Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

The Uncyclopedia logo. Maybe more appropriate for Wikipedia itself now.

Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead.1 The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.”2 The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science. Here are some examples from each of these subjects, which were easy to find, no hunting around. Many, many more could be given.

Wikipedia’s favorite president?

Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find. The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major parties.

In other words—and this is the point crucial to evaluating an article’s neutrality—a neutral article is written not to take sides on issues of controversy. It does not matter whether one or both sides believe their point of view is totally factual and supported with incontrovertible proof. How many times, in politics and in many walks of life, have we seen controversies in which both sides can cite apparently rigorous studies, or chapter and verse, or original source material that, they claim, show their view is absolutely certain? In such cases, a neutral resource like Wikipedia is bound by policy not to take a side. Yet it does.

Political scandals are a good example where sources are carefully lined up on both sides. There were many controversies over “scandals” plaguing Obama’s presidency. But in fact, the only scandals that I could find in Wikipedia’s Obama article were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash. You might find this to be objectively correct, if you are a Democrat; but you cannot claim that this is a neutral treatment, considering that the other major U.S. party would, citing other ostensibly credible sources, treat the subject very differently. On such topics, neutrality in any sense worth the name essentially requires that readers not be able to detect the editors’ political alignment.

Not Wikipedia’s favorite president

Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke. Just for example, there are 5,224 none-too-flattering words in the “Presidency” section. By contrast, the following “Public Profile” (which the Obama article entirely lacks), “Investigations,” and “Impeachment” sections are unrelentingly negative, and together add up to some 4,545 words—in other words, the controversy sections are almost as long as the sections about his presidency. Common words in the article are “false” and “falsely” (46 instances): Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are “false.” Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s incorrect statements as “false,” very well; but then you must admit that you no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia. More to the point, Republican, Trump-supporting views are basically not represented at all in the article on Trump.

I leave the glowing Hillary Clinton article as an exercise for the reader.

On political topics it is easiest to argue for the profound benefits—even the moral necessity—of eliminating bias in reference works. As I argue in my 2015 essay, “Why Neutrality” (updated in Essays on Free Knowledge) we naturally desire neutrality on political and many other topics because we want to be left free to make up our own minds. Reference, news, and educational resources aimed at laying out a subject in general should give us the tools we need to rationally decide what we want to think. Only those who want to force the minds of others can be opposed to neutrality.

“Prior to prohibition, cannabis was available freely in a variety of forms,” says Wikipedia, helpfully.

Wikipedia can be counted on to cover not just political figures, but political issues as well from a liberal-left point of view. No conservative would write, in an abortion article, “When properly done, abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine,” a claim that is questionable on its face, considering what an invasive, psychologically distressing, and sometimes lengthy procedure it can be even when done according to modern medical practices. More to the point, abortion opponents consider the fetus to be a human being with rights; their view, that it is not safe for the baby, is utterly ignored. To pick another, random issue, drug legalization, dubbed drug liberalization by Wikipedia, has only a little information about any potential hazards of drug legalization policies; it mostly serves as a brief for legalization, followed by a catalog of drug policies worldwide. Or to take an up-to-the-minute issue, the LGBT adoption article includes several talking points in favor of LGBT adoption rights, but omits any arguments against. On all such issues, the point is that true neutrality, to be carefully distinguished from objectivity, requires that the article be written in a way that makes it impossible to determine the editors’ position on the important controversies the article touches on.

Gospel reliability is “uncertain,” Wikipedia says, neutrally.

What about articles on religious topics? The first article I thought to look at had some pretty egregious instances of bias: the Jesus article. It simply asserts, again in its own voice, that “the quest for the historical Jesus has yielded major uncertainty on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus.” In another place, the article simply asserts, “the gospels are not independent nor consistent records of Jesus’ life.” A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means they are not neutral for that reason alone. In other words, the very fact that many Christians, including many deeply educated conservative seminarians, believe in the historical reliability of the Gospels, and that they are wholly consistent, means that the article is biased if it simply asserts, without attribution or qualification, that this is a matter of “major uncertainty.” Now, it would be accurate and neutral to say it is widely disputed, but being “disputed” and being “uncertain” are very different concepts. It is in fact a controversial view that the historical accuracy of the Gospels is uncertain; others disagree, holding that, upon analysis, it is not a matter of significant uncertainty. In other respects, the article can be fairly described as a “liberal” academic discussion of Jesus, focusing especially on assorted difficulties and controversies, while failing to explain traditional, orthodox, or fundamentalist views of those issues. So it might be “liberal academic,” but it ignores conservative academic and traditional views. Therefore, what it is not is neutral, not in the original sense we defined for Wikipedia.

