Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Geography

Does a geographical bias exist? edit

Almost certainly yes: researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have shown that both coverage^[1] and participation^[2]^[3] are strikingly geographically concentrated on Wikipedia. Below is a comparison between how many times Canada is mentioned in four encyclopedias and how many times Nigeria is mentioned. The second column is the ratio of mentions of Belgium to mentions of Rwanda.

Canada: Nigeria	Belgium: Rwanda	Encyclopedia
27:1	11:1	Wikipedia
19:1	4:1	Encarta
12:1	4:1	Columbia
5:1	4:1	Britannica

While it has long been one of Jimbo Wales' goals to distribute Wikipedia in the poor nations of the world, currently we would be giving them a product that does a relatively poor job of covering their regions. It should be noted that it only does a poor relative job. Wikipedia has a similar total number of articles mentioning Rwanda and Nigeria to Encarta and Britannica.

Rough evaluation of coverage:

Coverage	Region
Excellent	North America, Japan, Western Europe, Australia & NZ
Good	East Asia, Eastern Europe
Mediocre	Latin America, Middle East, South Asia
Poor	Sub-Saharan Africa

Causes edit

The causes of this bias are fairly readily apparent. Wikipedia exists almost solely on the Internet and is thus on one side of the Digital Divide. Wikipedia writers mostly come from developed nations. Take a look at Wikipedia:Wikipedians by country. Our writers submit articles about what they know and what they know is more likely to be close at hand. Also, a look at Special:Mostlinked quickly demonstrates that the United States is the most linked to country far above any other country.

Solutions edit

Make Wikipedians aware of the issue so that they might decide to help work to correct it.
Create lists of basic but missing topics in those underserved areas to aid Wikipedians in finding ways to correct bias:
Create a list of articles that currently only reflect a western or developed country viewpoint.
Rather than only encouraging existing users, attempt to recruit new users to the project who can help counter these biases.
Alter or expand the project so that it is not so subject to the digital divide.

Geography To-Do List edit

The following geographically related articles have been identified as inadequate. They must be completed to counter the systemic bias of wikipedia. Each article is assigned a level of completedness according to the following scale: (We will have to agree on some sort of scale)

- stub, a paragraph or two, completely inadequate.
- maybe a few paragraphs, but coverage is inadequate, still missing some basic information. May include Western-biased information; for example may focus on relations of a place with the west.
- Many paragraphs, covers all, or almost all, basic information, provides a bit of depth.
- Excellent article. Covers all that is required of an encyclopedia. Has balance and depth. Sufficiently long to cover the topic.