Notable findings include factual accuracy similar to other encyclopedias, the presence of cultural and gender bias as well as gaps in coverage of the Global South; that a tiny minority of editors produce the majority of content; various models for understanding online conflict; and limited correlation between Wikipedia trends and various phenomena such as stock market movements or electoral results.
That is, they appear to be doing more than just fixing spelling errors or reformatting citationsAn Argumentation conference paper (2010) assessed whether trust in Wikipedia is based on epistemic or pragmatic merits.
[6] In details, the author argued that Wikipedia can't be trusted based on individual expertise, collective knowledge, or past experience of reliability.
Editing Wikipedia may largely be confined to an elite group of editors, without aggregating "wisdom of the crowd" which in some cases lowers the quality of an article anyway.
Personal experiences and empirical studies, confirmed by incidents including Seigenthaler biography controversy, point to the conclusion that Wikipedia is not generally reliable.
Second, transparent developments of policies, practices, institutions, and technologies in addition to conspicuous massive efforts, address the possible concerns that one might have in trusting Wikipedia.
The concerns raised include the definition of provided knowledge, preventing distorted contributions from people not sharing the same commitment, correcting editing damages, and article quality control and improvement.
[further explanation needed] Research has consistently shown that Wikipedia systematically over-represents a point of view (POV) belonging to a particular demographic described as the "average Wikipedian", who is an educated, technically inclined, English speaking white male, aged 15–49 from a developed Christian country in the northern hemisphere.
[12] Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Wikipedia's users regarding controversial topics.
[14][15] Research conducted in 2009 by the Oxford Internet Institute showed that geotagged articles in all language editions of Wikipedia covered about half a million places on Earth.
[18][19] Some studies have investigated the work of WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB),[20] which is a collective effort of some Wikipedia editors to broaden the encyclopedia's POV.
"[11] The textual content and the structured hierarchy of Wikipedia has become an important knowledge source for researchers in natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
In 2007 researchers at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology developed a technique called Explicit Semantic Analysis[21] which uses the world knowledge contained in English Wikipedia articles.
Topics in other languages causing most controversy were Croatia (German), Ségolène Royal (French), Chile (Spanish) and Homosexuality (Czech).
[26] A 2007 study by Hitwise, reproduced in Time magazine,[27] found that visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 male/female, but that 60% of edits are made by male editors.
A 2007 joint peer-reviewed study[30] conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and HP Labs examined how policies are employed and how contributors work towards consensus by quantitatively analyzing a sample of active talk pages.
Illustrative of its broader findings, the report presented the following two extracts from Wikipedia talk pages in obvious contrast: is the mean ... not considered original research?
[U5] From WP:NOR "articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published arguments, concepts, data, ideas or statements that serves to advance a position."
A fifth power play category was analyzed; it consisted of blatant violations of policy that were forgiven because the contributor was valued for his or her contributions despite his lack of respect for rules.
I have over 7,000 edits ... As you know, I can take credit for almost entirely writing from scratch 2 of the 6 or 7 FAs in philosophy [U24] The study finds that there are contributors who consistently and successfully violate policy without sanction: U24 makes several blatant "us or them" vies for power: if U25's actions persist, he will leave. ...
There is a scarcity of contributors with the commitment to consistently produce high-quality content; the Wikipedian community is willing to tolerate abuse and policy violations if valued work is being done.
Do you also support U25's vie that the article is "poor", that is needs to overhauled from top to bottom, the meanignlsess nonsens that he actually did try to insert above or the other OR that he has stated on this page?
[U26] In 2008, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University devised a probit model of English Wikipedia editors who had successfully passed the peer review process to become admins.
The paper observed that despite protestations to the contrary, "in many ways election to admin is a promotion, distinguishing an elite core group from the large mass of editors."
In contrast, each edit to an Arbitration or Mediation committee page, or a Wikiquette notice, all of which are venues for dispute resolution, decreases the likelihood of success by 0.1%.
Participation in Wikipedia policy and WikiProjects was not predictive of adminship prior to 2006, suggesting the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination.
[42] DBpedia uses structured content extracted from infoboxes of Wikipedia articles in different languages by machine learning algorithms to create a resource of linked data in a Semantic Web.
[43] In a study published in PLoS ONE[44] Taha Yasseri from Oxford Internet Institute and his colleagues from Central European University have shown that the page view statistics of articles about movies are well correlated with the box office revenue of them.
[45] In a work published in Scientific Reports in 2013,[46] Helen Susannah Moat, Tobias Preis and colleagues demonstrated a link between changes in the number of views of English Wikipedia articles relating to financial topics and subsequent large US stock market moves.
[47][48] In an article published in Public Opinion Quarterly,[49] Benjamin K. Smith and Abel Gustafon have shown that the data on Wikipedia pageviews can improve traditional election forecasting methods like polls.