Geographies of Digital Exclusion by Mark Graham;Martin Dittus;

Author:Mark Graham;Martin Dittus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ingram Publisher Services UK

WHO CONTRIBUTES TO WIKIPEDIA?

As we discussed in Chapter 3, the digital representations of Wikipedia are produced by a global network of thousands of volunteers in a collective process of self-motivated volunteer labour. Who are these people, and where in the world are they located? While in previous chapters we have described geographies of information more broadly, we will now take a closer look at the geography of Wikipedia’s contributors.

The demography of social knowledge production

We might expect that Wikipedia’s open and participatory approach to knowledge production would result in a highly equitable social arrangement, with participation coming from a broad range of demographics. However, a surprising and much-discussed aspect of Wikipedia’s open editing model is its strong participation bias: that is, not all populations participate equally. We see this especially in terms of the platform’s gender breakdown. In an early study of highly engaged Wikipedia contributors, only 7 per cent of participants were found to be female (Nov 2007). It was later shown that such a strong gender bias can lead to a topical bias of contributions (Lam et al. 2011). A similar gender divide has been observed for a wide range of other participatory platforms, including both OpenStreetMap and Google MapMaker (Stephens 2013). Across a multitude of surveys, the share of female contributors in Open-StreetMap in particular was found to be as low as 2–5 per cent (Haklay and Budhathoki 2010; Y.-W. Lin 2011; Stark 2011; Lechner 2011; Budhathoki and Haythornthwaite 2013; Neis and Zielstra 2014).

This stark gender divide was likely identified early on because it is relatively easy to observe. By comparison, less information is available about other dimensions of social difference. The first large demographic survey of the Wikipedia community (including both editors and readers) was launched in 2008 by the Wikimedia Foundation and the United Nations University (Glott, Schmidt and Ghosh 2010). Over the course of a few months the survey drew almost 180,000 respondents, most of them participants in the English-, Russian-, Spanish- or German-language editions of Wikipedia. While a full third of respondents stated that they contribute actively to Wikipedia, the remaining two-thirds considered themselves to be readers. Half the survey’s respondents were younger than 22 years, possibly reflecting that the Wikipedia project itself was still quite new at the time, having only been launched in 2001. Perhaps corresponding to this relatively young age, around half the respondents stated that secondary education was their highest educational attainment to date, though respondents overall appeared to be well-educated: a quarter had completed an undergraduate degree, and a fifth a graduate or postgraduate degree. The survey also supported the earlier observation of a gender divide: only 13 per cent of respondents were women. This initial Wikipedia survey did not include questions about employment status and economic circumstances, however it is notable that when it asked about reasons not to make a donation to Wikipedia, almost half the respondents stated that they could not afford to make one. When respondents who identified as readers were asked why they did

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