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_orig…
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_s…
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(a)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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