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Wikipedia outperforms individuals when it comes to hindsight bias

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Abstract

Hindsight bias—the tendency to overestimate in hindsight what one knew in foresight—is a robust and pervasive human error. A recent study with Wikipedia articles, however, found evidence for a hindsight bias only for disasters but not for any other event category (e.g., elections). Although this might suggest Wikipedia articles to be less biased than individuals, alternative explanations had not been ruled out. The present study set out to answer this question by comparing individuals’ and Wikipedia’s representation of the very same event in foresight and hindsight. In particular, we made use of a state election and surveyed one part of participants before and after the outcome and had other participants rate the corresponding Wikipedia article versions with regard to the extent to which the article was suggestive of a particular outcome and presented it as foreseeable and inevitable. In line with prior research and our hypotheses, we found a hindsight bias at the individual level but not in Wikipedia articles. Applying Bayesian statistics, there was substantial support for the null hypothesis (i.e., no hindsight bias) in Wikipedia. By controlling for the potential impact of participants’ own hindsight bias on their article ratings we can rule out alternative explanations of our findings. Therefore, our findings are the first to demonstrate Wikipedia’s superiority over individuals when it comes to hindsight bias.

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Notes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes (2018-09-03).

  2. (302 including inactive language versions); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias (2018-09-03).

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics (2018-09-03).

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics (2018-09-03).

  5. https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageEditsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm# (2018-09-03).

  6. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=last-year&pages=Main_Page (2018-09-03).

  7. http://www.alexa.com/topsites (2018-09-03).

  8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies#Content (2015-01-07).

  9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability (2015-01-07).

  10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research (2015-01-07).

  11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view (2014-05-07).

  12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#What_counts_as_a_reliable_source (2015-01-07).

  13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias (2014-12-18).

  14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias in the English Wikipedia and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Diskriminierungsfreie_Wikipedia in the German Wikipedia (2015-01-12).

  15. Note that every edit of an article in Wikipedia is saved as a separate article version, which allows access to any article version that ever existed in the course of constructing the current article. This feature of wiki technology thus enabled a comparison of article versions that existed prior to a particular event (i.e., foresight article versions) to article versions after that event (i.e., hindsight article versions).

  16. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Landtagswahl_in_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_2016&oldid=152252152.

  17. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Landtagswahl_in_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_2016&oldid=154428718.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hagen, Feithstr. 188, 58084, Hagen, Germany

    Aileen Oeberst

  2. Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany

    Aileen Oeberst, Ina von der Beck & Ulrike Cress

  3. University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Ulrike Cress

  4. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Steffen Nestler

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  2. Ina von der Beck
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Oeberst, A., von der Beck, I., Cress, U. et al. Wikipedia outperforms individuals when it comes to hindsight bias. Psychological Research 84, 1517–1527 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01165-7

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