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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]

Now, comments on your analysis. 1) I'd nitpick not adding Australia and New Zealand to the Western world, but let's face it - their numbers are not likely to be very game changing. (Sorry, Aussies... I don't even know what is the nickname for New Zealanders...) 2) I understand very well why you have no Asian group (it's a pain to make); I'd still suggest having at least Japanese for some decent-ish comparison. Also I'd add German, as well as Russia to the set, those are big wikis (see also below). 3) Riding on - let's remember that Spanish and Portuguese significantly represent Latin America (you mention this for Spanish, but you seem to have forgotten Brazil...we have data from few years ago on views and edits to wiki by country - see [1] and [2]; sadly they are a few years old, the new Wikipedia Stats pages suck and if that information is still somewhere, I was never able to find it...), and English also includes many readers and contributors from India. Again, if anyone is interested in more, see our paper, we have like two page limitation chapter discussing this stuff. Anyway, the point is that the numbers above are not pure 'Western' world and to some degree (hard to estimate quickly) include Latin America and India. French is probably the 'purest', although it is popular in some African countries. That's why German would be very good here (big Western wiki not used much outside Europe). Russia would be good, since they not really 'West' (nor 'Asia'; Russia is, well, Russia). 4) As for the numbers, it's fascinating to see how different Arab numbers are, I'd love to learn more about what kind of people are and aren't discussed on Arab wiki, compared to 'Western'. 5) What's wrong with the table data for Arab and Culture? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:08, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, Kiwis. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:17, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, right, I forgot... :P Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:24, 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]

@Maplestrip Did you try starting a talk discussion to judge consensus? Or just start a dedicated stand-alone articles on these topics first, I am sure they are notable enough for that. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:46, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I actually just started a talk-page discussion, inspired by this In-Focus! I also wrote a few dedicated articles on those subjects, which is cool, but nobody looks at Video games in Nigeria if they aren't already interested in Nigeria. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:10, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or gaming trivia - or broader concepts. I mean, this won't be a top viewed article, but hey, I am planning on improving/writing some articles about related topics, namely science fiction (I have some materials on science fiction in some less known countries and wider regions). Science fiction in Africa is likely a notable concept and not just a fork of Afrofuturism. ([3]/[4] for example). Wishing you luck with your creations - I find this stuff very interesting, myself :) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:50, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh that's fascinating and exciting! I've been really happy to see topics related to Polish speculative fiction on the front-page recently (sad I couldn't find a translation of CyberJoly Drim), so I am really excited to see what else you might write like this ^_^ ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 18:14, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Maplestrip Machine translation is passable these days - you can translate CJD (published here) to English or such with just two mouse clicks. Granted, it is literature so the result want be as pretty as it would be from a professional literature translator (that's still is a few years away).
Many of my sf articles are published these days on pl wiki, but I am trying to get the better ones translated here. But again, I expect in few years we will have AI translating stuff... if you are curious, check for example my newest article on pl wiki at pl:Ostatnia godzina (powieść) and again, two clicks in browser should give you a passable English output. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:30, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do use machine translation, especially for sources and such, but it just feels terrible to try to parse a story that way. You lose all of the original writing and get something much flatter in return. Did read a bit of Cyberjoly Drim and it was cool, but I didn't get as much out of it. And to tie it back to this article's topic, that is of course one of the many challenges of making our articles represent the full human range :p ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 10:32, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is it realistic to expect a population of researchers to not have this sort of inherent linguistic bias? It is worthy of being done, but of course people who read, write, and speak English will go to English language sources first and that means subjects and topics that have happened within the Anglosphere get covered more. I see this all the time in plants. The sources are plentiful and easily accessed if a plant grows in North America. If it grows in Europe it is somewhat harder if it is not one of the cosmopolitan plants that have moved around the world. If the plant only grows somewhere like Mali or the Congo... it may well be impossible because the efforts to put sources for these countries online have not yet happened. And if they are online they may very well be in a language I do not read, I only know two. Anecdote: The other month when I wanted to de-stub an article for a Peruvian plant I had to physically go to a library to borrow a paper book. That slows things down. I could have done three much more in depth articles about American plants in the time it took me to write a short one for Castilleja ecuadorensis. And if I wanted a picture I would have to go to Peru and travel well into the Andes. So, of course, I'm going to work on plants closer to home more often. And given the huge gaps in the articles closer to home I'll never make even the local flora complete even if I keep editing steadily for another 20 years. I expect the reverse to also be true. Usually when I'm working on a North American species there is not an article in any language other than the four Wikis with a large number of bot created stubs (Cebuano, Svenska, Tiếng Việt, & Winaray). If the article does exist it is usually because of one editor. The one person with the skills, the time, and the interest has to exist to do the work. Because outside a few of the most famous or contentious topics it is going to be one editor who does most of the work to make an article really complete. TLDR: Editors are people. They're not perfectly spherical editing machines that have a universal set of skills to impartially and perfectly cover the world. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 04:47, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • Excellent points! Of course, there's a bias on English Wikipedia. We speak English, we use English sources, and we write in English. Editors are also biased toward using their time to create and edit articles that get attention rather than working on articles that get little attention. (I also love to toil on obscure Peruvian topics.) It would be interesting to see research on reader bias, such as the ebb and flow of interest in subjects, the trends in readership, etc. So, should we do something about reader and editor bias? No. The bias is perhaps more interesting than any remedy that could be devised. Smallchief (talk) 10:27, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      Thanks. I forgot to add the opposite problem. A super famous topic means there is too much information. Not too much variety, but too much of the same thing repeated over and over and over. If I go to edit catnip I can find a flood of information about it being used with cats. Trying to get specific information about its role in the environment is much harder because of all the sources repeating the same information about cats. I imagine the same thing may happen with broad topics like music or dance. There will be lots and lots of information in English about all the most popular parts of this broad topic as focused on the English speaking world making it harder for an editor looking for something different. Especially if they don't have an idea of what to look for. It is the one yellow straw in a pile of white ones problem. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 02:51, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • A pair of data points. First, one underreported subject are the ancient Christian churches of Eritrea/Ethiopia, which is a notable topic, & articles on them would help to rebalance coverage. (There are articles on notable churches of Europe & North America, so we should have equal coverage of those of Africa.) We do have a few (e.g. Lalibela), but finding information is a challenge. Except for the resources of ILL & JSTOR, the academic & public libraries in my area have practically no materials on them, despite there being only a few books written in English on them; I've been forced to collect the necessary sources to cover this topic, which has been quite the hit on my wallet. (I estimate that acquiring the 7 titles I have set me back $300. And not all Wikipedians can afford to make a sacrifice like this.) To repeat myself, Wikipedia lacks articles on certain topics because identifying & obtaining the material is a challenge.
      On the other hand, I was shocked to discover not only a lack of coverage of a series of WWII battles, but Wikipedia lacked even red links to these missing articles. When you consider the bias Wikipedia is accused of having -- male, white, North American, & men tend to be nerds about military history -- this absence of coverage is inexplicable. (And before anyone replies {{fixit}}, I am in the process of doing this. I'm being vague about this lacuna, because I have a personal interest in writing these articles, & would prefer no one to pre-empt my work.) -- llywrch (talk) 01:49, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      @Llywrch I recently created a bunch of articles on major WW2 topics, including Prisoners of war in World War II and one on Allied prisoners in Japan. You'd think at least the latter would have been covered by the "male, white, North American, & men" milhist nerds. Nope. And we still don't have article on China in the Korean War (we have much less relevant Soviet Union in the Korean War). I don't know why, but our milhist nerds can miss a lot of topics. Maybe it's easier to mass produce entries on warships? Dunno... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 17:07, 24 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]

