I think this will be important for us as a baseline to measure all sorts of things regarding chapter activity as well. Australia is probably worse than the Netherlands in terms of regional editting activity, and I have said before that we have a major problem finding US editors in the "fly-over states". 

However, regarding your last comment "Now, some of you will probably be aware of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-01-17/Recent_research Female Wikipedians aren't more likely to edit women biographies]."  I think it is important to put this in perspective:

I spoke with the woman who wrote that and we talked about some of the reasons this is true, including the fact that most top names in any profession are male because of systemic bias during and after the lives of those men (years after their death, their names come down to us in history because their names are the ones recorded, etc). In general anyone starting out on Wikipedia is more likely to have their edits stick around if those edits are non-controversial and meet the standards of Wikipedia, which is mostly true for reliable sources about men. Many notable women have biographies on Wikipedia that are only mentioned in leading historical sources in passing. Only savvy wikipedians are able to craft such biographies with proper sourcing to save them from deletion. So this study also shows the difficulty in writing about women on Wikipedia, not necessarily the lack of interest in writing about them. I think it is a very interesting study, but the same conclusion can also be made for other marginalized groups of Wikipedia editors, such as about men living in Africa being more likely to write about Western males than African males, etc., or in Australia's case, Aboriginal men being more likely to write about non-Aboriginal men, etc.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 2:12 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:

As previously came up in discussion about chapters, it would be very useful to have national data about Wikipedia activities, which can be determined (generally) from IP addresses. Now I understand the privacy argument in relation to logged-in users (not saying I agree with it though in relation to aggregate data). However, can we find a proxy that does not have the privacy considerations.

 

My hypothesis is that national content is predominantly written by users resident in that nation. And that therefore activity on national content can be used as a proxy for national user editing activity.

 

In the case of Australia, we could describe Australian national content in either of two ways: articles within the closure of the [[Category:Australia]] and/or those tagged as  {{WikiProject Australia}}. There are arguments for/against either (neither is perfect, in my experience the category closure will tend to have false positives and the project will tend to have false negatives).

 

I would like to know what correlation exists between national editor activity (as determined from IP addresses mapped to location) and national content edits and if/how it changes over time for various nations. This is research that only WMF can do because WMF has the IP addresses and the rest of us can’t have them for privacy reasons.

 

If we could establish that a strong-enough correlation existed between them, we could use national content activity (for which there is no privacy consideration) as a proxy for national editing activity. And we might even be able to come up with a multiplier for each nation to provide comparable data for national editing activity.

 

Now, it may be that we need to restrict the edits themselves in some way to maximise the correlations between national content and same-nation editor activity.

 

My second hypothesis is “semantic” edits (e.g. edits that add large amounts of content or citation) to national content will be more highly correlated with same-nation editors than “syntactic” edits (e.g. fix spelling, punctuation or Manual of Style issues) will be. I suspect most bots and other automated/semi-automated edits are doing syntactic edits.

 

Now, some of you will probably be aware of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-01-17/Recent_research Female Wikipedians aren't more likely to edit women biographies]. So it may well be that my patriotic-editing hypothesis is also untrue. But it would be nice to know one way or the other.

 

Kerry

 


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