The Signpost

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Mapping geotagged articles language, import sources enabled, and more

Geographical distribution of articles by language

Even many of the larger Wikipedias are very parochial, according to a new analysis of geographical density of Wikipedia articles by language, by Mark Graham. Graham wrote a column on "Wikipedia's known unknowns" in The Guardian last week that included maps of different regions of the world shaded according to the density of corresponding geocoded Wikipedia articles — that is, articles with geographic coordinates included; he found that the Global North is much better represented on Wikipedia in this regard than the Global South.

In the new follow-up up on his blog Zero Geography, Graham compares the density of geotagged articles in different language editions. The result is that each language's geotagged articles are largely concentrated in the areas where the respective languages are spoken, and only English and German Wikipedias have significant coverage outside the geographic areas where those languages predominate.

Import sources enabled on the English Wikipedia

It is now possible to import pages with their full history from Meta, several language versions of Wikipedia, and the Nostalgia Wikipedia, a copy of the English Wikipedia database from 20 December 2001. This feature can be used for attribution of translated articles alongside {{Iw-ref}}, and very old edits can be imported from the Nostalgia Wikipedia that are not in the current Wikipedia database. See Wikipedia:Requests for page importation to make requests, and this week's technology report for more details.

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