Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?
Wikipedia aims at representing the sum of all knowledge. It is not so easy to define "the sum of all knowledge". We could expect the sum of all knowledge means knowledge from every region in the world (geographical distribution), from every era in History, from every culture, every ethnic group, every gender group, etc.
Trying to measure diversity of knowledge on Wikipedia, we can look at diversity of contributors, number of Wikipedia articles, diversity of sources and references[1] or diversity in mentioned entities inside a given article.[2]
In this article, I look at the geographical distribution of people mentioned in an article (people mentioned with a blue link).
I apply my methodology to a selection of articles about general topics such as music, culture or knowledge in a selection of Wikipedia versions and I discuss the results.
Methodology
Given a Wikipedia article, I select all internal links (blue links) and I call them "mentioned entities". This can be done through the endpoint "links" in the MediaWiki generator API. The magic is that this API can be integrated in a SPARQL query in the Wikidata Query Service. So I combine the call to the API with a Wikidata query. I select all mentioned entities with P31 equal to Q5 (humans) with a known birthplace (P19) and I collect the country of the birthplace with property P17.
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?country ?countryLabel ?birthplace
?birthplaceLabel
WHERE {
SERVICE wikibase:mwapi {
bd:serviceParam wikibase:endpoint "en.wikipedia.org";
wikibase:api "Generator";
mwapi:generator "links";
mwapi:titles "Music";.
?item wikibase:apiOutputItem mwapi:item.
}
FILTER BOUND (?item)
?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ; wdt:P19
?birthplace.
?birthplace wdt:P17 ?country .
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}
I then collect a mapping between actual countries and continents. The mapping comes from Wikidata but is consistent with United nations M49 classification.[3]
SELECT DISTINCT ?continent ?continentLabel ?country ?code WHERE {
VALUES ?continent {
wd:Q55643
wd:Q48
wd:Q15
wd:Q18
wd:Q49
wd:Q46
}
?continent (wdt:P527*) ?country.
?country
wdt:P2082 ?code.
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}
I perform a left join of the two data frames using the Arquero JavaScript library.[4]
Finally, I regroup Europe and North America as "Western World" and the four other continents as "Rest of the world". This is an opinionated and radical approach but it makes the numbers easier to read. Places of birth which cannot be associated with a current country are labeled "Unclassified".
I've developed a user interface using Observable notebook.[5] Users can choose two parameters: the Wikipedia project (i.e. "pt.wikipedia.org") and the title of the article. Parameters can be added in the URL directly. For instance, you can look at article "Kennis" (i.e. knowledge) in Afrikaans: https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=af.wikipedia.org&article=Kennis.
All computations are performed in the appendix of the notebook. The code is open source licensed under the ISC.
Results
This approach makes sense for articles about general topics such as music, work, art, beauty, love, humanity, knowledge, education, school, religion, etc. Also it makes sense if the number of people mentioned in the article is high enough to compute percentages.
In this section, we focus on three notions, music, knowledge and culture in five languages English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
Music
Music comes from all over the world. I would expect an encyclopedic article to mention people from all the continents. Let's take a look at the numbers.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Music | 6 (8.2%) | 2 (2.7%) | 65 (89.0%)[6] |
| Spanish | es:Música | 0 (0%) | 3 (5.0%) | 57 (95.0%)[7] |
| French | fr:Musique | 4 (6.5%) | 0 (0%) | 58 (93.5%)[8] |
| Portuguese | pt:Música | 1 (5.0%) | 0 (0%) | 19 (95.0%)[9] |
| Arab | ar:موسيقى | 23 (79.3%) | 0 (0%) | 6 (20.7%)[10] |
On the French, English, Portuguese and Spanish Wikipedias, the proportion of people born in Europe and North America is higher than 89%. This leaves little room for people born in Asia, Africa, South America or Oceania. Although Spanish is widely spoken in South America, the article in Spanish does not mention any musician born on this continent or in Africa, Asia or Oceania.
