Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica? — HBS Working Knowledge

"For more than a century, the long, stately rows of Encyclopædia Britannica have been a fixture on the shelves of many an educated person's home—the smooshed-together diphthong in the first word a symbol of old-world erudition and gravitas. So it was a shock to many when, in 2012, the venerable institution announced it would no longer publish a print version of its multivolume compendium of knowledge. Though the Britannica would still be available online, the writing on the virtual wall was clear: It had been supplanted by the Internet. And more specifically, by an upstart phenomenon Wikipedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that since its inception in 2001 had rapidly become the new go-to source for knowledge ... But is objectivity better achieved by considering one viewpoint or thousands? Along with cowriter Shane Greenstein of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Zhu asks that question in a new paper, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence fromEncyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia ... Zhu and Greenstein have long been interested in the question of crowd bias, which itself has been hotly debated by scholars in many fields including psychology and politics over the centuries. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Does the collective will of the majority lead to democratic consensus or fundamentalist groupthink?  The massive, ongoing natural experiment of Wikipedia offers a unique view into these questions. 'The Internet makes it so easy for people to aggregate; some scholars worry that people will self-select into groups with a similar ideology,' says Zhu. As a result, the Internet may lead to more biased opinions, which only harden over time as users separate into rival virtual camps.  To test this theory, Zhu and Greenstein took a database of terms developed by University of Chicago economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro to examine newspaper bias. Gentzkow and Shapiro studied speeches in the 2005 Congressional Record to scientifically identify the top 500 unique phrases used by Democrats (e.g., tax breaks, minimum wage, fuel efficiency) and Republicans (e.g., death tax, border security, war on terror), rating each according to political slant.  Zhu and Greenstein then identified some 4,000 articles that appeared in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and determined how many of each of these code words were included, in an effort to determine overall bias and direction ..."