Hi James,
This paper suggests that Wikipedia has become more influential than a large
proportion of the peer reviewed literature:
I am not sure that is the correct conclusion from the paper you mention. To quote the conclusion:
"We find that ... the Wikipedia community favors reputable authors and trending topics. Second... Wikipedia does serve as a collaborative social filtering system which is able to favor “classical” papers, authors, and topics, and recommend them to the general public."
Unless I have missed something (and please let me know if I have) it doesn't compare Wikipedia's influence with that of journal publishing, merely observes that the same authors and topics are mentioned on Wikipedia as are heavily mentioned in journals (and thus that the two are reflective of the same corpus of knowledge)
my assertion that systemic bias in the English Wikipedia's economics articles has deleterious real-world implications...
Do you think this topic is something that the Foundation should study?
I wouldn't place it high up the list of things WMF ought to be worried about. I remember hearing something vaguely about studies looking at "left-right" bias among academic economists and in media coverage of economics. In principle the same techniques could be applied to Wikipedia articles and that might yield some insights into what could be done better.
Equally, economics isn't a very well covered area and has never attracted that many editors, so the problems probably woudln't be fixed without a couple of dozen more strong economics editors able to write about things in a neutral way.
Regards,
Chris