Sources: MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2018, "County Presidential Election Returns 2000-2016", 10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ, Harvard Dataverse Alaska Results by County Equivalent, 1960-2016, RRH Elections, /index.php/ 2/alaska-results-by- county-equivalent-1960-2016/ To put it another way: If your belief system is rooted in a book that has hardly changed for 2,000 years, you might be less interested in contributing to an encyclopedia that is continuously being written and rewritten. It’s not all that difficult to imagine that Wikipedia may not appeal to those interested in creating an information ecosystem that confirms religious beliefs not verifiable by the independent, secondary reliable sources that Wikipedia requires.
Its most popular articles include “Homosexual Agenda,” “Counterexamples to Relativity,” “Homosexuality and Anal Cancer,” and “Dinosaur,” which advances the argument that dinosaurs were created on the sixth day of Creation. The possibility that areas of high religious adherence might be less active on Wikipedia has some support in Conservapedia, which was founded in 2006 to counter what its founder perceived as Wikipedia’s liberal bias.
Of course, the modern encyclopedia is a largely secular project: The first large-scale one, Encyclopédie, did emerge from the Enlightenment after all, and took the then-radical approach of organizing its contents according to reason, not theology. This pattern appears to closely and inversely resemble religious adherence: Counties with high religious adherence also have a low level of Wikipedia-editing activity, and counties with low religious adherence have high levels of editing. Religion Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) The result is a set of maps that offer, for the first time, insight into where the millions of volunteer editors who build and maintain English Wikipedia’s 5 million pages are-and, maybe more important, where they aren’t. Read: The lopsided geography of Wikipedia I also counted 8.6 million username editors who have made at least one edit to an article.
I parsed all of the 884 million edits to English Wikipedia to collect and geolocate the 43 million IP addresses that have edited English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia screenshot editor software#
(This edit history is part of Wikipedia’s ethos of radical transparency: Everyone is anonymous, and you can see what everyone is doing.) When an editor isn’t logged in with a username, the software records that user’s IP address. Every time anyone edits Wikipedia, the software records the text added or removed, the time of the edit, and the username of the editor. And Wikipedia’s own culture pushes back against granular data harvesting: The Wikimedia Foundation’s strong data-privacy rules guarantee users’ anonymity and limit the modes and duration of their own use of editor data.īut as part of my research in producing Print Wikipedia, I discovered a data set that can offer an entry point into the geography of Wikipedia’s contributors. The media, meanwhile, frequently focus on Wikipedia’s personality stories, even when covering the bigger questions. But that’s basically it: In the interest of improving retention, the Wikimedia Foundation’s own research focuses on the motivations of people who do edit, not on those who don’t. We also know that, as with most of the internet, a small number of the editors do a large amount of the editing. We do know that just because anyone can edit, doesn’t mean that everyone does: The site’s editors are disproportionately cis white men from the global North. trust it about as much as the news.īut we know very little about who is writing the world’s encyclopedia. In a time of extreme political polarization, algorithmically enforced filter bubbles, and fact patterns dismissed as fake news, Wikipedia has become one of the few places where we can meet to write a shared reality.
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