I also saw that visualisation, and thought exactly the same thing.
Unfortunately, I think the Eurocentrism is based on a number of
things:
1. Greater proportions of people in those countries with higher
standards of living, meaning more free time to write articles and
higher rates of Internet connectivity.
2. Earlier proliferation of the printing press in Europe meaning
higher availability of historical records (along with this goes
greater degrees of digitisation and online availability of those
records in developed nations generally)
I think (1) is the greater issue, as similar visualisations (just
looking at geotags on articles, for instance) showed a similar
pattern.
Most of the African language Wikipedias have far fewer articles than
the Wikipedias in developed-nation languages, and I don't think they
can fill the gap. Most likely, to get developing nations' articles up
to standard, we will need to enlist the help of the greater numbers of
contributors from developed nations. I'm just not sure of the best way
to go about doing that.
On 8 April 2011 09:54, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This visualization - 'A History of the World in
100 Seconds' - is
fascinating. And instructive. (The missing byline is that it's a history
of the world according to Wikipedia). Apologies for cross-posting and/or
if you've seen it before - it seems to have been made about 2 months ago.
From the makers: "Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have
references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin
(@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic
visualization of Wikipedia's view of world history. Watch as empires
fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.
This won "Best Visualization" at Matt Patterson's History Hackday in
January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia
articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and
35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500
events with locations. Then we mapped them over time."
On the video's vimeo page, there are a whole lot of interesting comments
- like this one: "so cool! really incredible how euro-centric it is. i
wonder what it would look like if events were weighted by their
appearance in the non-english wikipedias?"
More here:
http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/06/a-history-of-the-world/
And here:
http://vimeo.com/19088241
Cheers,
Achal
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