Dear all,

Recently I have gathered and plotted the world Internet users from 2000 onwords based on three different world geographic categorization schemes: UN, World Bank, and CIA

http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/hanteng/2015/03/18/the-new-internet-world-un-worl...

In this blog post, I have noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation's geographic categorization seems to be different from the Stats page and the International development team, signaling out the distinct absence/presence of the category of Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a category that is used only in the World Bank categorization scheme.

Personally I do not have any preferences of any of the categorization schemes, I believe in open data, open research, and open solutions. So it is up to researchers and practitioners to decide which categorization schemes to use.

Nonetheless, it points to a practice gap in the current research into " global Wikimedia content and communities". Thus I raise a few questions in the blog post as below in terms how we can systematically compare and share the Wikimedia's global activities in editing, viewing, fundraising and fund dissemination:

The above charts no only show the important baselines for any Websites (assuming that Internet users are also Web users) for their global strategies for growth, but also demonstrate the importance of the choice of geographic categorization scheme. .....

...., it is relevant and important if the Wikimedia Foundation can release its global activities, including the viewing, editing and fundraising numbers so that researchers and Wikipedians can compare those numbers with the world distribution of Internet users. It would be interesting to see, for example, how the funds are raised from around the world and then distributed across different geographic regions, per Internet user.

To me, I believe that data aggregation reports to the level of any of the three geographic categorization schemes (CIA, worldbank, and UN) should have much less privacy concerns and thus should be reported regularly, if not monthly, at least annually.

Feel free to forward it to another mailing list of the larger Wikimedia family if you found it relevant.

Best, han-teng liao