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.
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(… 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.0…
[
23]<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0…
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_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;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****
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
--
Taha.
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org