Featured articles "represents the best of Wikipedia", but this unfotunately does not preclude a bias in the types of articles that qualify for this honour. This first became apparent to me after reading yet another featured article about an Austrialian war hero in as many months. These military personal are of course as deserving a place in Wikipedia as are all notable persons, and the quality of the article is not in question. But it did raise the question about how articles are selected to appear on the front page as a featured article.
I did a little research into which articles have been used as featured articles in 2016. Using a crude classification system, I grouped featured articles fron January 2016 to August 2016 into 9 groups divided by country. I suspected that military personel were overrepresented so that got its own category. It also quickly became evident which countries dominated the survey.
As the English Wikipedia, articles are mostly related to English speaking countries; USA, Britain and Australia related articles together account for 67% of all articles in the survey.
- USA 90 (37%)
- Britain 48 (20%)
- Australia 24 (10%)
- Other 82 (34%)
- Total 244
Another clear bias was towards American culture which accounts for 33% of all USA-related articles and 12% of all articles in the survey. This isn't so strange considering the popularity of American culture in the world.
As for the bias towards Austrialian military personal which inspired this article, they account for 3.5% of all articles in the survey. This may not seem like much but in fact it corresponds to one featured article per month that concerns a very narrow topic. And in relation to the total of number of Austrialia-related articles they are almost 40% which is a gross over-representation.
In general, the featured articles are greatly biased towards culture, persons, events and places, buildings, ships, etc. (82% of all surveyed articles). Only 43 out of 244 articles concerned any topics related to science, philosophy, economy, food, etc. I tend to believe that this is simply a result of the fact the people write about what they are interested in; the more popular a topic is the better quality of the article will likely be and the greater chance it has of being a featured article.
I really enjoy using Wikipedia; it inspires me to learn about new things, and not just in isolation but to be able to read related articles. To learn for instance not just about mathematical theories but also about the mathematicians themselves. So can I use Wikipedia to broaden my knowledge even more since there is so much bias in the featured articles?
Below the day's featured article is a list of Recent deaths. This being the deaths of notable people, there is something to learn about what contributions they made to society. There is a lot less bias in this list since death does not discriminate, and it quickly leads into new areas of exploration that are underrepresented in featured articles. It is also a fine way to honor these people by reading about who they are and what they did. Long live knowledge.
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