Wikipedia:Systemic bias
However, the encyclopedia fails in this goal because of systemic bias created by the editing community's narrow social and cultural demographic.
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.
These peer-reviewed studies provide reliable sources that are relatively easy to incorporate into the encyclopedia and have enormous potential for countering systemic bias.
"[10] Groups who lack access to information technology, schooling, and education include African Americans and Latinos in the U.S., Indigenous peoples in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and poorer populations of India, among others.
The VisualEditor offered by the Wikimedia Foundation for many of its projects (including the English Wikipedia), is buggy and increases load times.
MediaWiki's functionality and Wikipedia's policies and guidelines were primarily designed for editors using desktop web browsers.
Maps of geotagged Wikipedia articles and geolocated images on Wikimedia Commons show notable gaps in comparison to the density of items in the GeoNames database.
Sources published in a medium that is both widely available and familiar to editors, such as a news website, are more likely to be used than those from esoteric or foreign-language publications regardless of their reliability.
For example, a 2007 story on the BBC News website is more likely to be cited than a 1967 edition of the Thai Post or Večernje novosti.
A 2015 survey[16] of material from 2000 U.S. newspapers and online news found that:[17] Wikipedia started with a vision, a "radical idea", later expressed by cofounder Jimmy Wales: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
That means that when editors edit neutrally, Wikipedia content will reflect the biases found in reliable sources.
Read about other people's perspectives, work to understand your own biases, and try to represent Wikipedia's NPOV policy in your editing.
Where such English-language press is not available, automated translation, though imperfect and error-prone, can enable you access articles in many languages, and may be a reasonably adequate substitute.
There is a vast body of critical and decolonial scholarship that offers much 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.