Of course, similarly tendentious claims can be found in other articles on religious topics, as when the Christ (title) article claims,

Although the original followers of Jesus believed Jesus to be the Jewish messiah, e.g. in the Confession of Peter, Jesus was usually referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth” or “Jesus, son of Joseph”.[11] Jesus came to be called “Jesus Christ” (meaning “Jesus the Khristós”, i.e. “Jesus the Messiah” or “Jesus the Anointed”) by later Christians, who believe that his crucifixion and resurrection fulfill the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.

This article weirdly claims, or implies, a thing that no serious Biblical scholar of any sort would claim, viz., that Jesus was not given the title “Christ” by the original Apostles in the New Testament. The Wikipedia article itself later contradicts that claim, so perhaps the editors of the above paragraph simply meant the two conjoined words “Jesus Christ,” and that Jesus was rarely referred to with those two conjoined words in the New Testament. But this is false, too: the two words are found together in that form throughout the New Testament.

But the effect of the above-quoted paragraph is to cast doubt that the title “Christ” was used much at all by the original Apostles and disciples. That would be silly if so. These supposed “later Christians” who used “Christ” would have to include the Apostles Peter (Jesus’ first apostle), Paul (converted a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion), and Jude (Jesus’ brother), who were the authors of the bulk of the epistles of the New Testament. The word “Christ” can, of course, be found frequently in the epistles, including very early epistles, thought to be the first texts written about Jesus.3 Of course, those are not exactly “later Christians.” If the claim is simply that the word “Christ” does not appear at all or much in the Gospels, that is false, as a simple text search uncovers dozens of instances in all four Gospels,4 and about 550 instances in the entire New Testament. If it is used somewhat less in the Gospels, that would be a reflection of the fact that the authors of the Gospels were, argumentatively, using the Hebrew word “Messiah” to persuade Jewish readers that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish messiah. But the word means much the same as the Greek title “Christ”: the anointed one, God’s chosen. So, in any event, the basic claim here is simply false. He is called “Jesus Christ” (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ) in the very first verse of the New Testament (Matthew 1:1) and in the first verse of the gospel sometimes thought to be the first-written, Mark (1:1), as well.5

Or if the claim were that Jesus was not understood to be the Messiah or Christ in his own lifetime before being crucified, we need not quibble about that (though it is easy enough to cite the gospel claims that Peter believed him to be the Christ; see, e.g., Mark 8:29). The book of Acts and the epistles make it abundantly clear that the Apostles, setting up the earliest churches, thought Jesus was the Messiah—indeed, the Son of God.

Clearly, Wikipedia’s claims are tendentious if not false, and represent a point of view that many if not most Christians would rightly dispute.

It may seem more problematic to speak of the bias of scientific articles, because many people do not want to see “unscientific” views covered in encyclopedia articles. If such articles are “biased in favor of science,” some people naturally find that to be a feature, not a bug. The problem, though, is that scientists sometimes do not agree on which theories are and are not scientific. This point is perfectly obvious to anyone who actually follows any lively scientific debate at all closely. On such issues, the “scientific point of view” and the “objective point of view” according to the Establishment might be very much opposed to neutrality. So when certain people seem unified on a certain view of a scientific controversy, then that is the view that is taken for granted as the Establishment one, and often aggressively asserted, by Wikipedia.

Neutral information, representing a scientific consensus with no dissent, I’m sure.

The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject. Another example is how Wikipedia treats various topics in alternative medicine—often dismissively, and frequently labeled as “pseudoscience” in Wikipedia’s own voice. Indeed, Wikipedia defines the very term as follows: “Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.” In all these cases, genuine neutrality requires a different sort of treatment.

Again, other examples could be found, in no doubt thousands of other, less exciting topics. These are just the first topics that came to mind, associated as they are with the culture wars, and their articles on those topics put Wikipedia very decidedly on one side of that war. You should not be able to say that about an encyclopedia that claims to be neutral.

It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). At the very least they should admit that that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one.6 It might be better to embrace a “credibility” policy and admit that their notion of what is credible does, in fact, bias them against conservatism, traditional religiosity, and minority perspectives on science and medicine—to say nothing of many other topics on which Wikipedia has biases.

Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to make any such change; they live in a fantasy world of their own making.7

The world would be better served by an independent and decentralized encyclopedia network, such as I proposed with the Encyclosphere. We will certainly develop such a network, but if it is to remain fully independent of all governmental and big corporate interests, funds are naturally scarce and it will take time.

Here is a follow-up article (June 2021).
And here is another (June 2023).


