Hi, the second most obvious factor is going to be the availability of internet access, but
also the type of internet access, and how long people have had internet access.
The unproven assumption is that Wikipedia is written by people with internet experience
and leisure time access to the internet via the desktop environment.
Over a decade ago when I was working in a marketing company, there was a rule of thumb
that people only started shopping on the internet after two years of internet experience.
I don’t know if that was ever scientifically tested, or what the equivalent would be for
editing Wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure that editing Wikipedia is not an entry level
experience on the internet.
We do know both from experience of training people to edit Wikipedia and also from looking
at recent changes, that Wikipedia is almost a broadcast media in the mobile environment.
There are some people who edit on tablets and even smartphones, but the editing community
is mostly via the desktop environment. Just to confuse things desktop doesn't just
include laptops in this context, there are even people using tablets but opting for the
desktop environment rather than the mobile one.
So two languages with similar populations on the internet could have radically different
Wikipedia sizes because in one culture access is fairly new and mostly smartphone based
whilst in the other it is a longstanding thing with a large proportion of experienced
Internet users with PC access.
The biggest difference though is going to be the policy of that Wikipedia community re bot
creation of articles, with Cebuano, Swedish and Waray at one extreme. Such policies change
over time, the English Wikipedia went through one of its early growth surges when a bot
was used to start articles on all populated places in the USA, so it would be an
oversimplification to simply list English as one of the Wikipedias that is currently chary
about bot creation of articles. A very simplistic way to look at this is to order
Wikipedias not by number of articles but by number of edits. On that basis Polish with 53m
edits would drop behind the rather smaller Japanese Wikipedia as that has 69 million
edits. Cebuano with 5.3 million articles but only 23 m edits would drop a long way from
second place.
Other theories re differences between sizes of Wikipedia include ones re multilingual
people. Phenomena such as the tendency of Indian editors to edit in English rather than
Indic languages. One theory is that people are editing in a language that they perceive as
“higher status” another that Wikipedians have multiple motivations and that some people
edit in a language they are not fully fluent in in order to practice that language, a
third is that Wikipedia is written in the correct alphabet for each language, but many
people only have access to Latin keyboards. I am familar with this from Georgia where a
large proportion of Georgians communicate on sites such as Facebook writing Georgian in
the Latin script, but last I heard Wikipedia editing is restricted to those who can switch
to Georgian script. Obviously this last issue is changing over time as particular scripts
become available on the internet or as options in Wikipedia editing.
I would be very interested to see your paper, thanks for picking this topic.
Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
________________________________
From: 30012764400n behalf of
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 10:03 am
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Country (culture...) as a factor in contributing to collective
intelligence projects
Dear all,
I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to
collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The
paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various
people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is
biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few
Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or
auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South
Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status,
yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can
account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens
of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what
I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for
xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things
that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question
to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey:
Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes,
outside of the popularity of a given language?
For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
TIA!
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l