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Yes, and one could counterargue that the old media still remains the dominant source of contextualization, vastly overpowering both FR and DU combined, and is clearly biased to the left (*particularly* in terms of omission), and this could arguably create an environment in which both participant contributions to articles, and referee decisions about "NPOV" and "common opinion" and so on regarding them, are likewise subject to long-standing built-in bias.

In which case, it's not actually a "Wikipedia-specific" bias, but simply yet another example of the general case today caused by about two generations of increasingly one-sided mass media contextualization.

In short, not that Wikipedia is particularly biased to the left compared to everybody else, but that it's pretty much as biased to the left as *anything* created by those who grew up under the mass media's slant usually is.

Also, my opinion is based upon my experiences with both forums, and the significant difference I see in sheer blatant nastiness and viciousness and so forth between the two. FR is subject to more than its share of petty schoolyard attacks and gross bigotry, especially where homosexuality is concerned, but DU seems to just *thrive* on the stuff and both produce and consume it gleefully in mass quantities, with a much lower signal-to-noise ratio in terms of sober, reasoned, courteous, and insightful commentary.

[shrug] It seems to be that the older I get, the less impressed I am by people's cleverness in saying nasty, vicious things about other people -- and yes, [points at the recent Kerry/Katrina thread], my own included.

I believe FR has a significantly better record on this than DU does. Yet of their respective Wikipedia FR entries, only the FR one makes a particular point of noting this aspect.

So that's the other part of what I'm talking about when I say "slight bias (of omission) favoring the left."

Systematically, TTBOMK, Wikipedia's critical path failure lies in its process of defining its standards of "general knowledge" and "common understanding" and so forth. This is a well-known problem with reference works, and so far we do not appear to have developed any methods of resolving it that even begin to approach the (relative) success of establishing an authoritative editing board -- which Wikipedia *deliberately* lacks.

See: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 , and note particularly comment 401, http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/12/30/142458/25/401#401

So I am not by any means arguing that there is a inherent bias to every Wikipedia article in existence. Or that Wikipedia is bad and wrong. My basic point is only that the standards of the Wikipedia referees are questionable, and particularly vulnerable when it comes their application in terms of the definition of "common knowledge" about a subject, and that this, fundamentally, is likely to be a large part of why I observe a slight bias of omission favoring the left WRT the comparison of the articles about FR and DU.

In summary: leftists generally tend to get more of a pass for their bad behavior than their opponents do, and the Wikipedia entries for FR and DU reflect this.