Racial bias on Wikipedia

[2] The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors.

[3] Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa.

[5] Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has argued that the specific focuses in Wikipedia's content are representative of those of society as a whole.

[6] "Studies have shown that content on Wikipedia suffers from the bias of its editors – [who are] mainly technically inclined, English-speaking, white-collar men living in majority-Christian, developed countries in the Northern hemisphere.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) criticized Wikipedia for being "vulnerable to manipulation by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racist academics seeking a wider audience for extreme views.

"[13] According to the SPLC:[13]"Civil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation.

In recent years, the proliferation of far-right online spaces, such as white nationalist forums, alt-right boards and HBD blogs, has created a readymade pool of users that can be recruited to edit on Wikipedia en masse...

The presence of white nationalists and other far-right extremists on Wikipedia is an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away in the near future given the rightward political shift in countries where the majority of the site’s users live".The SPLC cited the article Race and intelligence as an example of the alt-right influence on Wikipedia, stating that at that time the article presented a "false balance" between fringe racialist views and the "mainstream perspective in psychology.

[16] One such edit-a-thon was organized by the White House to create and improve articles on African Americans in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

In 2015, it was reported that the Wikimedia Foundation made numerous grants "to organizations in the 'Global South'—including Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East—with plans to improve [coverage of Global South topics in] Wikipedia.