Who am I, What is Wikibias?

Hello world.  My name is Wikipedian.  Like many of you, I have spent many hours laboring over articles on Wikipedia trying to follow the site’s guidelines on keeping everything free of opinion and full of facts.  I have spent time writing on both simple and controversial topics.

Whenever I wrote a post on a topic like a city, university, or band, I was happy with the results.  The community generally embraced articles and helped expand and build on them.  Ultimately, many of these became high quality articles.

On the other hand, everything is not so easy and clean on Wikipedia.  Topics that involve politics, religion, and conflict can quickly become out of hand.  People become engaged in “Edit Wars” and use other immature and hostile methods to push their point of view, simply called POV on Wikipedia.

Of course, as one of the top ranked and most visited sites in the world, it is important that topics are both factual and free of bias.  In the event there is a conflict of opinion, the best way to handle it is to present all of the details of both sides.  However, this rarely happens.  People often gang up on each other and bring issues to either “administrators,” who are senior editors with special powers over posts, or arbitration, where people get to air their complaints and a committee chooses a solution.

But what happens if that committee has its own agenda?  What is the most commonly used phrase is not accurate?  What if a group of racists join together?  The bandwagon always wins, even if their position is Wikifiction, not Wikifact.

So, I have started this blog to publish the often hidden problems of the world’s free online encyclopedia.  I plan to work with other Wiki editors on this site, and we must be totally anonymous in order to keep our accounts on the site.  I will likely focus on issues surrounding the Middle East, where I have seen a systematic bias, but I will look outward to other topics as well.  If you are interested in writing for the site, send me a note through the contact form. 

I look forward to passing on the truth of Wikipeida editing and hope to make a difference.  I love Wikipedia, what it stands for, and many of the editors who spend hours, for free, creating a wonderful resource for information on just about everything.  I want to see it move forward as a success in the future.  But, even as its founder and many regular users acknowledge, it must be a fair and balanced source of information or it is doing a disservice to those who use it.