Mind Your POV: Convergence of Articles and Editors Towards Wikipedia's Neutrality Norm
This addresses the effectiveness of moderation tools for online content quality, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tagging systems without introducing new methods.
The study tackled the problem of measuring the impact of Wikipedia's neutral point of view (NPOV) tagging system on content and editor behavior, finding that tagging significantly reduces biased language in articles but does not significantly change editors' usage of biased words.
Wikipedia has a strong norm of writing in a 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Articles that violate this norm are tagged, and editors are encouraged to make corrections. But the impact of this tagging system has not been quantitatively measured. Does NPOV tagging help articles to converge to the desired style? Do NPOV corrections encourage editors to adopt this style? We study these questions using a corpus of NPOV-tagged articles and a set of lexicons associated with biased language. An interrupted time series analysis shows that after an article is tagged for NPOV, there is a significant decrease in biased language in the article, as measured by several lexicons. However, for individual editors, NPOV corrections and talk page discussions yield no significant change in the usage of words in most of these lexicons, including Wikipedia's own list of 'words to watch.' This suggests that NPOV tagging and discussion does improve content, but has less success enculturating editors to the site's linguistic norms.