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Join Living Room Conversations, our civil dialogue partner, and America Indivisible for a nationwide conversation on April 13, Thomas Jefferson’s 276th birthday. "Reckoning with Jefferson: A Nationwide Conversation on Race, Religion, and the America We Want to Be" will be held via in-person and online video discussions. Sign up today!

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Join Living Room Conversations, our civil dialogue partner, and America Indivisible for a nationwide conversation on April 13, Thomas Jefferson’s 276th birthday. "Reckoning with Jefferson: A Nationwide Conversation on Race, Religion, and the America We Want to Be" will be held via in-person and online video discussions. Sign up today!

What America Do We Want to Be?

Join Living Room Conversations, our civil dialogue partner, and America Indivisible for a nationwide conversation on April 13, Thomas Jefferson’s 276th birthday. "Reckoning with Jefferson: A Nationwide Conversation on Race, Religion, and the America We Want to Be" will be held via in-person and online video discussions. Sign up today!

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We have rated the bias of nearly 600 outlets and writers!

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We have rated the bias of nearly 600 outlets and writers!

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See How AllSides Rates Other Media Outlets

We have rated the bias of nearly 600 outlets and writers!

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_harvesting

Wikipedia

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AllSides does not currently rate the bias of Wikipedia, despite previously rating it Center prior to March 2021. AllSides changed Wikipedia's rating to Not Rated after considering that the encyclopedia does not fit neatly into our bias rating methodologies, which were developed for news sites. Here, we detail third-party data and claims that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias. You can vote on what you think the bias of Wikipedia is above.

Table of Contents

Third-Party Accusations of Bias

Seven Studies Find Wikipedia Has Left-Wing Bias

Seven studies and analyses, including 2 from Harvard researchers, show a left-wing bias at Wikipedia:

  • A 2024 analysis by researcher David Rozado found that English Wikipedia contains roughly three times as many mentions of the far-right compared to the far-left.
  • A 2024 analysis by researcher David Rozado that used AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found Wikipedia associates right-of-center public figures with more negative sentiment than left-wing figures, and tends to associate left-leaning news organizations with more positive sentiment than right-leaning ones.
  • One Harvard study found the articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Brittanica.
  • Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site.
  • A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing.
  • Another analysis found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing outlets (AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ were used to assess this).
  • American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement.

A a former Wikipedia editor writing for Breitbart News pointed to 5 studies that demonstrate Wikipedia's left-wing bias. One analysis used AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ to check the bias of Wikipedia sourcing. It found that "articles on American politicians tended to rely on left-wing media. Based on AllSides ratings, 33,000 sources used were left-wing with 44,000 being left-wing based on MBFC ratings. Right-wing sources were shown to be more rarely used with such sources being cited less than 10,000 times according to either rating site. Centrist sources were used more often and closer to the number of times left-wing sources were used. Neither ratings site has rated all of the outlets cited on Wikipedia, while some ratings differ between the two sites."

One 2024 analysis by Rozado found there is "the tendency in Wikipedia articles for names of prominent left-leaning politicians to be used, on average, with more positive sentiment than their right-leaning counterparts is not circumscribed to political figures. Similar associations are also apparent when examining the average sentiment with which the names of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and U.S. based journalists are used in Wikipedia articles." In addition, he found "there is a tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate left-leaning news media institutions with more positive sentiment than right-leaning news media organizations. This asymmetry however is not apparent for mentions in Wikipedia of U.S. based think tanks." This analysis used AllSides Media Bias Ratings™.
 

"The following figure shows the average sentiment with which U.S. presidents, U.S. senators, U.S. House of Representatives Congressmembers from the 117th Congress and U.S. State Governors (as of 2022) are used in Wikipedia articles. There is an average tendency in Wikipedia articles to use the names of prominent left-leaning U.S. politicians with more positive sentiment than their right-leaning counterparts."

Another analysis by Rozado found that Wikipedia is more likely to mention right-wing political extremism than left-wing political extremism.

Rozado also looked at other terms denoting extremism in Wikipedia. "The results in this case present a more nuanced picture," he wrote. "On English Wikipedia, terms using the adjective extreme to describe political extremism are more frequently associated with right-wing ideologies than with left-wing ones. Conversely, terms using the adjective radical tend to be more commonly linked to left-wing ideologies than to right-wing ones. However, it is crucial to consider the scale of the y-axes in the figures above. The terms far-right and far-left are by far the most common terms used to refer to political extremism."

A study from Harvard Business School found that Wikipedia was more left-biased the Encylopedia Brittanica. Researchers Greenstein and Zhu examined articles covering U.S. politics on Wikipedia and compared them to similar articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. They looked at word choices more consistent with left-wing and right-wing views respectively, and found articles on Wikipedia tended to show greater left-wing bias.

