Image above: Europe at night - the concentration of light as well as information
Related links to Spatialworlds
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
manning@chariot.net.au
Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'
The spatial examination of Wikipedia
Associate Professor Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford has used gotagging to reveal that Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all. Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content.
As Mark Graham says in his excellent paper;
Graham goes on to explain that "despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are fears that the platform is simply reproducing the most established worldviews. Knowledge created in the developed world appears to be growing at the expense of viewpoints coming from developing countries. Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopedia is far from “equal”, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out."
He found that Europe and North America account for a staggering 84% of the “geotagged” articles. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia, too. In fact, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica (14,959) than any country in Africa. And while there are just over 94,000 geotagged articles related to Japan, there are only 88,342 on the entire Middle East and North Africa region.
The follwoing chloropleth maps clearly show the spatial inequity of Wikipedia articles ....and much more.
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"All this matters because fundamentally different narratives can be, and are, created about places and topics in different languages."
The following maps shows that even in theArabic Wikipedia, there are geographical imbalances. There are a relatively high number of articles about Algeria and Syria, as well as about the US, Italy, Spain, Russia and Greece but substantially fewer about a number of Arabic speaking countries, including Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.
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Total
number of geotagged articles in the Arabic Wikipedia by country
Thanks to Alaric Maude for pointing me towards this fascinating article on the geographies of Wikipedia.
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