Similarly Internet penetration is very high here in Australia (available to
every home no matter how remote) and most home access is broadband (I think
we came in 2nd after South Korea in some recent survey). There is also free
access via public libraries, schools, etc (government policy is that
everyone should have access). My impression is that most Australian WP
editors do it from home.
I am not particularly convinced that being in North America has some great
advantage wrt to the servers in Florida. I might be half a world away but I
don't find that makes any difference to editing WP compared with using some
web service closer to home - we have massive great undersea cables to carry
the data across the Pacific Ocean. I guess some countries might experience
slower speeds if they don't have adequate network infrastructure in place
but I don't think it can be automatically assumed that geographic distance
is a barrier.
Kerry
_____
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
WereSpielChequers
Sent: Saturday, 8 September 2012 12:47 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [pre-print] Value production in
acollaborativeenvironment
Hi Taha,
I think you might want to review your assumptions about Internet access. My
understanding was that the US ranked behind Canada and Northwest Europe,
though ahead of Europe as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:InternetPenetrationWorldMap.svg
However that is a somewhat simplistic take on things. The US benefits from
faster connection speeds to the servers in Florida, so active editors there
can get more done in an hour.
But the US has more of a pro business set of employment laws than Europe,
especially mainland NW Europe. This makes it easier for US companies to run
surveillance on their employees internet use. So if there are still any
editors editing from work they are more likely to be in Europe.
The vast majority of our editing is probably being done in people's own time
on domestic use IT equipment, so the base you really need to look for is
domestic broadband penetration. But on top of that a more urban culture with
more access to libraries and free PCs within them is probably also helping
the UK.
There's probably also a big cultural thing here. Even if people don't try to
edit articles about global warming or especially evolution there has got to
be some effect on their participation in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an
encyclopaedia based we hope on reliable sources, so those people who have a
problem with science and academia are bound to find Wikipedia a less
congenial environment. There is bound to be some link between that and our
different editing rates on the two sides of the pond.
WSC
On 7 September 2012 14:09, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
Thank you very much for the feedbacks.
Actually I would basically agree to most of the points mentioned by you
both. However, let me quote the original paragraph from the extended paper
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030091
(not the review article):
Considering the large population of English speakers in North America
compared to Europe, and the fact that the Internet is most developed in
North America, the estimation of around only half share for north America to
English WP is a puzzle, which definitely needs further multidisciplinary
studies. In the case of Simple English WP, the European share is even
larger, which is not surprising, together with the fact that the share of
Far East increased, since this WP is meant to be of use by non-native
speakers (though, not necessarily written by them). Note that previous
results of [16]
<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030091#
pone.0030091-Jonathan1> and [23]
<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030091#
pone.0030091-West1> are partially supported by the results reported here.
For instance, a share of less than for Australian editors in English WP is
in both articles reported. Unfortunately, there is no explicit focus on the
contributions from European countries in the mentioned works, and it seems
the large amount of efforts by European editors was overlooked
There are two points, 1st the population and the Internet penetration depth,
and second the common sense which may wrongly, assume that WP is dominated
by north American editors. The evidence for the presence of this kind of
assumptions are in the other tow cited papers. Where, all the non-English
speaking European countries are mostly ignored in the analysis.
Please keep me posted about your thoughts and comments.
cheers,
.taha
On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 2:15 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It may well be surprising to people in North America and especially the USA
that North America provides only half the edits to EN wikipedia, especially
as it did start in the US. But editing rates here in the UK are
significantly higher than in the US, and that helps make up for the
population imbalance. EN Wiki also has significant numbers of editors from
outside the English speaking world.
I'm pretty sure that a secondary motivation for some of our editors is that
editing the English language Wikipedia is a great way to practice and
improve their written English. Conversely it may be a way for migrants to
retain a native tongue and even pass it on to their children. So no surprise
that the US has a much greater proportion of editors in non-English projects
than the UK has. As to why we have these patterns, I suspect that several
factors are in play,
The US is a land of substantial immigration from non-English speaking
countries and this may explain the large amount of editing of non-English
Wikipedias from the US.
English Wikipedia supports many different varieties of English - the
compromise between English, American English and other versions has been to
let the first major author of an article set the language version. By
contrast German, Dutch and many other wikipedia languages have standardised
on one dominant dialect. I would hypothesis that this compromise is
significantly more natural and acceptable to Brits, Australians and others
than it is to speakers of American English. At least one of the significant
attempts to launch a rival did so with a policy of American English, I'm not
aware of a serious attempt to launch a Wikipedia rival in which American
English was deprecated. While Conservapedia won't have drawn off many
Wikipedia editors, I suspect that just as Brits are generally more used to
hearing American English on TV and Films than is the reverse, we may also be
more familiar with seeing it in print.
And then of course there is our weather.
Other factors could include differences in leisure time and Internet access.
Especially amongst those with the free time to edit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origi
n could do with updating, and maybe we should try to get some questions into
a future editor survey as to why people edit in languages other than their
native one.
Regards
WSC
On 6 September 2012 21:40, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Firstly, thanks for the paper. I enjoyed reading it (although I am not a
statistician so some of it went over my head).
In 4.1.3 Edits Origin, there is the sentence "Surprisingly, it turned out
that English WP is almost equally edited by North Americans and editors from
the rest of the world [110]". That sentence comes across as implying that
North American has some special relationship to the English language
relative to the rest of the world (a claim that seems somewhat at odds with
the language originating outside of North America). I presume the surprise
was in relation to the proportion of English speakers in North America and I
think the sentence would be better if this was made clear, e.g. Given that
X% of English speakers reside in North America, surprisingly .."
However, my ball park estimate would be that about half the world's English
speakers are in North America (which would make it a very unsurprising
observation that English WP is "equally edited"). According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Countries_in_order_of_total_sp
eakers North America (USA+Canada) constitutes about 62% of English speakers,
but that's probably an over-estimate given that it is based on the "major
English-speaking nations" but at least it's a citable statistic that make
the finding a bit more surprising. Of course, maybe it's simpler just to not
be surprised and just say "English WP is almost equally edited .".
Aside, I really don't know whether it's possible to get the numbers to truly
know how many people speak a language well enough to be likely to be willing
to edit WP in that language in order to compare it to the location where the
edits originate. There's probably an interesting research topic in relation
to level of skills in a language and comfort zone in terms of editing WP in
that language. I speculate that many people might be confident to do simple
edits in a language in which they have a lower level of fluency but that
larger edits might only be done by the more fluent. And I suspect the
language(s) in which you read WP probably limit the languages in which you
edit it (since reading an article is often a trigger to edit it).
Kerry
_____
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Taha
Yasseri
Sent: Thursday, 6 September 2012 7:06 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] [pre-print] Value production in a
collaborativeenvironment
Hello Everybody,
Few days ago, we have submitted a manuscript, reviewing some of our recent
work + comparisons to others + some new results.
A pre-print is at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5130
The aim of the paper is to provide a mini review especially for those ones
who are not very familiar with the field. However, the paper is clearly
biased in coverage in favour of our topics of interest and also mentioning
only those papers that I come across! Since the first characteristic, being
limited in topical coverage, is fine, the second one, potential missing of
related papers should be cured as much as possible.
That would be highly appreciated if you could give me feedbacks of any kind,
especially on the missing literatures.
Cheers,
.Taha Yasseri
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