At Newpage patrol I've been seeing quite a few articles about towns and wildlife parks in Africa and South Asia, often by newby editors. Getting them categorized, wikified and ideally referenced is enough of a challenge let alone getting them geocoded.
But I do get the impression that we are filling in some of those geographic gaps.
And most of the time I think they are being treated OK by the deletionists. Though I did see one speedy tag where I wondered if the tagger would have tagged as non notable a nature reserve of over 10,000 ha in North America or Western Europe.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:21:50 +0000 From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Technology Guardian article on global article distribution To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4B17AD5E.5050602@ntlworld.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/02/wikipedia-known-unknowns-ge...
Mark Graham writes. Map of density by geo-tagging round the world, and a sensible comment that broadband is only just coming to parts of Africa, meaning we can expect more editing from there in future. Actually South Asia needs a mention in that connection also.
Charles
Message: 2 Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 12:49:54 +0000 From: geni geniice@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Technology Guardian article on global article distribution To: charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com, English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: f80608430912030449j4b0680bdnde5c153a3b9e8584@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
2009/12/3 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/02/wikipedia-known-unknowns-ge...
Mark Graham writes. Map of density by geo-tagging round the world, and a sensible comment that broadband is only just coming to parts of Africa, meaning we can expect more editing from there in future. Actually South Asia needs a mention in that connection also.
Charles
Original blog post has more maps:
http://zerogeography.blogspot.com/2009/11/mapping-geographies-of-wikipedia.h...
Slovenia seems to have rather a high number of geocoded articles per head of population.
-- geni
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:50 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@googlemail.com> wrote:
And most of the time I think they are being treated OK by the deletionists. Though I did see one speedy tag where I wondered if the tagger would have tagged as non notable a nature reserve of over 10,000 ha in North America or Western Europe.
Do we need affirmative action in favour of articles about Africa?
Steve
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:50 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@googlemail.com> wrote:
And most of the time I think they are being treated OK by the deletionists. Though I did see one speedy tag where I wondered if the tagger would have tagged as non notable a nature reserve of over 10,000 ha in North America or Western Europe.
Do we need affirmative action in favour of articles about Africa?
No because we already have this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias
What we do need is more of an understanding by AfD participants and by admins processing speedy candidates that African topics are far less likely to have sources immediately apparent on a simple search of Google. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/BENDELfor an example (not to single out its nominator, but it is a good example). This is a former state of Nigeria which had a population of several million.
Sam Blacketer wrote:
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Do we need affirmative action in favour of articles about Africa?
No because we already have this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias
Which would be fine if the concept of "systemic bias" was understood by the very people who exhibit it. (Perhaps that's not quite the right way to put it: individuals do though put forward views and opinions that are representative of our various kinds of systemic bias, and this tends to be unconsciously done on their part.) If we want a good strategy direction, we could ask the WMF to do more to place systemic front and centre in descriptions of the mission, as an unacceptable clamp on WP's ability to reflect the total of global knowledge.
See for example [[Quinary]], which carries a notability query template. The body of the article starts "Many languages^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinary#cite_note-0 use quinary number systems". The systemic bias of denary (base-10) people is fairly clear here. The [[tyranny of the majority]] indeed. See [[Category talk:Positional numeral systems]] for me getting annoyed.
Charles