WIKIPEDIA MORE BIASED THAN ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA: Scholars find Wikipedia is more left-leaning. Surprise!

Perhaps the most interesting finding of Zhu and Greenstein’s research is that the more times an article is revised on Wikipedia, the less bias it is likely to show—directly contradicting the theory that ideological groups might self-select over time into increasingly biased camps.

“The data suggests that people are engaging in conversation with each other online, even though they have different points of view,” says Zhu. “The crowd does exhibit some wisdom, so to speak, to self-correct bias.”

The number of revisions required to start showing this effect, however, is quite large—at least 2,000 edits—and the articles most read by users aren’t necessarily those most revised by editors. “To some extent, we are not seeing the scenario where too many cooks spoil the broth, we are mostly seeing an insufficient number of cooks,” says Zhu.

hat-tip Matthew