Systematic bias

A systematic bias is a bias arising from how participants in some joint process work together. It is related to, and may arise in part from, a systemic bias. However, one deals with the two in quite different ways - while a systemic bias can often be dealt with simply by disrupting the cliques and inviting in new participants, a systematic bias can only be addressed by what is known in legal terms as "due process" - a dragging-out and delaying of decisions so that persistent factual claims can be evaluated, and decisions are not made until a deliberation has occurred on the credibility of each one.

For ordinary distinctions such as, e.g. "simple vandalism" on a large public wiki, such a process may be overkill. However, for deep distinctions that involve the sysop power structure, such as sysop vandalism, there is going to be a "due process" or nothing, since, the sysops themselves have the technological power to prevent their own activities from being investigated.

The concept of the w:carceral state may be relevant: This was Michel Foucault's generalization of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" or prison-like society where authority could see and control everything, but its own secret investigations and deliberations were entirely invisible to those it controlled.

Groupthink and the echo chamber are the natural result of an unaddressed systematic bias. While a group may have a systemic bias to accepting the outputs of such phenomena as "real", it takes a lack of process for them to accept those outputs as being viable consensus decision-making. Thus only a disciplined notion of such decision making can alleviate the systematic bias.