Hi, the second most obvious factor is going to be the availability of internet access, but also the type of internet access, and how long people have had internet access.
The unproven assumption is that Wikipedia is written by people with internet experience and leisure time access to the internet via the desktop environment. Over a decade ago when I was working in a marketing company, there was a rule of thumb that people only started shopping on the internet after two years of internet experience. I don’t know if that was ever scientifically tested, or what the equivalent would be for editing Wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure that editing Wikipedia is not an entry level experience on the internet. We do know both from experience of training people to edit Wikipedia and also from looking at recent changes, that Wikipedia is almost a broadcast media in the mobile environment. There are some people who edit on tablets and even smartphones, but the editing community is mostly via the desktop environment. Just to confuse things desktop doesn't just include laptops in this context, there are even people using tablets but opting for the desktop environment rather than the mobile one. So two languages with similar populations on the internet could have radically different Wikipedia sizes because in one culture access is fairly new and mostly smartphone based whilst in the other it is a longstanding thing with a large proportion of experienced Internet users with PC access. The biggest difference though is going to be the policy of that Wikipedia community re bot creation of articles, with Cebuano, Swedish and Waray at one extreme. Such policies change over time, the English Wikipedia went through one of its early growth surges when a bot was used to start articles on all populated places in the USA, so it would be an oversimplification to simply list English as one of the Wikipedias that is currently chary about bot creation of articles. A very simplistic way to look at this is to order Wikipedias not by number of articles but by number of edits. On that basis Polish with 53m edits would drop behind the rather smaller Japanese Wikipedia as that has 69 million edits. Cebuano with 5.3 million articles but only 23 m edits would drop a long way from second place. Other theories re differences between sizes of Wikipedia include ones re multilingual people. Phenomena such as the tendency of Indian editors to edit in English rather than Indic languages. One theory is that people are editing in a language that they perceive as “higher status” another that Wikipedians have multiple motivations and that some people edit in a language they are not fully fluent in in order to practice that language, a third is that Wikipedia is written in the correct alphabet for each language, but many people only have access to Latin keyboards. I am familar with this from Georgia where a large proportion of Georgians communicate on sites such as Facebook writing Georgian in the Latin script, but last I heard Wikipedia editing is restricted to those who can switch to Georgian script. Obviously this last issue is changing over time as particular scripts become available on the internet or as options in Wikipedia editing. I would be very interested to see your paper, thanks for picking this topic. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: 30012764400n behalf of Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 10:03 am To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Country (culture...) as a factor in contributing to collective intelligence projects Dear all, I am working on a paper on why/whether people contribute (or not) to collective intelligence differently projects in different countries. The paper was inspired, partially, by several discussions I had with various people on why different language Wikipedia's have different sizes, besides (doh) the popularity of the language (and yes, English is biggest because it is international; and yes, I am aware a few Wikipedias are outliers because of bots creating machine translations or auto-populating villages or such). But for example, Poland and South Korea have roughly similar population/speakers and development status, yet Polish Wikipedia is over 3x the size of the SK one and no bot can account for that. So, there's more to that. I am already feeding dozens of parameters to a spreadsheet for some modelling, but I a) wonder what I might have missed - before a reviewer asks 'why didn't you check for xyz' and b) would like to have a few nice sentences about how things that people expect to matter do not (or vice versa). Hence, my question to you all, in the form of this open question mini survey: Why do you think different language Wikipedia's have different sizes, outside of the popularity of a given language? For reference, list of Wikipedias by size and language: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias TIA! -- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