  1. The misbegotten phrase “neutral point of view” is a Jimmy Wales coinage I never supported. If a text is neutral with regard to an issue, it lacks any “point of view” with regard to the issue; it does not take a “neutral point of view.” My preferred phrase was always “the neutrality policy” or “the nonbias policy.”[]
  2. On this, see my “Why Neutrality?“, published 2015 by Ballotpedia.[]
  3. Both in the form “Jesus Christ” (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1, Jude 1:1) and in the form “Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2). “Christ” is found throughout three epistles widely held to be among the first written, including Galatians and 1 Thessalonians, and twice in James.[]
  4. I mistakenly conceded this false point in an earlier draft of this article, after not searching enough. Greek nominative and accusative Χριστόν and genitive Χριστοῦ can be found throughout.[]
  5. If you look at the footnote Wikipedia cites in support of its weird claim, you will find a sensible, not-misleading, and relatively neutral article by Britannica, the context of which makes it perfectly clear that the authors were not making any claim about the use of the title “Christ” but instead the two-word combination “Jesus Christ,” as applied directly to Jesus in his own lifetime. It seems likely that that two-word name was used rarely, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with his having the title “Christ,” but a reflection of the fact that “Ancient Jews usually had only one name, and, when greater specificity was needed, it was customary to add the father’s name or the place of origin.” Wikipedians copying from Britannica may have missed that bit.[]
  6. That it was Wikipedia’s original notion, see the Nupedia “Lack of Bias” policy, which was the source of Wikipedia’s policy, and see also my final (2001) version of the Wikipedia neutrality policy. Read my “Why Neutrality?” for a lengthy discussion of this notion. Both articles appear in slightly revised and footnoted versions in my recent book.[]
  7. UPDATE: In an earlier version of this blog post, I included some screenshots of Wikipedia Alexa rankings, showing a drop from 5 to 12 or 13. While this is perfectly accurate, the traffic to the site has been more or less flat for years, until the last few months, in which traffic spiked probably because of the Covid-19 virus. But since the drop in Alexa rankings do not seem to reflect a drop in traffic, I decided to remove the screenshots and a couple accompanying sentences.[]

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Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

290 responses to “Wikipedia Is Badly Biased”

  1. Winston Smith

    There will always be a subset of people, often well represented within intelligensia, who are entirely unable to be objective. They in fact gravitate to neutral domains in order to impose their bias, such as at Wiki. It only takes a small excess number of such to outweigh, or by sheer will, outdo their opponents, and to slant Wiki one way or another. They often win the numbers debate simply because they are the only ones willing to go the distance in slanting a view towards one side. Activism sometimes wins because only an activist would bother being so fanatical about being biased in the first place. The person who wants to suppress can be louder than the person who wants to express. But mostly, the person who wants to suppress is most willing to distort and even cheat in order to do it….Without strong regulation, Wiki would devolve to survival of the fittest ideas, which means ideas would prosper which attract the most people, rather than those ideas which are the most accurate or true.

  2. […] a May blog post, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger declared that the site’s “neutral point of view” (NPOV) […]

  3. Richard

    Below is an email I sent to Wikipedia today

    The Dream is Dead

    Given Wikipedia’s recent policy to censor Fox News I will no longer be a yearly contributor. It is a shame that Marxist pirates have seized your wonderful site and sailed off into oblivion. I know Wikipedia didn’t survive on my $12 to $20 bucks a year but I will no longer contribute. Please strike name from your donor records.

  4. Sigit Mursidi

    Mr. Sanger,
    I cannot thank you enough for your blog and article on Wikipedia. I tried recently to contribute an edit to an entry that obviously very dismissive about a media person (Lionel Nation), I was reprimanded and my entry was deleted. Anything that contradicts the mainstream left’s view is immediately dismissed as “conspiracy theory” and will be deleted, and the contributors banned. I don’t see why I need to believe Wikipedia anymore. It was sad that the baby that you helped deliver has grown up indoctrinated and hijacked by the lefties globalists and their agenda. I can’t help think that we should initiate something else, a sort of a middle-of-the road Wikibalanced thing. I learned a lot from you how a great idea and hard work could easily be hijacked, and stolen.

    1. Christopher Beland

      Lionel Nation is a promoter of 9/11, anti-vaccine, and QAnon conspiracy theories. These are not designated as conspiracy theories because they contradict a political view; they are verifiably false, and have the defining hallmark of a conspiracy theory, which is that they would require an implausible number of people to be involved to be true, in addition to lacking supporting evidence.

  5. Anton

    Personally I haven’t noticed that Wikipedia is biased on religion and science. For instance, in the example about the reliability of the Gospels, yes, Christians obviously believe that they are reliable, but non-Christian academics, atheists, agnostics and followers of other religions don’t, so describing their reliability as uncertain is correct. Also, alternative medicine is any procedure or claim that is not based on the principles of biology and science and that, indeed, has been proved ineffective. Science is based on facts and evidence. If the evidence says that a certain therapy is ineffective it is not only objective, but dutiful to write it, otherwise every snake oil seller would receive the same credibility as scientists and doctors who have saved millions lives.

