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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