Now the cartogram of the Wikipedia’s presence in East Asia national languages in 2009 shows the strong performance of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.  Not too bad for Malay, Indonesian and Thai.  Very weak for Mongolian, Laotian, Burmese and Khmer. Recall that according to the ITU in 2003, Nordic countries, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Finland and Asian Tiger economies of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, dominated the top-ten global digital access rankings.

If one compare the cartogram for East Asia in the post and that for Europe in the previous post long enough, the Wikipedia seems to have a “geographical” preference for certain coastal area.   It reminds me of the historical development of submarine telecommunication at least hundred years ago, when Denmark not only used telecommunication development to maneuver between big European powers such as Britain and Russia, but also played a pivotal role in connecting East Asia with their submarine telecommunication capacity.

So who are the Danish-like people now in East Asia to promote and benefit from the ICT development in the region?  I tend to think it is not just American entrepreneurs or Chinese bureaucrats, as most previous research has suggested, but some one else.  I will leave the question for another blog in the future.

Some commentators, especially from China and South Korea, has suggested that Wikipedia does not fit East Asian culture and argued that the local competitors of Wikipedia, the major ones of them are all services provided by major national/local search engines, serve the people better. The below choropleth map may challenge such an argument on two grounds. First, Wikipedia is popular in Japan, Vietnam and some Chinese-speaking regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Second, even Wikipedia is not as popular in South Korea and China, the sheer number of articles Wikipedia has, along with the other cross-lingual capacity of Wikipedia project, should have some influence on users there.

However, I have to agree with the commentators that language and culture do matter. (I am not easily convinced that all versions of Wikipedia is inherently Western and thus not Asian or local enough.) One of the most politically and technically controversial issue in East Asia is the role of Hanzi (or Chinese characters) in the deployment of ICT now and modernization in the past.  However, it is interesting to note that the countries of Hanzi-sphere, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and even Vietnam, has experienced higher-than-regional-average literacy rate (digital or otherwise) and economic development. Thus it is interestingly paradoxical when some commentators suggest the East Asian language writing systems hinder the modernization (or diffusion of Western technology and ideas) while some other suggest the opposite, the meritocratic part of Confucian culture helps the diffusion of digital literacy and ICT deployment. Which one is more correct than the other?

All these arguments have to be tested and substantiated with more evidence other than just the number of Wikipedia articles. Otherwise, people may be caught up with the number myth by believing number means absolute growth, which has been the major if not the only indicator of the “successful” stories of other Chinese-written encyclopedias such as Baidu and Hudong. Still, mapping Wikipedia with careful attention to its geo-linguistic distribution in the world seems to be a productive beginning.