The Signpost

News and notes

Geographical distribution of Wikipedia edits; Sue Gardner interviewed; brief news

Geographical distribution of Wikipedia edits visualized

Erik Zachte, Data Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation, has produced visualizations showing the geographic provenance of edits to various language versions of Wikipedia on a particular day, using bubble maps, heat maps and animations. For example the bubble map for the spatial distribution of edits for the Chinese Wikipedia on that day clearly indicates that most contributions came from Hong Kong and Taiwan, instead of mainland China. The maps for the Ukrainian and Turkish Wikipedias hint at noticeable diaspora communities outside the main country, in contrast to, for example, the Norwegian Wikipedia. The spatial distribution for all languages combined shows a clear predominance of edits from within Europe.

The data used for the visualizations included the IP addresses of logged-in editors, which are subject to the WMF privacy policy. To protect editor privacy, edit timestamps were obfuscated by adding small errors, and geocoordinates were rounded.

Sue Gardner and Hisham Mundol interviewed

Wikimedian GerardM celebrated his birthday by interviewing the Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner on his personal blog. Among other things, she discussed preliminary results of the 2011 editor survey conducted recently by the WMF, which showed a markedly higher satisfaction with the performance of the WMF than with that of chapters (on a scale from 1 to 10, respondents ranked their own performance at 6.24, that of volunteers overall at 7.14, the Wikimedia Foundation's at 7.32 and that of chapters at 4.33). She believed this result was due to the relative youth of chapters. (In March, Gardner had—somewhat controversially—warned of possible risks from the inexperience of many chapters' boards, and Deputy Director Erik Möller had earlier stated that "the very existence of chapters [was] increasingly being questioned", a statement that was questioned itself. Cf. Signpost coverage.) She also commented on recent rises in traffic for the Chinese Wikipedia (with a general rise in Chinese Internet users as the most likely explanation) and from mobile devices.

Earlier last week, GerardM interviewed Hisham Mundol, the WMF consultant for National Programs, India.

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-16/News_and_notes