Comments on floatingsheep: Mapping Wikipedia

Very interesting maps, I have actually proposed th...

2011-08-25T10:20:57.569-04:00

Very interesting maps, I have actually proposed them to analyze for a cartogrphic exam! Just one thing, colors can be misleading when representing absolute numbers, as far as I am concerned, I usually use proportional circles. Good job though!

@ft: I agree about the need to compare against Int...

2010-01-27T13:22:09.531-05:00

@ft: I agree about the need to compare against Internet population. I'm preparing a file containing exactly that data and hope to make the maps soon.

These maps display the number of tags in all language versions of Wikipedias combined.

You relate tags to population size to neutralise t...

2010-01-27T04:15:17.102-05:00

You relate tags to population size to neutralise the effect of the country size on the probability of a Wikipedia article. A better standard to compare against seems the Internet population to me. There will be no large differences in the results in high-diffusion countries but quite a lot in African or other low diffusion countries.

But I guess that the visibility of locations in wikipedia is quite influenced by the attention geography of tourists. So relating the no of geo-referenced wikipedia articles to the no of visitors might well help to explain the visibility of a place in wikipedia.

And there is of course the quetsion of language. Did you work about place tags in the English-language wikipedia or in other language wikipedias? If was for the English version of Wikipedia only the blind spot in French-language Africa is not surprising.

Thanks Geoff. That is a very good point. I notice ...

2009-11-24T05:07:48.746-05:00

Thanks Geoff. That is a very good point. I notice that counties in the UK are all geotagged, but that Irish provinces (generally being at a different scale) are not. Just to confuse things, some US states are geotagged despite being much larger than UK counties or Irish provinces. This is definitely something I'll look into in more detail.

Another bias that skews these maps -- although onl...

2009-11-23T13:01:10.367-05:00

Another bias that skews these maps -- although only slightly, I'll admit -- is that some geographcial units do not readily lend themselves to geotagging. Assigning a latitude & longitude to an object works better the smaller it is: I have written articles on the 500-odd local administratives units in Ethiopia called woredas, & had these been geotagged the values for that African country would have been higher on at least one of the maps presented here.

Geoff

Yeah, it'd need an actual survey to determine ...

2009-11-20T02:14:53.586-05:00

Yeah, it'd need an actual survey to determine one way or another. My impression is mainly from working on articles about architecture, where most of the US, Canadian, and European buildings (and some Japanese) seem to be tagged with a geotag that shows their exact location, while very few of the South American ones have a geotag. Geotagging of towns/cities seems to be more uniform.

I agree that not all articles about a location (or...

2009-11-18T04:54:18.769-05:00

I agree that not all articles about a location (or an event that took place in a location) are geotagged, but I haven't yet seen any evidence to support the idea that there is a systemic bias towards the tagging of North American and European articles. Many article stubs in the rest of the world seem to have geotags, even when they contain very little text.

One thing that's slightly confounding for the ...

2009-11-18T00:54:24.643-05:00

One thing that's slightly confounding for the results is that there's a bigger bias in *tagging* than in actual coverage--- almost all U.S. and European articles about a specific location are geotagged, while many for the rest of the world don't have coordinates yet.

Check out this map too: http://commons.wikimedia.o...

2009-11-17T18:26:56.845-05:00

Check out this map too:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png