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Wikipedia knowledge deserts Africa fact of the day
Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).There are some countries that are crammed with a dense amount of floating virtual information, such as Germany (with an average of one article tagged for every 65 square km), while others remain as virtual deserts, such as Chad (with an average of one tagged article every 17,000 square km).
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen when looking at the number of geotagged articles per person. Austria, Iceland and Switzerland all have around one geotagged article for every 1,000 people, while in China or Guinea there is just over one article for every 500,000 people.
Here is the full article, interesting throughout and with a good map. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 4, 2009 at 04:39 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
One reason for Chad to be a virtual desert on wikipedia is... well it is pretty much an actual desert (hottest place on earth if I am not mistaking).
Posted by: Ben at Dec 4, 2009 5:47:12 AM
Still, there must be lots on Hanging Chads?
Posted by: dearieme at Dec 4, 2009 5:59:15 AM
topical
Posted by: josh at Dec 4, 2009 6:13:52 AM
Doesn't it make sense? Middle Earth and Discworld are more interesting to people in the "Global North", so there are more Wikipedia articles about them.
Posted by: Neal at Dec 4, 2009 7:00:42 AM
More articles on anime than on the rest of Japan.
Posted by: Tom T. at Dec 4, 2009 7:16:45 AM
Typical of the corporatist information structure that rules what gets published and what doesn't. If only information - indeed, the very publishing of that information - could be decentralized to the individual level, so the people themselves could disseminate what is important to them, such inequities would disappear in short order.
Posted by: ziel at Dec 4, 2009 8:26:42 AM
Who writes Wikipedia? I've noticed with Google that for words with any computer software connotation, that meaning will dominate search results. Sun is not primarily the bright orb in the sky, nor is Java an island. Information gathering on the internet yields disproportionately those things of interest to people who are interested in the internet.
Posted by: John Mansfield at Dec 4, 2009 8:36:21 AM
Typical of the corporatist information structure that rules what gets published and what doesn't. If only information - indeed, the very publishing of that information - could be decentralized to the individual level, so the people themselves could disseminate what is important to them, such inequities would disappear in short order.
Zounds! They're onto us!
Posted by: Evil Corporatist at Dec 4, 2009 9:02:38 AM
I think this would be a more interesting fact if it compared per-capita English speakers to tagged articles. For example, Namibia's official language is English, but almost no one speaks it as a first language, and the nation only has 2 million people, about a sixth of New Jersey.
Posted by: Joshua Holmes at Dec 4, 2009 9:10:35 AM
Does it matter? In absolute terms Africa still has an incredible amount of coverage.
Posted by: Chris at Dec 4, 2009 9:12:00 AM
It turns out that Wikipedia is as inherently racist as the piano:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/23/composer-fluid-piano-geoff-smith
Posted by: Winslow Theramin at Dec 4, 2009 9:23:47 AM
Does anyone have a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica handy to run the requisite comparison?
Posted by: Mike Giberson at Dec 4, 2009 9:33:29 AM
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen...
Hmmmm. Coverage on Wikipedia seems like a funny indication of the division between Global North and Global South.
Posted by: Matt at Dec 4, 2009 10:18:28 AM
Westerners probably know more about Middle Earth than about Africa. Its called "the Dark continent" for a reason.
And I see the Guardian comments were dominated by a political argument about Israel, proving the point about the article.
Posted by: Ed at Dec 4, 2009 10:58:43 AM
Mike, no info on the Britannica, although I'm sure there's a bias for historical reasons if nothing else. I have a book somewhere with a selection of articles from past editions of the EB, and it's really interesting to see how the approach has changed since the earliest - where, for example, a Scottish Calvinist morality pervades many of the articles.
I am also reminded of Clay Shirky's recent post on categories and classification (http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html). Library catalog systems were primarily set up to organize books, and often a particular collection of books at a particular time. Thus (to take one of Shirky's examples), under "History" two of the top-level categories are "The Netherlands" and "Asia".
Getting back to Wikipedia, there's wikigroaning, proposed by the humor site somethingawful. As they put it (http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php):
"First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles."
Posted by: Ken at Dec 4, 2009 11:08:28 AM
I still don't understand a lot of the rhetoric surrounding "Global North" and "Global South."
While "environmental determinism" is a dangerous set of theories and generalizations to apply anywhere, it would seem to me to carry a lot of merit; countries that have found success in the Global South tend to be those with measurable amounts of land within or near the temperate belts, i.e. Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, South Africa, pre-2000's Zimbabwe, Botswana (due more to elevations), and the biological advantages that tend to come with it; namely, lack of organisms adapted over long timespans to simian/human biology to act as parasites and diseases in our systems surviving dormant in every part of the landscape.
Also in the article, there is an emphasis on "geotagged" articles, but is that really representative of the actual volume of available information? I seem to have little trouble discovering a fairly significant amount of information on Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, etc, particularly in fields that have been documented in Western learning (i.e. linguistics, archaeology.) But even so, this goes back to the issue of human development, and one that seems just as colonialist and condescending, saying "the poor natives can't be held responsible to trying to develop their own infrastructure/learning/stability/social structures because of colonialism, etc... while there are still issues, there are also a number of reasons why simply blaming every problem within the "Global South" on nasty evil white-folk imperialists ignores many harsh realities of environment, societal development, and the limitations that these circumstances place on Western-style QoL improvements. Just my two cents, perhaps a bit of an overreaction...
