Benvolguts,
M’ha arribat procedent de la factoria Bilbeny aquest
interessant article sobre geografia, en estudiar quantitats i percentatges
de temes que es publiquen per internet, segons àrea geogràfica, segons llengua de publicació i
segons llengua majoritària dels diferents territoris.
Diuen que l’ambició de Viquipèdia és simple: compartir lliurement la
suma dels coneixements humans...
El treball de síntesi que s’ha fet és extraordinari. Els
mapes i estadístiques són notables. I les conclusions, encara que previsibles,
també.
·
El 84% d’articles tracten d’Europa o de Nord-Amèrica...
·
L’Antàrtica és gran, però no hi viu ningú...
·
Dels pocs articles escrits sobre territoris d’Àsia, Àfrica,
i Sud Amèrica, una desproporcionada quantitat està escrita en llengües que els
residents no coneixen...
·
La distribució de procedències dels articles fa que la
discrepància sigui encara més gran si es considera la població dels territoris,
ja que les àrees infrarepresentades resulta que són també les més fortament
poblades...
·
Malgrat les bones intencions hi ha dades curioses, per
exemple la llengua més usada sobre Bolívia i Namíbia és l’alemany, i la de la part
de la península ibèrica que anomenem Espanya ... és el català...
El gràfic de barres, nombre d’articles versus població, també
és aclaridor, encara que imaginable:
·
A l’Àsia, Àfrica i Sud-Amèrica el volum d’articles és
molt més petit que la població
·
A Europa i Nord-Amèrica el volum d’articles és molt
superior a la població
Vegem l’article, els
mapes i les estadístiques:
Wikipedia's geography problem: There are more articles
about Antarctica than Egypt
Antarctica's great. But no one lives
there.(Martha
de Jong-Lantink)
Wikipedia's ambition is simple: to freely share
the sum of all human knowledge.
In many ways, its
writers and editors have made remarkable progress toward that goal. But
analyzing the 31 million articles that currently make up
Wikipedia reveals it has a pretty huge blind spot — the world outside of Europe and
North America.
84 PERCENT OF ARTICLES ARE ABOUT NORTH AMERICA OR EUROPE
Mark Graham,
an Oxford geographer, and a few colleagues have analyzed a sample of nearly 4 million
Wikipedia articles in 44 languages that describe a subject with a particular
geographic location — say, the Battle
of Gettysburg, or the Great
Wall of China. When the researchers examined the geographic
distribution of these articles, they found that Europe and North America are
dramatically overrepresented, while Africa, Asia, and South America are hugely
underrepresented.
You might not be
shocked to learn this, but there are a few statistics that really drive home
how profound the geographic distortion is. 84 percent of all geotagged
articles, Graham found, are about places or events in North
American or Europe. Meanwhile, there are more Wikipedia articles written
about places in Antarctica (which has no permanent human residents) than about
any single country in Africa.
The underrepresentation of Africa, Asia, and South America
This map shows the
huge discrepancy in Wikipedia coverage worldwide. But it might actually
undersell it a bit, because the color scale used is logarithmic, collapsing the
difference between countries.
To get a better idea,
consider this: Japan has more than 94,000 articles about it, and all of North
Africa and the Middle East only have 88,342 combined.
The discrepancy is even bigger when you
consider population, since the underrepresented areas also happen to be among
the Earth's most heavily populated. Here's another striking chart from the research:
Simply put, there are
barely any articles about most places besides Europe and North America. Keep in mind
that this covers articles in all languages — not just English.
There's a language imbalance too
The research uncovered
another geographic problem with Wikipedia — of the few articles written about places in
Asia, Africa, and South America, a disproportionate amount are in languages
that most local residents don't speak. Wikipedia
skews towards English for articles about most countries, including almost all
of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Here's a map of the language most commonly represented in articles
about places or events in each country:
This basically means
that few of the articles being written about these countries are by locals —
and the majority of residents can't actually read them, because they're not in
the right language.
Why is Wikipedia so
geographically skewed?
Apart from documenting
Wikipedia's geographic disparities, Graham's research seeks to explain why they exist. And by looking at a number
of different variables and statistically analyzing them, his team highlighted
some of the factors that correlate with the number of Wikipedia articles about
a country.
One is pretty
straightforward: the country's population. Although (as mentioned) many of the
world's most populated areas are underrepresented, on the whole, there are
still more articles about countries with more people in them. This makes sense,
because at some level, more people mean more places and events that are
considered to be worth writing about.
A related factor is
simply the number of Wikipedia edits made from each country. On the whole,
people tend to write and edit articles based on places and events in their
country, so there's an overall correlation between Wikipedia activity in each
nation and the number of articles about it.
WIKIPEDIA'S GEOGRAPHIC
DISPARITIES REFLECT THE WORLD'S DIGITAL DIVIDE
But if these two
factors were the only important ones, it'd mean Wikipedia represented the world
pretty perfectly. The reason it doesn't is a third factor: each country's degree
of broadband internet access. Wikipedia's geographic disparities are
simply a reflection of the world's digital
divide.
People in poorer
countries are less likely to have access to computers, smartphones, or the
internet. The correlation is so high, in fact, that researchers sometimes use internet and
smartphone penetration as a proxy measure of a country's overall development.
There are some ongoing
efforts to fix this, such as Google's Project Loon, which could use high-altitude balloons
to bring internet to remote areas in Africa and Asia. If these projects
succeed, the presence of internet could help people in these regions in a
number of ways. And among the benefits could be the chance for residents
to document and learn about important places in their countries in the world's
largest encyclopedia.
Joan A. Forès
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