Every time anyone edits Wikipedia, the software records the text added or removed, the time of the edit, and the username of the editor. I parsed all of the million edits to English Wikipedia to collect and geolocate the 43 million IP addresses that have edited English Wikipedia.
I also counted 8. Read: The lopsided geography of Wikipedia. Source: Analysis of Wikipedia IP editor activity. This map shows the percentage of households editing by county. It contains a number of distinct patterns, the most striking of which is the span of very low editing activity across the Plains, from the Dakotas through West Texas, and in the South, excluding the Carolinas and Florida, and cities such as Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta.
Source: The U. 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.
To put it another way: If your belief system is rooted in a book that has hardly changed for 2, years, you might be less interested in contributing to an encyclopedia that is continuously being written and rewritten. Meanwhile, though many of the low-editing-density areas are Republican-heavy counties in the Plains and the Rockies, the areas of high activity do not follow such clear voting patterns.
Likewise, states with histories of internal political divisions, such as California and New York, also have high overall editing activity that does not conform to political boundaries. Households in conservative upstate New York are as likely to contribute as ones in New York City, except for the two upstate counties Lewis and Hamilton that are also among the most religious and politically conservative in the state.
If Wikipedia is a place where people come to negotiate a shared understanding of the truth , these patterns of editing activity suggest that it might work in part because people come from regions of differing political beliefs, especially including the bellwether swing states, and that trustworthiness is established through the interaction of contributors across the political spectrum.
Editing patterns also map onto other demographic lines: The pattern of editing activity in Appalachia and the South appears to match population density, income, education, and broadband access. Does proximity to other people make you more inclined toward collective action, or is it simply the fact that editing would be difficult without the income to purchase a computer, access to broadband, and education to feel comfortable with formatting citations?
While idealistic Wikipedians might like to think it is the former, the persistent and well-documented poverty of the rural South seems the more likely cause. This area of low editing, from East Texas to Virginia, includes the highest concentration of African Americans in the country, raising the likelihood that income, education, and internet access intersect with racial inequity as factors that prevent participation. Following this pattern, Native American communities also appear to be prevented from editing by similar factors: low education , high poverty , and lack of internet access.
Nearly all counties with majority Native American populations have low editing rates. The absence of participation from majority Native American counties, and rural, poor, black counties in the South, is troubling. This absence is not a choice—as it may be with the deeply religious—but an inability to contribute due to intersectional inequality.
While the United States accounts for nearly half of the editors, looking at the data from an international perspective reveals the United States as just one part of the colonial legacy of the English language. Although the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation diligently keeps track of how editors and users interact with the site, until recently it was unclear how content production on Wikipedia was distributed among editors. According to the results of a recent study that looked at the million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia's editors have generated 77 percent of the site's content.
Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership. At the time of writing, there are roughly , registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site.
So statistically speaking, only about 1, people are creating over three-quarters of the new articles posted to Wikipedia every day. Of course, these "1 percenters" have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks. In the early days, when there were only a few hundred thousand people collaborating on Wikipedia, Matei said the content production was significantly more equitable. But as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia's growth ever since.
Matei and his colleague Brian Britt, an assistant professor of journalism at South Dakota State University, used a machine learning algorithm to crawl the quarter of a billion publicly available edit logs from Wikipedia's first decade of existence. The results of this research, published September as a book , suggests that for all of Wikipedia's pretension to being a site produced by a network of freely collaborating peers, "some peers are more equal than others," according to Matei.
Matei and Britt argue that rather than being a decentralized, spontaneously evolving organization, Wikipedia is better described as an " adhocracy "—a stable hierarchical power structure which nevertheless allows for a high degree of individual mobility within that hierarchy.
They invested so much of their time and seeded the collaboration process. In this respect, Wikipedia isn't that much different from other for-profit social media companies.
And like these companies, its leadership has created its own share of problems. In a publicly available audit of its volunteer editors published in , the Wikimedia Foundation found that the overwhelming majority—91 percent—of its editors were male.
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