On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 5:46 PM, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:

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@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] and [23] 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@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_origin 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@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_speakers 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@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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