Just how representative is the world’s largest encyclopedia?

Featured:

Associate Professor Heather Ford: Head Of Discipline Digital and Social Media, UTS

Produced and Presented by: Lawrence Bull

Music: Ha-He by Just a Band

The world’s biggest encyclopedia has a big problem. Female editors at Wikipedia are outnumbered by a factor of eight. Africans are underrepresented by a factor of 17. 

The bias is built into the code, and that code is programming our future. If Wikipedia – one of the largest databases of information on the internet and now used to train neural networks – is biased, how can we rely on it as a source of balanced information? Think: Digital Futures’ producer Lawrence Bull investigates.