One of the central idea of my overall concern about diffusion of innovations (which includes technology and political ideas) is how the geo-linguistic factors may help or hinder such diffusion. Here the post is about Wikipedia and the world.
Note that the success of Wikipedia can be contributed to many decisions or contributions made by individuals from around the globe. My own gut feeling about the major factors for its “global” success: is It solves some language capacity issues and it allows different governance for each language version of Wikipedia, which I have partially addressed in a published IEEE magazine article: Conflict and consensus in the Chinese version of Wikipedia. How Wikipedia as new idea and new technology has diffused around the globe?
Recently our OII research fellow Mark has just published an article for Guardian, provides interesting evidence on how the efforts and attention of Wikipedia’s geo-tagging is unevenly distributed across countries. Indeed, for Wikipedia to grow in geo-tagging requires even higher digital literacy, not just contributing to Wikipedias, but aslo contributing well-formatted geo-rich information.
Thus I make both cartograms and choropleth maps to show the geo-linguistic distribution of Wikipedia articles in East Asia and Europe. Note that only the national (non-colonial) languages that are unique to certain nation-states are included, leaving some countries like Cyprus, Switzerland, and Belgium out, and excluding English in East Asia. Singapore should have been excluded by the same rule, but since the other official languages of Singapore are represented by other East Asian countries in the map, I decide to include Tamli, one of the official language of Singapore to represent Singapore.
Because the nature of cartogram, one can immediately see the dominance of English in the Wikipedia world. Still, German, Polish Dutch and other Latin languages have strong showing relatively t their geographical size, with Catalan being represented by a small country Andorra. In contrast, Russian has relatively small size of Wikipedia articles in comparison with its European geographical territory.
The below choropleth map showing the same data set provides another perspective on the geo-linguistic diffusion of Wikipedia.
Some ex-communist countries like Poland and Russia have relatively high number of Wikipedia articles, sometimes even higher than the Nordic countries where Internet and ICT development is expected to be more extensive. Given the fact that the development of Wikipedia requires higher levels of digital literacy and more advanced skill sets., than just surfing, I tend to hypothesize that, as I found in the case of Chinese Wikipedia, a language version of Wikipedia can take off sometimes even earlier than a more extensive diffusion of Internet and ICT in a geo-linguistic region because of a sizable well-equipped users.
Is this the case for Russian and Polish version of Wikipedias? Are they written also by Russian and Polish speakers who are not in Russia and Poland? I will leave the question open a at the moment (probably come back later with the cartogram of Internet users in Europe) and move on to the geo-linguistic distribution/diffusion of Wikipedia in East Asia.