On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Which subdomains are linked to most often as 'external links' in Wikipedia?
Looking for bias in this list is a dangerous activity.
I feel a useful, if not particularly exciting, Wikipedia task is to periodically check these links, to verify that they still work, that they offer useful material, etc.
I personally think that the BBC is horribly biased, and so I was alarmed to see how often we link to them, as compared to other sources that may give a more "fair and balanced" perspective (yes, you know what I mean, and yes I'm having fun).
I didn't know Al Franken had a web page.
More seriously, I guess this preference of links to news sites with a center to left POV reflects the interests & nature of the WP community. All of my links to news sites have been to my local newspaper, which historically presents a Republican POV (although it has been gradually drifting to the left relative to the rest of the media).
HOWEVER, a huge proportion ofhte BBC links are from the page *about* the BBC, which links to lots of divisions of the BBC.
Most of the other cases are similar.
One catagory that surprised me was the number of external links back to Wikipedia. Surely most of them can be modified to a simple hyperlink.
I wasn't surprised at the number of links to the Internet Movie Database, though; variations on its URL make it the first & third most linked site. However, having used it frequently over the years (since it was nothing more than a collection of perl scripts on a server in Wales), I know that as a resource it is thin in facts as compared to WP currently, & even admitting many of our articles need work.
Geoff