Knowledge
Knowledge is another general topic. One would expect the article to mention people from all over the world. Wikipedia in English and Wikipedia in Portuguese have articles with more than 90% of mentioned entities born in Europe or North America. Wikipedia in French has too few entities and Wikipedia in Spanish has more diversity.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Knowledge | 5 (6.4%) | 2 (2.6%) | 71 (91.0%)[11] |
| Spanish | es:Conocimiento | 1 (3.1%) | 5 (15.6%) | 26 (81.3%)[12] |
| French | fr:Connaissance | 0 (-) | 0 (-) | 10 (-) [13] |
| Portuguese | pt:Conhecimento | 1 (3.4%) | 1 (3.4%) | 27 (93.1%)[14] |
| Arab | ar:معرفة | 6 (20.7%) | 4 (13.8%) | 19 (65.5%)[15] |
Culture
Looking at culture shows that the article in French lacks diversity, with 96.5% of mentioned people from Europe and North America. Articles in English and Spanish are a little bit more diverse, with 84.0% and 88.9% of people from Europe and North America. The article in Portuguese is a good example of diverse article with respect to our criteria, with 55% people from Europe and North America.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Culture | 21 (12.9%) | 5 (3.1%) | 137 (84.0%)[16] |
| Spanish | es:Cultura | 4 (8.9%) | 1 (2.2%) | 40 (88.9%)[17] |
| French | fr:Culture | 2 (3.5%) | 0 (0%) | 55 (96.5%)[18] |
| Portuguese | pt:Culture | 10 (20.4%) | 12 (24.5%) | 27 (55.1%)[19] |
| Arab | ar:ثقافة | 0 (-) | 0 (-) | 4 (-)[20] |
Discussion
Globally, the results show that on the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, people born outside Europe and North America are not mentioned very often.
Of course, there are multiple layers of explanations. The total number of written sources about those topics may be higher in Europe and North America than in the rest of the world. The total number of contributors may also be higher in those regions than in the rest of the world. There is also maybe an imbalance in the number of biographies between people born in Europe and North America and people born in other continents.
Of course, nobody knows what would be the fair percentage of people born outside Europe and North America for a given Wikipedia article. But WWRW helps raise awareness of some imbalances. If people from Oceania, South America, Asia or Africa are not mentioned in an article about the topic, it's worth asking why and looking for new sources which could help to add some diversity in the article.
More work is needed to measure diversity in Wikipedia articles. Anyone can play with the WWRW tool or any other tool in "article analytics"[21] and do his or her own report, and anyone can develop new ways to measure diversity.
References
- ^ For instance, Piotr Konieczny and Włodzimierz Lewoniewski look at the number and of articles related to the United States of America and the number of American sources in references. See their presentation at Wikimania 2024: https://prezi.com/view/C7snnAZFWqZz7vPD0kLu/
- ^ In a previous Signpost article, I look at the gender distribution of people (human entities) mentioned in Wikipedia articles: Measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles, The Signpost, may 2022
- ^ https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/overview/#
- ^ Arquero is JavaScript library developed by Jeffrey Heer: https://idl.uw.edu/arquero/api/
- ^ Observable is a platform created by Melody Meckfessel and Mike Bostock which proposes to write notebooks in JavaScript. It is widely used by the data visualization community
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Music
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=M%C3%BAsica
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Musique
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=M%C3%BAsica
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%82%D9%89
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Knowledge
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=Conocimiento
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Connaissance
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=Conhecimento
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%A9
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Culture
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=Cultura
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Culture
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=Cultura
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D8%AB%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%A9
- ^ https://observablehq.com/collection/@pac02/article-analytics
Discuss this story
Interesting. Thanks for mentioning our presentation. The Prezi can be seen in our Wikimania presentation: File:Wikimania 2024 - Dilijan - Day 1 - Exploring Americanization in different regions of the world using Wikipedia and Wikidata.webm. You may also want to check our paper on this, that the presentation was based on, published earlier this year: Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias. Accessible through WP:Wikipedia Library, I hope (not in LibGen yet, sorry...). No OA as WMF does not support grants for OA on Wikipedia studies (we asked), and no other funding source was available. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:44, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess it's a basic understanding in eastern world editors that their is a supremecy of the so called west in term of equal distribution of content.––kemel49(connect)(contri) 00:48, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While bringing a spotlight to a specific region with a new article is pretty doable (love seeing articles dedicated to specific fields in specific countries), trying to bring up a non-canonical region in a broad-topic article tends to be controversial. Here's one experience I've had with this, for example, trying to add a little section on Latin America in the History of video games. (Same with Africa but I'm not sure when that was removed) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:23, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The bias tends to be geographically oriented from major cities, in my opinion. This can be seen within the UK and USA easily by checking the origin of edits against articles about geographic items of interest. The geographic items (towns, statues, etc) tend to be written by a more diverse community according to proximity of larger population centres. Lazy Wikipedians read & edit only in their native language. Connections and filling in of blanks are the hobby of multi-lingual Wikipedians, who tend to be in the minority. Jane (talk) 11:29, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]