, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We then extract the paragraphs in which those terms occur to provide the context in which the target terms are used and feed a random sample of those text snippets to an LLM (OpenAI’s gpt-3.5-turbo), which annotates the sentiment/emotion with which the target term is used in the snippet. So, it's all bullshit, then. Good to know. XOR'easter (talk) 19:02, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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