Geographical bias on Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been criticized for the inequality in the distribution of its volunteer-created content with respect to the geographical association of article subjects. The research shows that despite considerable differences of this distribution depending on the language of Wikipedia, there is a common trend towards more content related to the United States and Western Europe coupled with a lack of information about certain regions in the rest of the world.[1]

Analysis

Several studies on internet geography and Wikipedia were published by the members of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

A 2 December 2009 article by Mark Graham of OII in The Guardian presented a color-coded map of the world that illustrated the disparity between the numbers of geotagged Wikipedia articles (in all languages) for countries from the Global North versus the Global South. Graham wrote: "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).[2]"A 2010 analysis of Wikipedia people edits revealed that Asia, despite being the most populous continent, was represented in only 16.67% of edits; Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented.[3] A 2011 study by OII found that 84 percent of articles tagged with a location were in Europe or North America, and that Antarctica had more entries than any African or South American nation.[4] According to Adama Sanneh, the founder of the WikiAfrica Education initiative, as of 2021 there were more articles on the English Wikipedia

See also

• List of countries by number of Internet users

Further reading

• The following references are found in Beytía's article:
• Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K. & Medhat, A. Uneven geographies of user-generated information: patterns of increasing informational poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104, 746–764 (2014).
• It was summarized in an article by Joseph Stromberg "Wikipedia's geography problem: There are more articles about Antarctica than Egypt", Vox.com 14 September 2014
• Graham, M. Information geographies and geographies of information. New geographies (2015).
• Roll, U. et al. Using Wikipedia page views to explore the cultural importance of global reptiles. Biological conservation, 204, 42–50 (2016).
• Overell, S. E. & Rüger, S. View of the world according to Wikipedia: Are we all little Steinbergs? Journal of Computational Science, 2, 193–197 (2011).
• Graham, M., Hale, S. A. & Stephens, M. Geographies of the World's Knowledge. (2011).
• Graham, M., De Sabbata, S. & Zook, M. A. Towards a study of information geographies: (im)mutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information. Geo: Geography and environment, 2, 88–105 (2015).