Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).
There are some countries that are crammed with a dense amount of floating virtual information, such as Germany (with an average of one article tagged for every 65 square km), while others remain as virtual deserts, such as Chad (with an average of one tagged article every 17,000 square km).
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen when looking at the number of geotagged articles per person. Austria, Iceland and Switzerland all have around one geotagged article for every 1,000 people, while in China or Guinea there is just over one article for every 500,000 people.
Here is the full article, interesting throughout and with a good map. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
One reason for Chad to be a virtual desert on wikipedia is… well it is pretty much an actual desert (hottest place on earth if I am not mistaking).
topical
More articles on anime than on the rest of Japan.
Who writes Wikipedia? I’ve noticed with Google that for words with any computer software connotation, that meaning will dominate search results. Sun is not primarily the bright orb in the sky, nor is Java an island. Information gathering on the internet yields disproportionately those things of interest to people who are interested in the internet.
I think this would be a more interesting fact if it compared per-capita English speakers to tagged articles. For example, Namibia’s official language is English, but almost no one speaks it as a first language, and the nation only has 2 million people, about a sixth of New Jersey.
It turns out that Wikipedia is as inherently racist as the piano:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/23/composer-fluid-piano-geoff-smith
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen…
Hmmmm. Coverage on Wikipedia seems like a funny indication of the division between Global North and Global South.
Mike, no info on the Britannica, although I’m sure there’s a bias for historical reasons if nothing else. I have a book somewhere with a selection of articles from past editions of the EB, and it’s really interesting to see how the approach has changed since the earliest – where, for example, a Scottish Calvinist morality pervades many of the articles.
I am also reminded of Clay Shirky’s recent post on categories and classification (http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html). Library catalog systems were primarily set up to organize books, and often a particular collection of books at a particular time. Thus (to take one of Shirky’s examples), under “History” two of the top-level categories are “The Netherlands” and “Asia”.
Getting back to Wikipedia, there’s wikigroaning, proposed by the humor site somethingawful. As they put it (http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php):
“First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight.” Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles.”
True, Wikipedia Africa may lag behind the other continents… but it still is far more useful than many other sources. My mother, who works in many rural parts of East Africa, tells me about how Wikipedia usually has much more up to date data than the CDC, USAID, or the UN for the small villages where she works. Wikipedia’s reliance on decentralization makes it successful in areas where large state-run organizations can’t succeed.
Geotagging is a flawed measure, as the author of the article states: “The reason that Burkina Faso has more geotagged articles (1071) than South Africa (945), Kenya (217) and the rest of Africa is probably down to diligent editing rather than more actual content in Burkina Faso. However, in all cases, these numbers pale in comparison to the huge number of articles in places such as the US (89,549) and Germany (54,634).” This indicates that, if properly tagged, countries like Egypt and South Africa should be the leading African countries, and certainly have more articles than Antarctica, based on Anglophone biases.
Neal: More importantly, lots and lots and lots of people with computer access know the books very well.
The people with the most knowledge about Chad (eg) that isn’t already covered by the basic article… aren’t spending a lot of time on Wikipedia, I think.
And as Millian said, counting geotags is not the same as real content about the location.
africa’s a shithole
what else is there to know
Very little of my 27 volume Encyclopedia Britannica is devoted to African nations, people, culture, religion, etc, and I paid some over a thousand two decades ago, continuing with the tradition of many Americans wanting a comprehensive summary of our world’s knowledge which provided the scholars producing the articles funding for something like a century to expand on the summary they produced with continuing work.
Clearly the lack of detail on Africa in wikipedia is unrelated to money, nor unique to wikipedia.
Of course, the effort by Europeans to wipe out African history and culture in order to justify taking their property and enslaving them because they have no history or culture plays a major role in the knowledge of Africa. How can you write up the rich history of Africa and its people, while stealing their property, mass murdering them, and enslaving them?
What a terrible way to compare the two. Chad is almost triple the size of Germany but has about one seventh the population.
I bet the Mojave desert has way fewer articles per square meter than the Los Angeles metro area! Bias!
“africa’s a shithole
what else is there to know”
Oh, my mistake. I assumed that I was commenting with rational thoughtful people, not brain dead Sailerites. Tyler, it seems that you still have this infestation…
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