PurposeTo 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/approachQuantitatively, 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.FindingsThrough 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 implicationsWP 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/valueThe 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.

As the vital source of information on the Web that it has long become, Wikipedia (WP) has developed detailed policies and guidelines for contributing to it as well as for resolving conflicts with a goal to ensure that all important viewpoints are represented fairly and supported by trustworthy published resources. However, WP has long been criticized for systemic biases in its content, which are often implemented and maintained through the use of these same WP policies and guidelines. The present study explores editorial behaviors of a selected editor who succeeded in biasing a set of WP articles. By selecting an editor to examine through a big‐data approach, this study can serve as an objective crosscheck for previously reported tactics for introducing and maintaining bias observed from personal experiences of disputes on WP, and could provide evidence to generate empirically grounded hypotheses concerning editorial practices indicative of bias. It was found that editorial behavior around deletion and erasure is an important strategy for implementing and maintaining bias on WP, and WP policies and guidelines are used to support and validate the silencing of other voices.