Wikipedia and Internet Use

The following map displays the total number of Wikipedia articles normalised by the number of internet users at the country level. The countries with the highest number of articles per 100,000 internet users are Nauru (4667), the Central African Republic (1253) and Myanmar (824). In fact most of the places that score highly by this measure, like the countries listed above, have extremely low levels of internet use per capita.

In contrast, countries with higher level of per-capita internet usage tend to have far lower rates of Wikipedia article per 100,000 internet users (e.g. the United Kingdom (70) and France (67)). While it is entirely possible that the high rates of articles per internet users in some countries is an indication of dedicated Wikipedia editors, it seems instead more likely that Myanmar, the Central African Republic and most other nations with low levels of internet penetration are being represented by editors from outside of their boundaries.

2010 Internet Penetration Rates

Today's post comes courtesy of data available from Internet World Stats. The map below presents the most recent statistics on global internet usage. The shading reflects the proportion of the population that uses the internet within each country. The height of each bar indicates the total number of internet users in each country.

Iceland has the world's highest penetration rate: over 93% of the population are internet users. Almost all of Europe and North America also have relatively high rates (at least at the national scale, as there are likely to be significant digital divides in every country). China, interestingly, is already home to the world's largest population of internet users (384 million) despite having a penetration rate of less than 30%. India is another interesting case. 81 million Indians are internet users (there are more Indian internet users than there are people in the UK), yet this represents only 7% of the Indian population.