    However when it comes to politics I agree that Wikipedia is clearly biased on the liberal/leftists side. I recently wrote in the Talk page of the article “Ideological Bias on Wikipedia” about this. I pointed out to the cherry picking of sources to justify the labeling of conservative/right wing ideas as “conspiracy theories”, for instance regarding Cultural Marxism. They rejected articles written by certain scholars on the basis that they weren’t published in peer-reviewed journals, and at the same time they used as source articles from news outlets that not only aren’t peer-reviewed, but are clearly biased on the left (I’d rather use the term “New Left” because it’s indeed different from the historical left). It’s a blatant contradiction of their own principles and yet my comment was dismissed as personal opinions irrelevant to the topics. I try to be critical about all sources and I realize that in political issues a certain amount of bias is unavoidable. But, receiving daily a lot of articles from CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post etc every time I open Google on my smart phone I cannot fail to notice that they are more biased than, for instance Fox News. Yet Wikipedia decide that they are reliable sources – and apparently peer-review is not needed for them – while conservative sources are not. The arbitrary, partisan attitude of those Wikipedia editors is worrying, and even worse is the fact that objections are dismissed or even blocked, for instance by “protecting” certain articles, like the piece about the Frankfurt School.

    1. Regarding the reliability of the Gospels, the whole point is that Christians believe they are definitely reliable, and the article says otherwise. How could the article be neutral, then? Maybe it will help to explain what a neutral treatment of the subject would be like. Well, it would say that, on the one hand, the orthodox Christian view is that the Bible is wholly reliable. It might go into some detail about reasons to think so, all attributed of course to Bible-believing Christians. Then it would say, separately, that more skeptical or critical religious scholars disagree, saying that matters are not so clear.

      Also, no: “Also, alternative medicine is any procedure or claim that is not based on the principles of biology and science and that, indeed, has been proved ineffective.” That is the definition that would be used by a person who rejects alternative medicine, obviously. Hence Wikipedia, using this definition, is biased against them. So you can feel free to advance this definition, but at the same time you must also proffer definitions of the sort used by practitioners of alternative medicine, thereby explaining how they understand the term. Wikipedia itself would not be taking a position, but would be informing readers about what different opposing parties believe, leaving it up to the reader to decide what to think. If you think that’s OK in the arena of politics, why not also in religion and science?

  6. Jacob Jones

    I don’t blame you for feeling that way. Many years ago, I looked at an article describing the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. While reading it, I came across a passage that suggested that “a closer reading” of the text “showed” that the traditional interpretation of the story are “incorrect” despite scholarly sources that clearly contradicts such a claim. I tried to edit the intro to make it suggest that there exist those who oppose the traditional interpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah story without suggesting that either view was the superior or “correct” interpretation of the story, but it immediately got changed back to how it was before I edited it. I get that homosexuality is a very controversial topic that stirs up a lot of passion and I get that LGBT individuals don’t take kindly to having their choice of relationships frowned down upon, but give me a break! This is about the accounts of an ancient text that the Bible itself tells (it isn’t even about whether the Bible is true or not, just simply about a story the Bible is telling). It’s ridiculous! I’m sorry Wikipedia, but it’s pretty obvious that you hate conservative viewpoints and actively censor those viewpoints because you don’t like it when some provides information that clearly contradicts your liberal narrative.

    1. Christopher Beland

      I do not see any such passages in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah … I assume this article was fixed, or was it a different article you were referring to?

  7. About a month ago I blogged a critique about the topic ‘institutional racism’ on the Dutch wiki. It was a new item still under development. I saw that it was mainly written by one wikipedian. Also, I discovered it was one-sided and written from an activist’s point of view.
    I also tried to bring my blog to the attention of the Dutch section of Wikipedia and of the writer. No reaction whatsoever, however.
    Officially there is a means to criticize, but at the same time Wikipedia has a strong hierarchy that implies that critique can simply be removed. The way to criticize should really be improved. For example, give each item a thumbs up/down section that also includes comments.

    https://pvanlenth.wordpress.com/2020/07/13/institutioneel-racisme-volgens-wikipedia/

  8. […] The reliance on Wikipedia could partly explain the de-rankings, as the crowdsourced encyclopedia calls Breitbart “far right” and alleges that the Daily Caller “frequently published false stories.” But Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, recently wrote an essay about how “Wikipedia is badly biased.”  […]

  9. […] Lott said Google’s reliance on Wikipedia is problematic, not only for quality control purposes, but also for bias. Lott noted that Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, recently wrote an essay titled “Wikipedia is badly biased.”  […]

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