  • A bit late, but for the record, the choice of articles is fairly eccentric. I don't think that many people are actually reading the articles like knowledge and culture. A quick check of pageviews shows around 1,000 hits daily for knowledge, and a bit more for culture. But I imagine lots of these hits are, say, elementary schoolers or English-as-a-second-language readers who are just reading the lead section for a dictionary definition, and not closely interrogating the whole article and its links. For comparison, the article Taylor Swift gets 25K hits a day at minimum, which spikes to ~100K hits when she's in the news. Basically, if the goal is countering systemic bias, I think it would be way more helpful to include non-Western scientists or artists on Wikipedia than it would be to edit articles that are actually not that important to include more links to non-Western figures. SnowFire (talk) 20:45, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I think the best way to think of how people read Wikipedia articles, is to check yourself on a random day. You may have read something in depth because of your own specific "Wikipedian bias" based on your own Wikipedia work, but you may also have checked the lead section for any number of articles while on the go downtown, sitting before the tv, reading a book, or shopping around for your next holiday meal, vacation, or visitor attraction. Some Wikipedians bother to correct or add to their "fly-by" reads, but most oldies like myself just stick to their area of interest, due to preference of desktop over mobile editing. Jane (talk) 12:30, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Er... no? Not the point I was making. Experienced Wikipedians are a poor analogue to how regular normies read Wikipedia. I've seen smart, college-educated people not even realize that the article extended beyond the lead section (back on the older version of Vector where there was a Table of Contents after the lead). Anyway, we don't have to speculate, we can just look at the pageviews, which gives us an objective maximum of people interested in the article content. Per above, there's reason to think that at least some of those hits are not "genuine" hits but really people who just want dictionary definitions, and also per above, casual readers very often read the lead section and absolutely nothing else. SnowFire (talk) 13:42, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Apart from User:Piotrus (twice, in his first comment) no-one has mentioned India (or Pakistan, South Asia). But we have huge numbers of writers and readers from there (including diaspora) most of whom write mainly or entirely on Indian topics, where in some respects en:wp is extremely strong. Our Indian readers are perhaps not so exclusive, but Indian topics, especially in popular culture and sport (but also politics) get huge views, often making the Signpost "traffic report". But though numerous, Indian writers and readers are a minority, and we should neither be surprised nor too abashed that topics from "the West" do best. Johnbod (talk) 02:47, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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