Posted by: Neal at Dec 4, 2009 11:08:38 AM
True, Wikipedia Africa may lag behind the other continents... but it still is far more useful than many other sources. My mother, who works in many rural parts of East Africa, tells me about how Wikipedia usually has much more up to date data than the CDC, USAID, or the UN for the small villages where she works. Wikipedia's reliance on decentralization makes it successful in areas where large state-run organizations can't succeed.
Posted by: John at Dec 4, 2009 11:11:52 AM
Compare the "Geotagged Wikipedia Map" to a Map of Internet Users:
http://www.indexmundi.com/map.aspx?v=Internet+users
Note that the Internet Users Map has a strong choropleth visual bias towards the high end, where about 90% of the map is a shade of blue, and only 3% is red. Regardless, look at the numbers and compare to the Guardian's quantity of wiki tags. They seem to correspond (by quick inspection) highly with Internet Use.
We are everywhere egoists.
Posted by: tgrass at Dec 4, 2009 11:18:39 AM
Geotagging is a flawed measure, as the author of the article states: "The reason that Burkina Faso has more geotagged articles (1071) than South Africa (945), Kenya (217) and the rest of Africa is probably down to diligent editing rather than more actual content in Burkina Faso. However, in all cases, these numbers pale in comparison to the huge number of articles in places such as the US (89,549) and Germany (54,634)." This indicates that, if properly tagged, countries like Egypt and South Africa should be the leading African countries, and certainly have more articles than Antarctica, based on Anglophone biases.
Posted by: Millian at Dec 4, 2009 1:16:46 PM
This phenomenon calls for affirmative action. There should be an equal number of articles published for each nation. Any other outcome is racist or otherwise politically incorrect. I propose the formation of a UN Agency to regulate such vital matters. All violators should be severly punished.
Posted by: Albert Farangh at Dec 4, 2009 4:33:32 PM
Neal: More importantly, lots and lots and lots of people with computer access know the books very well.
The people with the most knowledge about Chad (eg) that isn't already covered by the basic article... aren't spending a lot of time on Wikipedia, I think.
And as Millian said, counting geotags is not the same as real content about the location.
Posted by: Sigivald at Dec 4, 2009 5:43:32 PM
There is an enormous amount of infrastructure, clearly defined civil society, functional and far-reaching government, information gathering, censuses and other organized, recorded information bits in countries like Germany.
In countries like Chad, the quantifiable information is far less available. The more predominant form of information is diffuse local knowledge that cannot or will not be recorded. A traveler learns this very quickly.
Posted by: Karen at Dec 4, 2009 5:50:41 PM
africa's a shithole
what else is there to know
Posted by: james at Dec 4, 2009 5:59:31 PM
I wonder how closely that map correlates with a map of annual Star Trek conventions per capita.
Some of the differences are due to differences in how much stuff there is to say about a place. More dynamic areas will have more to write about than ones that are more static.
But that doesn't account for all of the under-representation in that map. China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America -- they're not exactly fact deserts.
This is the trouble with Wikipedia or indeed anything where revenue and employee compensation are as close to FREE as possible. Let's think of an industry where the coverage-to-fact ratio is much higher than in Wikipedia, by geography. I got it -- newspapers. Those foreign bureaus cost money to run, and this has to be paid for by the end user.
That's why the WSJ and FT have such excellent world news reporting, and why the FREE-thinking NYT has started to emphasize domestic fads more and more. Hell, the WP just shuttered all of its domestic bureaus outside of Washington!
If you want hard-to-get stuff, you have to pay more for it.
Posted by: agnostic at Dec 4, 2009 6:50:43 PM
Very little of my 27 volume Encyclopedia Britannica is devoted to African nations, people, culture, religion, etc, and I paid some over a thousand two decades ago, continuing with the tradition of many Americans wanting a comprehensive summary of our world's knowledge which provided the scholars producing the articles funding for something like a century to expand on the summary they produced with continuing work.
Clearly the lack of detail on Africa in wikipedia is unrelated to money, nor unique to wikipedia.
Of course, the effort by Europeans to wipe out African history and culture in order to justify taking their property and enslaving them because they have no history or culture plays a major role in the knowledge of Africa. How can you write up the rich history of Africa and its people, while stealing their property, mass murdering them, and enslaving them?
Posted by: mulp at Dec 4, 2009 7:12:44 PM
hey mulp, go check out Wikipedia and you'll see that africans were doing that to each other long before the evil European devil came. Wikipedia will have as many articles on africa when there is something NOTABLE (yes, Wikipedia has standards) to come out of that continent.
Posted by: mulp_is_racist at Dec 4, 2009 8:09:17 PM
What a terrible way to compare the two. Chad is almost triple the size of Germany but has about one seventh the population.
I bet the Mojave desert has way fewer articles per square meter than the Los Angeles metro area! Bias!
Posted by: michael at Dec 5, 2009 12:22:04 AM
"Wikipedia will have as many articles on africa when there is something NOTABLE (yes, Wikipedia has standards) to come out of that continent."
You don't think that there is a systemic bias in the form of overly represented western oriented articles in wikipedia? Wikipedia, itself, dissagrees with you ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia#Systemic_bias_in_coverage ).
Judging on how many article stubs on Africa related topics currently exist ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Africa_stubs ), one can easily conclude that lack of notability is not the real cause for the lack of articles.
Posted by: mulp_is_racist_is_an_ethnocentrist at Dec 5, 2009 9:03:20 AM
"africa's a shithole
what else is there to know"
Oh, my mistake. I assumed that I was commenting with rational thoughtful people, not brain dead Sailerites. Tyler, it seems that you still have this infestation...
Posted by: mulp_is_racist_is_an_ethnocentrist at Dec 5, 2009 9:09:55 AM
