This section has been copied and pasted from Criticism of Wikipedia § Systemic bias in coverage.
See also: Academic studies about Wikipedia § A minority of editors produce the majority of persistent content
Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias
in the selection of articles which it maintains in its various language
editions. Such alleged bias in the selection of articles leads, without
necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various
prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on
minor factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns
about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing
influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an
article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher
Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all
the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a
"youthful cab-driver's" perspective.[2]
Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these
circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to
control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a
benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and
subtle threat to freedom of thought."[2] That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."[2]Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'".[3] In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted:
People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.[4]This critical approach has been satirised "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren[5] of the website Something Awful.[6] In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a topic popular or current.[7] Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:
That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.[8]
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