A subsequent study by these researchers and an additional researcher examined the bias of active Wikipedia editors; it found they tended to be more left-wing and more partisan than their right-wing counterparts. "However, the researchers also concluded many editors moderate their bias in editing the more they edit and thus over many years left-wing editors moved towards a more neutral stance somewhat more quickly," Breitbart noted in its coverage of the study. "One flaw in the study is it excludes editors who made over 950 edits in a year, which excludes many of the site’s most active partisans."

Another analysis looked at Wikipedia sourcing and found (emphasis ours) "establishment left-leaning outlets such as the and BBC News, each cited in around 200,000 articles, were often the most-cited news sources. The left-wing Guardian was the third most-cited outlet with almost 100,000 articles citing the outlet. Among the top ten outlets cited in Wikipedia articles, only one was right-leaning."

In a piece for Critic, a British magazine, American academics found that Wikipedia editors whose contributions favored the right-leaning perspective were more likely to be sanctioned in “arbitration enforcement,” cases where special site administrators can impose restrictions on editors.

Wikipedia Co-Founder Accuses Site of Bias

Many have accused Wikipedia of having a left-wing bias, including its co-founder Larry Sanger, who conducted his own bias analysis of the website. Wikipedia has been accusing of failing to mention the crimes of communist and socialist regimes, employing left-wing bias in its decriptions, using mostly left-wing media outlets in its sourcing, and of being more likely to sanction conservative editors.

"The days of Wikipedia's robust commitment to neutrality are long gone," co-founder Larry Sanger told Fox News in Feb. 2021. "Wikipedia's ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work." In his bias analysis of Wikipedia, co-founder Sanger wrote:

Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead. 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.” 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.

He gives numerous examples, noting President Barack Obama’s article mentioned none of his Administration’s scandals, but scandals on President Trump’s page were extensively documented. He also wrote:

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. ... 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.

Sanger also notes numerous instances of bias in articles on Jesus Christ, stating that "Wikipedia’s claims are tendentious if not false, and represent a point of view that many if not most Christians would rightly dispute."

Elon Musk Calls for Wikipedia Boycott Due to Bias

In Jan. 2025, Elon Musk tweeted, "Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!" with a link to Rozado's analysis of mentions of political extremism in Wikipedia (more here.) In December 2024, X owner Elon Musk posted, "Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority," linking to a graphic showing Wikipedia’s annual budget report from 2023—2024, which indicated it spent over $50 million of a total $177 million budget on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Fox News Accuses Wikipedia of Bias on "Socialism," "Communism" Pages

In a 2021 analysis article on Wikipedia's left-wing bias, Fox News noted, "The two main pages for "Socialism" and "Communism" span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved." Fox continues:

Wikipedia’s Socialism page announces: "The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century." It ignores a man-made famine in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin commandeered the food from regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, leaving millions to starve to death even as the Soviet Union exported grain to foreign countries. Asked for comment, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson sent a statement noting that "Wikipedia is a living, breathing project, and is always evolving just as our shared understanding of a topic does." The response also noted that the foundation does not directly control content on Wikipedia, which is written by volunteer editors. The statement did not address any specific criticisms of the content. The Wikipedia socialism page also mentions China’s Communist history, but only begins its description in 1976, after Mao Zedong’s reign of terror had already killed tens of millions. "After Mao Zedong's death in 1976... China's economic performance pulled an estimated 150 million peasants out of poverty," the encyclopedia says. The article fails to mention Mao’s prior communist programs such as his "Great Leap Forward", in which private farming was abolished, leading to mass famine that killed tens of millions. It also neglects to mention Mao’s "Cultural Revolution", in which, according to the History Channel, "Millions of young radicals who formed the paramilitary Red Guards shut down schools, destroyed religious and cultural relics and killed intellectuals and party elites believed to be anti-revolutionaries."

Fox News also said that "the two main Socialism and Capitalism [Wikipedia] pages also fail to note any of the atrocities committed by other socialist and communist regimes, from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Cambodia, or North Korea, among others."

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Previous AllSides Media Bias Rating for Wikipedia

Prior to March 2021, AllSides rated Wikipedia as Center. We changed Wikipedia to Not Rated after considering that the encyclopedia does not fit neatly into our bias rating methodology, which was developed for news sites. We became aware of the accusations of Wikipedia bias, and decided to move the website to Note Rated until we could devise a better way to rate them within our system.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. Wikipedia is frequently used and cited by AllSides when conducting media bias-related research. Since its launch in 2001, it has become one of the world's most-trafficked websites.

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Ballot harvesting is the collecting and submitting of absentee or mail-in voter ballots by volunteers or workers. It occurs in some areas of the U.S. where voting by mail is common, but is illegal in some other states.

Arizona banned the practice except for family members and caregivers. The U.S. Supreme Court stayed a Ninth Circuit Court ruling that overturned the ban in 2016 and a U.S. District Court judge upheld the ban in 2018.

California changed its rules before the 2018 election to allow persons other than family members to collect and submit ballots. Large last minute submissions of votes in the election delayed results and altered the outcome of several elections from the outcome indicated by initial results, swinging several races in favor of Democratic Party candidates.