UC Davis

With the rise of partisan media and ideologically segregated news feeds on social media, balanced information is much needed for citizens to reference when they engage in politics. This paper seeks to explore whether Wikipedia, a peer-production platform, can be an alternative source that offers politically balanced information. By analyzing news references in the Wikipedia biographies of U.S. elected officials, we find evidence of a moderate but significant liberal bias, with liberal media sources cited more extensively than conservative ones across the pages of both Democrats and Republicans. We then discover that the bias in terms of the use of news citations is significantly associated with workload diversity and communication influence during the process of crowd editing. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on bias in peer-production communities and shed light on the influence of digital media on collaborative knowledge production. Furthermore, our results challenge the belief that political neutrality can be safely assumed from collaborative editing, offering implications for digital journalism on how to produce more balanced, two-sided information.