A similar phenomenon occurs here in the US with northern cities (specifically Seattle and Minneapolis) often ranking highly on measures of literacy like library checkouts, newspaper circulation, and education levels. When people spend free time indoors due to cold and damp weather, I speculate that they tend to engage in activities like reading, playing musical instruments and computer games, improving their education, and of couse watching Seahawks football games. ;) I hope that we will make good use of this phenomena in Seattle by engaging more people in Cascadia Wikimedians activities.
Pine
> On 16.3.2015, at 11.30, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Awesome work! It's interesting to see Finnish as the outlier here. Do
> we have any fi-users on the list who can comment on this and might
> know what's going on? (And, in the absence of Finns: Jan, heard
> anything from across the border? :p)
To find a certain societal explanation for this, one good have a look of the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic Wikipedias. If they come high, too, I would explain this with the Nordic people’s interest in reading (and high level of general education).
Some earlier studies by UNESCO have demonstrated that the people in Nordic countries read more newspapers, books etc. than people in the rest of the world. If I remember right the Finns has beaten the Nordic countries also in these comparisons. So the explanation can be reading habits in generate, which is a cause of high level of basic education, library network, equal society etc.
- Teemu
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Teemu Leinonen
http://teemuleinonen.fi
+358 50 351 6796
Media Lab
http://mlab.uiah.fi
Aalto University
School of Arts, Design and Architecture
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