Danielle A. Morris-O'COnnor

Purpose: To add new empirical knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities, and to conversations about bias and its implications for democracy. To help identify Wikipedia (WP) articles that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such bias on the general public, thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online information services (e.g. Google) in ways that contribute to democracy. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.Design/methodology/approach: Quantitatively, the authors identify edit-warring camps across many conflict zones of the English language WP, and profile and compare success rates and typologies of camp edits in the corresponding topic areas. Qualitatively, the authors analyze the edit war between two senior WP editors that resulted in imbalanced and biased articles throughout a topic area for such editorial characteristics through a close critical reading.Findings: Through a large-scale quantitative study, the authors find that winner-take-all camps exhibit biasing editing behaviors to a much larger extent than the camps they successfully edit-war against, confirming findings of prior small-scale qualitative studies. The authors also confirm the employment of these behaviors and identify other behaviors in the successful silencing of traditional medicinal knowledge on WP by a scientism-biased senior WP editor through close reading.Social implications: WP sadly does, as previously claimed, appear to be a platform that represents the biased viewpoints of its most stridently opinionated Western white male editors, and routinely misrepresents scholarly work and scientific consensus, the authors find. WP is therefore in dire need of scholarly oversight and decolonization.Originality/value: The authors independently verify findings from prior personal accounts of highly power-imbalanced fights of scholars against senior editors on WP through a third-party close reading of a much more power balanced edit war between senior WP editors. The authors confirm that these findings generalize well to edit wars across WP, through a large scale quantitative analysis of unbalanced edit wars across a wide range of zones of contention on WP.

In many universities, first year literature courses are required for students in a wide variety of programs, including arts and sciences. These courses are generally focused on teaching transferable skills and strategies, such as critical analysis, essay writing, and research. This article argues that picturebooks are an exceptional teaching tool for these broadly focused first-year courses, because they quickly engage students as learners, encourage participation, and open students to new approaches of critically reading texts while challenging their assumptions and personal biases about children’s literature. Examples of picturebooks, secondary sources, class discussion, and group work activities used in first year literature courses are shared, along with students’ responses to these approaches. The article ends with an explanation of a short, low-stakes assignment that instructors can assign students to help build essential skills with picturebooks, and exercises to do around picturebooks to work on critical thinking skills. Picturebooks are often perceived as being simple and only for children, but many picturebooks are layered texts that make great teaching tools for any literature course.